Dear Friends,
This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa, contains one of the most painful moments in the entire Torah.
Moses is alone on Mount Sinai, preparing to receive the tablets of the covenant. Down below, the Israelites wait. But as the days pass and Moses does not return, anxiety begins to grow. Without their leader, the people feel uncertain and frightened about the future.
In that moment of fear and instability, they search for something concrete, something tangible, to ground them.
And so they create the Golden Calf.
The Torah tells us:
“Come, make us a god who will go before us, for that man Moses who brought us up from Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.” (Exodus 32:1)
At first glance, it appears that the people were rejecting God outright. But many commentators suggest something more complicated was happening. The people were reacting to uncertainty. The world that had seemed stable suddenly felt frightening and unpredictable.
And human beings, it turns out, have never been particularly good at living with uncertainty.
We rush to conclusions.
We rush to assign blame.
We rush to create simple answers for complicated realities.
If we are honest, that dynamic feels very familiar right now.
The war with Iran has created enormous anxiety and disagreement within the Jewish world and far beyond it. At the same time, Jews around the globe are experiencing a resurgence of hatred that many of us hoped belonged to the past.
In moments like this, the temptation is strong to divide the world into simple categories: those who see things exactly as we do, and those who must therefore be wrong.
Ki Tissa reminds us that moments of crisis call for something different. They call for patience, reflection, and restraint, lest we take the easy path that, as our ancestors discovered with the Golden Calf, ultimately leads nowhere good.
After the episode of the Golden Calf, Moses does something remarkable.
Despite his anger and disappointment in the people, he returns to the top of the mountain and pleads with God on their behalf.
The Torah records his extraordinary words:
“Please forgive their sin – but if not, erase me from the book You have written.” (Exodus 32:32)
Moses does not pretend the people were right. They were not.
But he also refuses to abandon them.
And perhaps that is one of the most enduring lessons of this portion. Jewish peoplehood has never depended on unanimous agreement.
Our history has always included disagreement – sometimes intense disagreement – about how to respond to the challenges facing us. The Talmud itself is essentially a record of centuries of rabbinic debate. It reminds us that the Jewish people have never been monolithic.
And yet we remain bound together.
The same is true today.
Within our own community, people hold deeply different views about the war now unfolding. Some believe strongly that it is necessary. Others worry deeply about its consequences.
Those differences are real, and they deserve to be treated with seriousness and respect.
But moments like this call on us to remember something even more important: what has sustained the Jewish people across millennia has never been perfect unity.
What has sustained us is the understanding that, even when we disagree, we remain responsible for one another.
The rabbis gave that idea a name:
Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh: All Jews are responsible for one another.
Responsible for each other’s safety.
Responsible for each other’s dignity.
Responsible for the future of the Jewish story itself.
As we watch events unfold in the Middle East, and as we witness rising hatred toward Jews in many parts of the world, perhaps the message of Ki Tissa is this:
We will face challenges. We always have.
We will sometimes disagree about how to respond to them. We always have.
But the Jewish future has never depended on perfect agreement.
It has depended on whether we remember that we belong to one another.
And if we can hold onto that, even in difficult moments, then the covenant that began at Sinai will continue to endure.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Daniel Cohen