Parashat Ki Tisa: Joining the Celebration or Not
(delivered on 2/18/2022 by Student Rabbi Maayan Le)
Shabbat shalom everyone. It’s so great to be here tonight with you all. Believe it or not, until tonight, I have never led a Shabbat service for a synagogue before on my own. So before we talk about this week’s Torah portion, I wanted to say a few words about my time here so far. It has now been a year since I arrived at Am Hayam, and it has been an amazing experience. I love working with Rabbi Sacks, and I am very grateful to him for all he has taught me so far. But, more than that, I have really loved getting to know you, the congregants, at Am HaYam. This congregation has a spiritual intimacy that allows everyone to be seen and heard. And I have seen you, and I have heard you, whether in services, at our Wednesday weekly Torah class, or at other events. It has been really special. Thank you so much for welcoming me with open arms. Being at Am Hayam feels almost like winning the Super Bowl. And we’ll talk about the Super Bowl in a minute, but, first, the Torah portion.
This week’s Torah portion is parashat Ki Tisa. Not everyone knows the name “Ki Tisa,” but its contents are well-known to many Jews and non-Jews alike, for this week’s reading contains the story of the עגל הזהב, better known as the “Golden Calf.”
Moses had gone up to Mt. Sinai, and he was gone a long time. After a certain point, the Israelites became worried that Moses wasn’t going to return. There was a void of leadership. They had Aaron, but that wasn’t enough for them. They came to Aaron in Exodus 32:1, and they said, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that fellow, Moses–the man who brought us from the land of Egypt–we do not know what has happened to him.”
After enduring slavery in Egypt for so many years, and witnessing the miracles of the plagues, the splitting of the sea, and of manna, they abandoned their faith very quickly. And it wasn’t just about Moses. It was about G!d. They didn’t want to replace Moses’s leadership with another human. They wanted someone else to worship. Someone they could see with their own two eyes. An idol. Holy cow!
And so came the Golden Calf. As for how it was created, we will read more about that tomorrow. But what really strikes me here is how quickly the people got behind this idea of an idol. Maybe it was spontaneous. Or maybe they had always wanted one. But either way, they had committed to following the Ten Commandments. The Golden Calf was a clear violation of the 2nd commandment. I find it hard to believe that so many of them had originally planned to abandon the commandments so quickly. Perhaps it was the actions of a select few that prompted others to go along with it. And that brings me to my Super Bowl story.
The Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl this past Sunday. It was a really fun game to watch, and the team should be very proud of its accomplishment. But it’s strange how quickly the city got behind them. The Rams first came to Los Angeles in 1946, but in 1994, the year I was born, they decided to move the team to St. Louis. The Rams came back to Los Angeles in 2016, but while they seemed to have more fans than the Chargers, which relocated to Los Angeles one year later, they did not seem to be truly embraced by the city until they won the Super Bowl. News articles often claimed that the only football team Los Angeles fans care about is the USC Trojans. And indeed, the Rams often made headlines, even a few weeks ago, for hosting large prime-time games on national television where the visiting teams’ fans usually outnumbered the home fans. In the Ram’s own house of worship, they were outnumbered.
But the tide may have finally changed last Sunday. I will confess that I am not a Rams fan. I am a Ravens fan. But the Ravens did not make the playoffs this year. I had no team to root for these past several weeks. Just like the Israelites did in this week’s Torah portion, I felt there was a void that needed to be filled. But rather than change my allegiance, even temporarily, I didn’t really watch the playoffs at all. It was not a conscious boycott. I was simply busy doing other things. In fact, I was actually attending a class on Zoom for the majority of the Super Bowl. But the class let out at 6:00pm, and there were still a few minutes left in the game. I saw on my phone that the score was close, so I turned on the TV. A family member who had been watching in the other room came to join me. I told myself that I didn’t really care who won the Super Bowl. After all, my team was not playing in it, and I had nothing against either the Rams or the Bengals. But the final minutes of the game were thrilling, and when it became clear that the Rams had won, the celebration was infectious. The players looked so happy. When Aaron Donald was interviewed, there were tears in his eyes. The neighbors in the houses next store began to cheer. Firecrackers went off. I admit it. I celebrated.
It wasn’t that I was truly a Rams fan, but I wanted something to celebrate. When Moses came down from the mountain in Exodus 32:19, he sees the Israelites gathered around the calf, dancing! When the Rams won the Super Bowl and the music played over the loudspeaker, I began to sing and dance! It has been a very hard year for many people, myself included. I wanted something to sing and dance about. I am not really a Rams fan, but I’m still an Angeleno! Why shouldn’t I take part in the celebration with my city?
I want to make myself perfectly clear. There is nothing wrong with being a Rams fan. But due to the temporary absence of my preferred team, I shifted my allegiance to a team whose mascot is an animal that can be found on a farm. A farm animal that drapes itself in a golden uniform. Essentially, I had joined the mob, and celebrated the success of the Golden Calf, or in this case, the golden ram. Just as many of the Israelites probably did not plan on worshiping the Golden Calf, I got swept up in the celebration of others, and couldn’t help myself.
Obviously, this is not a perfect parallel. As I said, there is nothing wrong with being a Rams fan. It’s fine to root for more than one team. In Judaism, we believe in only one G!d. But football teams are not gods. They are not idols. We can have more than one. I will be happy to root for the Rams’ continued success, so long as they don’t play the Ravens. But what happens when they play each other? What happens when I have to choose one or the other? Sometimes we have to make choices. That is certainly the case in tomorrow’s haftarah reading.
All football aside, at the end of the day, one of the great privileges of being free human beings is that we get to stand up for what we believe in. Moses did have allies. The Levites took a stand with him. This week’s portion can be inferred to mean that G!d refused to destroy the Israelites based on the merit of Moses alone. But maybe it was the Levites and Moses’s other allies that helped seal our survival. In the Talmud,[1] Rabbi Elazar claims that Moses said to HaShem: “Master of the Universe, if a chair with three legs, equal to the number of the Jewish patriarchs, is unable to stand before You in Your moment of wrath, all the more so that a chair with only a single leg, my own merit as a leader, will not be able to withstand Your wrath.” The Levites took a stand, and perhaps that made all the difference. We have the ability to make choices!
In fact, even as slaves in Egypt, we still had the option of taking a stand. If we have beliefs, we should not be afraid to champion them. Perhaps those beliefs will make us unpopular. But that doesn’t mean you should have to hide them or feel ashamed because of them. When the people around you stand for something you oppose, we must be careful not to be swayed by them too easily. Perhaps they stand for a really great cause or organization, and once they educate us about it, we decide to get on board. But until we truly examine a cause for ourselves and see if it is rooted in our own personal values, and also Jewish values, we should be wary of promoting that cause or organization.
As Jews, we come here this Shabbat under one banner, the banner of Am HaYam, to pray as a community. And while we might not all have the same ideas about G!d, I think we can all agree that this is not the space for a Golden Calf. Not in our physical sanctuary, and not on Zoom. So as we finish our service tonight in this safe and sacred space, I want to thank you all once again for creating this holy community. Don’t have a cow. Have a Shabbat. Shabbat shalom.
[1] BT B’rachot 32a.