Podcast #56: Parashat Ki Tissa

Shlomo and Alesha are discussing the parasha Ki Tisa, which focuses on the golden calf and the missed opportunity of receiving the original divine Torah. They discuss the flaws of Moshe and Aharon and how the commentators defend their actions. Alesha believes that their flaws are part of their human perfection and that repentance is what truly matters. They also discuss the uniqueness of Jewish religion in portraying flawed individuals. They connect this idea to the concept of emotional intelligence and how Aharon's actions in the parasha show his high emotional intelligence compared to Moshe's lower emotional intelligence. Shalom Shlomo! Shalom Alesha! It's good to be back here. Last time we spoke, it was over Zoom. I was in the Shalom, you were at home, and here we are. It's Wednesday evening, it's dark outside, it's quiet outside. It's only you and I, and I have to tell everyone, I had a delicious dinner. Shlomo brought me his homemade ice cream. And Shlomo has a philosophy regarding food. You always start with dessert. Yes, and there's a reason, Alesha. My theory is, if it makes you happy, in moderation, it keeps you healthy. And my brilliant granddaughter Eliana, who's 12, about to be bat mitzvah, tells me, Saba, you always teach us to eat happy but unhealthy. But I think it's healthy. Yes, being happy is certainly healthy. So thank you for the ice cream. And it's actually very fitting, because we're in a very interesting parasha, not to say difficult and painful. A parasha where it's all about idolatry. It's about the golden calf. So parashat Ki Tisa, I don't know what you have in store for us today. So Shlomo, what are we going to talk about today? So first of all, parashat Ki Tisa is the 21st parasha since Simchat Torah, since we began reading the Torah. And we have this painful reminder this year, Alesha. 21 parashat, 147 days. We're in day 145 of the war. So as we read along the parashat, we are also reminded of this awful war that is ongoing. And it's constantly on our mind. And it's on our mind as we read the Torah and learn the lessons. And your parasha is titled, The Depth of Belief, The Strength of Will. This is from your book, a collection of parashat. And you begin by saying, parashat Ki Tisa, which is the longest parasha, by the way, in the book of Shemot, in Exodus. Parashat Ki Tisa is the parasha of missed opportunity. What's the missed opportunity in Ki Tisa, Alesha? Yeah, oh God, just thinking about that makes me want to cry almost. Well, Moshe was about to bring down the tablets with the handwriting of God, with God's pure message, without a human touch to it. And Moshe saw the golden calves from a distance as he started climbing down the mountain, descending the mountain and saw the festivities and smashed the tablets. And we were so close, so close. It was on the fortieth day. Moshe was coming down from the mountain so close to having the original Torah, the divine Torah. We have the human version of it. We were about to see God's divine handwriting and God's divine messages. It's not just the font that we missed out on. It's, you know, we don't even know what we missed out on. It was something purely of another dimension. And it's an opportunity that was missed and I don't know how to bring it back. Exactly. So, Alesha, I'd like to lodge a complaint against our brilliant rabbis, the sages. And I'm pretty sure you're going to be their defender. But I'm going to make the case and then you can respond. So, the Torah is an amazing book, Alesha. The Bible is by far the best-selling book. It always has been, always will be. And it's fascinating to ask, what's the secret of the Bible? What is it that millions and billions of people find comfort, solace, wisdom, life lessons? What is it? And the answer is these are stories about amazing people, spiritual people, Avraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov, Moshe, Aaron, who are deeply flawed. They are deeply flawed and they mess up all the time. All of them, every single one, every single one. No one is without fault in the Bible. And some of those faults are really rather horrendous. King David, David, the ancestor of the Moshiach, it's endless. So, okay, Moshe loses it. He comes down, he sees idol worship. He smashes the tablets written by God. And then Aaron, what does he do? He collects the gold earrings and they make an idol. They make a golden calf. He goes along with the people. Idol worship, temper tantrum, good heavens. Okay, let's go to the commentaries and read what they say. And they find endless ways of defending what Moshe and Aaron do. And I keep saying to myself, come on, these are human beings. They are frail human beings like the rest of us. And they messed up. Moshe was impatient. And Aaron was a rather weak leader. He was a follower rather than a leader. Accept it. By the way, Alicia, the one commentator who I think really gets it, is named Abarbanel. We studied him in school. Abarbanel was the finance minister of Spain and Portugal, the finance minister of Italy, brilliant, hard-headed banker. And he says Aaron did wrong and Aaron was punished. And he cites sources in the Torah. But the other commentators, so Alicia, how do you deal with this wonderful message of great people, great leaders who showed us all their flaws, as we human beings are, all of us, being defended with apologetics that I think just don't get it? Well, I actually agree with you to a great extent. The best way to defend them, it's not to say, no, no, no, they did right. It's just like, you know, the sages try to exonerate Yaakov from all the wrongdoings that he did to his brother or his father. But I would maybe address it from a different perspective. Their flaws are their human perfection, meaning, aspiring to be angelic, aspiring to be perfect, I think is a terrible sin. And expecting anyone to be perfect is a real sin. And our patriarchs and matriarchs and the great prophets and all those great leaders, we're actually studying in our Beit Midrash, we're studying the prophets this year. And we have just finished learning all about King David and his falls, you know, with Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite. We studied that and we saw that what was so unique about David, King David, is that the minute the prophet comes to him and tells him a story, but essentially says to him, how could you have done that? David never, ever tries to get away with it and find excuses, blame someone else. He immediately says, oh my God, you're absolutely right. Wow, I really, really sinned. I apologize deeply. The minute he is faced with a mirror, he looks at the mirror and said, oh no, I've really erred. I've really, really gone astray. I've made a terrible mistake. And he immediately is willing to repent. And that's incredibly unique. We're expecting a person to be perfect. We expect our politicians to be perfect. And it's not about being perfect. It's about being able to do tshuva. And there's a beautiful Jewish saying, where a person who does tshuva stands, even the most righteous cannot stand. A person who is just born without desires and born without any flaws, no such person, but if there was, is on a lower rank than a person who is riddled with human frailty, with human desires and falls, but then repents. Repents and immediately takes responsibility, is willing to face the punishment and move on. That's what the Torah finds so beautiful. It's not about the sin. It's about the repentance. We will sin. We have to sin. It's not part of the plan, the part of the divine plan not to sin. The greatest lessons come from our falls, not from our... Very often in America, the philosophy, I don't know if it still is the case, you learn from success. Not true. There's a lot to learn from success. But you really learn. I'm not going to say you learn from your failure. We can say that you learn from your failure. But you really learn from your repentance. And David, I have to say, is truly an inspiration in this regard. Yes, you learn from learning from your failures. You can fail and if you don't learn from them, you certainly don't go on to succeed. Right, and if you do learn from them, i.e. you make repentance, then you rise up to a whole new level that didn't exist before. And you know, it strikes me, Alicia, Jewish religion is unique in this. Because all of the people that we venerate and worship in the Bible are deeply flawed and it's all there for you to read in plain print. In other religions, in the Christian religion, the center of the Christian religion and the center of the Islam, of the Muslim religion, they are, as far as I understand, essentially without flaw. And I think we're unique in that. Right, so much so that today, if you say anything bad about Muhammad, you risk your life. Exactly. And claiming that someone has no flaws is the ultimate flaw. And yes, we can see really, it's very powerful when you study the prophets. Suddenly you start reading the Bible through the lenses of the prophets, not through the lenses of the kings. I'm continuously reminding our students here that it's not about David. It's about the prophet that comes to David and puts a mirror in front of his eyes. And David's greatness is his ability to listen to the prophet and make amends and repent. Exactly. And there's something amazingly modern about this, Alisha, as always in the Torah, because you've taught us to read the Torah and to help learn how we can be better people from the Torah. The Torah was written 2,500 years ago. It's pretty old and it's incredibly modern. Here's an example of amazing modernity. So in 1995, a psychologist named Daniel Goleman wrote a book on emotional intelligence, or EQ. And he made the point that there's cognitive intelligence, people who are smart and know things and can make calculations, but there are people who are emotionally intelligent because they're able to understand and empathize with their own feelings and manage and control them, but also to read and understand the feelings and emotions of other people. And this is an incredibly important thing. It's measurable. People measure it. And it's relevant in the Parshah of Kitzah because Aharon, who is Rodef Shalom, a man of peace, he has very high emotional intelligence. He realizes, he feels the distress of the people, and he acts to help them to relieve it because it's on a boiling point. Moshe, I think, is a leader with low emotional intelligence. In several cases in the Bible, right, he loses it. He simply loses it. Now, there are cases where it's the right thing to lose it, but in this case it was not the right thing to smash the tablets of God. Maybe that would have made a much better world. So, yeah, Moshe was a great leader with low emotional intelligence. And I think the lesson of the Torah, which is a lesson, it's a textbook in leadership. You need Moshe and Aharon together, and the commentators do make this point. You need the two of them. You need the empathic, sensitive person attuned to the will of the people, and you need someone who will lead the people and make them do things that are really hard they really don't want to do because they're slaves and we want them to be free. You need both of those characteristics, and they're pretty unusual in a single person. Together, Moshe and Aharon fill the bill. Right, right, and you're absolutely right. I think Aharon really has that. Aharon represents the people. Aharon really feels the people, and Moshe, you're right, he doesn't. Actually, at some point he takes his tent and he plants it outside of the camp. He's like, I can't stand those people anymore. I'm going to remove myself from the community. And I guess we need people like that too. But the ability to feel for the other is extremely powerful, is extremely important and powerful. And a person, very often a person who has never been poor cannot really, really understand a poor person. But if he's highly evolved, if that person is highly evolved and the person has an ability to have empathy, i.e. to really feel the feeling of the other, then he could even grasp what it means to be poor. So I think, Elisha, this quality of being sensitive to other people, I think it's the number one necessity for a rabbi, for a spiritual leader. I think you have this in spades, for sure. You don't have to comment. But my question is, were you born empathic? Did you develop it as empathy and emotional intelligence and sensitivity to others? Is this a learned characteristic or is it something we're born with? Well, I don't know. I have my own self-criticism and I'm not so sure I'd be as complimentary as you are, as you've been. So I really don't know. Very often I went to visit my friends whose son was killed last week in Gaza and I went to the shiva there and there were a lot of people. And when I came in, the mother ran up to me and said, like, you did his pijona ban, how could that be? How could this happen? So I did his pijona ban and I did his bar mitzvah. And I know this couple many, many, many years. We kind of go way back. And they've been part of our gila and they've moved down south. I mentioned them already, I think, in previous tosha. Maybe not, actually. No, that was before. And we walked away from the shiva, the three of us, and we went to Rotim. The guy's name was Rotim. We went to Rotim's room. And they just broke down. They broke down and they cried, like, how could this be? We were such a happy and joyful family of, you know, there were five kids. They were five kids. And this is just, and I just started crying. I couldn't, like, stop the tears. It was just very, very, very sad. Very, very painful. And the whole time there were, like, two parts of me. One part was, like, totally with them, like, crying with them. And another side saying, like, well, Alicia, maybe you should be a bit more composed and be able to be a little bit distant so they can, maybe they need you to be strong and solid and not to cry with them. And we sat there for about half an hour. Everybody was there at the shiva, and we were just, like, gone in another room. And eventually we walked back, and as I went back to the car an hour later, I was thinking to myself, what is more beneficial? What would have been more beneficial here? What would have been more, like, healthier for them, better for them? If I was able to somehow overcome my own emotions here and feelings and simply just be with them and listen to them and comfort in whatever way that I can. There are not many things you can do at that moment besides just be there, just be there for them. Or the contrary, just be human, be in pain, and I don't have an answer for that. I don't, but maybe it really is the combination of both. Moshe would not have cried there. Moshe would have said, you know, he is immortal, he is up there, and he would certainly want you to keep on living. You have four kids, four beautiful kids. You have to live, you have to live for them, and it will be painful, but you are going to have to, or something like that. While Aharon would probably cry with them. So I guess we need both, and there is a time for this and a time for that. So my take on this, Elisha, is that you did the right thing. And the reason you did the right thing is that it was true and genuine and from the heart. And I think when we put on a little bit of an act, when we try to say things that other people might want to hear, rather than what we feel, it's pretty obvious. Elisha, none of us are going to win Academy Awards for acting. And it's pretty obvious when that happens. I think this is one of the strengths of Israeli society. People in America and in Europe and France are very polite. And if I were to wear an awful shirt, people would not tell me that. And in Israel, my God, who got you that terrible shirt? We are brutally honest with each other, and it's part of our strength because it embodies trust in one another. Elisha, I want to read a passage from Rabbi Sachs. I think it's relevant because it has a little bit of history. In 2010, Israel had a problem with the world. The Turks sent a ship with food and medicine, supposedly to Gaza, called the Marmara. And we decided that we couldn't allow them to break the blockade because who knows what was on it. We used our special forces to stop the ship. Some were killed. There was a battle. Some of the people on the ship were killed. We captured the Marmara. We took it into our port, into our shtod. And the world came down on us like a ton of bricks. How can you prevent humanitarian aid to the poor, starving people in Gaza? And there was a huge outcry in the world, and Israel lost a lot of support and a big fight in Britain. And Rabbi Sachs spoke to this in Drosha in 2010, and this is what he said. My view is that Israel needs our support at this critical time. But the debate that has taken place is superfluous. Jews are a nation of strong individuals who, with rare historic exceptions, never agreed about anything. That's for sure. It makes them unleadable, unleadable. But it also makes them unconquerable. The good news and the bad go hand in hand. And if, as we believe, God loved and still loves this people of Israel, despite all its faults, may we do less. So we are unleadable. Boy, do we know that. How many elections did we have in the last seven years? And unconquerable, which we are now showing. These two characteristics based on trust and based on telling the truth. And I might just add a postscript to this. In my entrepreneurship course, the first talk was given by Dan Shechman, who won a Nobel Prize in 2012 for chemistry, a Technion professor. And he talked about entrepreneurship, how you be a creative person in a big organization, usually where people get lost. You're working with 12,000 other people, and you are a lowly worker on the factory line. You have an idea. Who's going to listen to you? And Danny travels the world and consults in Korea and all kinds of places, and Japan. And he said that these countries will never reach what Israel has. I'm writing a column now about creativity and IDF, Alicia. Not all of it we can talk about, but some of the things the army has come up with are amazing. And the reason is we have low power distance in Israel. We are unleadable because everybody is a general. And in an organization in Israel, in a company, even if there are a lot of people there, a lowly person will tell the CEO, I have an idea. And guess what? The CEO will listen. And there are CEOs that we know who have open phone lines and open doors, and people walk in, spill ideas, and they get ideas from them. So, yeah, this is unusual. This is unique, I think, for Israel. Everybody is a king, and it makes us really hard to govern, but also very hard to beat. Yeah, yes. That's so true. And maybe that's also why there's so much anti-Semitism around the world right now. Like we're goodniks, and we won't bow our head, as Mordecai wouldn't bow his head to Haman, and we're stiff-necked people, for better and for worse. Yeah, no, I agree. We are 9 million people, Elisha, 9 million, 2 billion Muslims in the world. Most of them dislike us. Today on television, on the news, you might not have seen this, we have an invention that no one else has. Even the Americans couldn't do it. We are now able to intercept rockets fired at us with a laser beam, and it's really cheap and really effective, and it's a game changer. And we've been working on this for 20 years, and everybody said it's impossible, it's science fiction. Have they launched it already? It's been operationally tested, and it works. And it's a long story. I work with people who used to work at Rafael, people who worked on this, and they started 20 years ago. We didn't have the technology, and the idea was dropped. It didn't work. But we're stubborn people, right? Stubborn, stiff-necked people. People kept at it, and they wouldn't give up, and they succeeded. And this thing will astonish the world. Right. We need it badly because right now every anti-missile rocket that we use costs like $50,000, every single one, and many are used on a daily basis. So that's really good news. Let's talk about Moshe and how he responds to the golden calf, not just by smashing the tablets. He responds basically by resigning. He pitches his tent not just outside the camp, way outside the camp, according to the Torah, right? Quite a distance. And actually he doesn't do it. It's done by his assistant, a young man named Joshua, his successor who's already helping him, this right-hand man. And even before Moshe gets there, according to the Torah, reading the Parsha carefully, the people are gathering there waiting to talk to him. And even all the people, according to the Torah, they all go to Moshe's tent before he gets there because they want him as their leader. They missed him with all his faults, with all his temper, with his low emotional intelligence. So sometimes think about Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion did that, right? He packed up his things and went to this little shack in Sde Boker. In the Negev. In the Negev. And we can visit it. We've all been there. We've seen this little shack that he lived in with his books and his reading and so on. Sometimes a leader just has to throw up his hands. Enough, I'm leaving. If you want me, you know where to find me. I love Moshe. I love Moshe. It goes back to your very first question about the flawed leaders. I think one of the reasons that they're flawed is because, as I said earlier, it's part of the divine plan. If Moshe fully succeeds, Moshe did a great favor by smashing the tablets. I know I said it was a missed opportunity. It's also a missed opportunity. That's true. On the other hand, Jews always have on the other hand, so on the other hand, if we truly had the divine answers, that would be the end of the story. The whole idea of having a story is when you can have many different interpretations, many different understandings. If we know God's plan, period, if we know, if we have God's living words etched into the rock, then this game is over. The story is over. I think Moshe also, in the parasha, when he goes back to Mount Sinai and he asks for forgiveness in the name of the people, he can't resist it. He asks God, like, show me your face. He too wants a golden calf. He too wants to see God just like the children of Israel wanted to. He wants to know God's basic qualities. Tell me who you are. Right. And God tells him, Moshe, I love you dearly. But the answer is no. No living person will ever get to see me and know me and truly know me. All you're going to have is you're going to see my back. You're going to see my reflection. You're going to see my footprints in the sand. You're going to see... You're doomed to live a life of metaphor. Everything is going to be a metaphor for me. And therefore, Moshe had to smash the tablets. And somewhere deep inside, I think, whether he knew it or not, he really fulfilled his mission. He was a prophet. But a prophet can only bring down a well concealed Torah. He cannot really truly bring the Divine Essence because the Divine Essence is infinite. And the infinity... The infinite will simply annihilate the finite and will simply be gone. So Elisha, there's a tradition in Kabbalah that the pieces of the smashed tablet written by God were carefully picked up and put into the Aharon HaKodesh, into the Ark. Right. And carried along with Bnei Yisrael. What do you think about that? I love that. Yeah. It's beautiful. First of all, it's not even in Kabbalah. It's basically in the text. In the text, right. They collected the pieces. Right. And they continue now marching in the desert with two sets of tablets. One, the human one and the smashed one, the Divine one. And that's very, very deep. It's like the reminder that the human tablets are whole. Meaning the flawed is whole. The Divine is shattered. And saying, like, you want wholeness? Well, it's going to have to be a human wholeness. You want God? You can just get little shards that will suggest what God may have wanted to say but the actual words, according to the text, according to interpretation, that's not in the text, they kind of flew in the air and returned back to God. So all that was left were just broken pieces that all we could do is try and piece them together as a puzzle. Sharona, your wife, loves doing puzzles. So we can try and puzzle them together but the words are not going to be there. So you want the Divine? Well, fine. Look for the shattered. Look for the brokenness. Look, a woman told me today, there's a woman that I visit every week, she's a Holocaust survivor and she celebrated her 99th birthday last week. And I visit her every week and before I was leaving, she reached out and she always blesses me, you know, I wish you a great Shabbat and that you and your family will do well, etc. And she says, listen, I just want to tell you, blessings from a broken heart reach God. And I was surprised to hear that from her because she doesn't usually say things like that and that was very deep. Blessings from a broken heart reach God. If we want pure, perfect blessings, they can't pass the ceiling, they get stuck here. But when it comes from the shattered, from the brokenness, she regards herself as she's old, she's in pain and she has a lot of issues and problems. So from her broken heart, the blessings go up to God. And, you know, another way of seeing it, I know we have to end, but another way of seeing it is in order to extract the letters out of the rock, the rock has to be broken. So it's broken, as the Koska Rabbi said, there's nothing more whole than a broken heart. And in the Psalms, it's said beautifully, מִּנָּם אֲמַּכִּים כָּרַתִּיָּה אֲנָּנִּי וַמֶּרְחַבִּיָּה From the depths of my despair I called on you. Right. So next Parsha Elisha is Vayakhel and I think this is cool because we have this terrible wrenching rebellion and idol worship and then we all come together Vayakhel which is essentially what has happened in Israel society torn apart and split apart and then in tragic circumstances coming together and hopefully remaining united. Right, Vayakhel, congregated, absolutely. So Shlomo, Todah Rabah Thank you for the delicious ice cream. If anyone here wants really good ice cream come to Israel, come to Reuven Street No. 21 There's great ice cream to be had there. You're all welcome. Let's go out and have a Shabbat Shalom to everyone. Shabbat Shalom.