This past week felt choppy. There’s no other word for it. Purim fell on a Tuesday, which meant all four kids were home, we went to synagogue fully clad in costumes. There was joy and noise and hamantaschens — and also no gym, no routine, no walk, no quiet. By Thursday morning, I was already behind on things I thought I’d have done by then.
I didn’t publish my podcast last week. I didn’t publish a single blog post last week. Estate planning paperwork, taxes (more taxes), scholarship applications, birthday cards I’m falling behind on, and things on my to-do list kept piling up. By Thursday, I felt quite overwhelmed, and exhausted. And as usual, Ki Tisa landed pretty on point for the week I was having. How about you?
Drama at its finest
Ki Tisa is quite a dramatic parsha. It opens with a census — every person counted, every half-shekel mattering equally, no one’s contribution more or less than anyone else’s. There is something quietly radical about that image: a nation being told, before anything else, that each of you counts the same. Ki Tisa then follows the drama of the golden calf, it shows us Gods raw fury and vast disappointment with Israel. And finally, Ki Tisa ends with an intense back and forth between Moses and God, Moses ultimately convincing God to not only not destroy His nation, but to also follow through on the covenant he made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Strap in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
The Man Who Brought Us Out of Egypt
Last we saw Moses, he went up the mountain to receive God’s commandments. And he stays there. Forty days. The people wait. And then — they can’t wait anymore. When the people saw how long Moses had been gone, they started to panic, turned towards Aaron and said, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for we do not know what has happened to Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt (32:1).”
A few interesting things happen all at once. First of all, the man who brought us out of Egypt. Wasn’t it God, not Moses who did such a miraculous feat, that they witnessed firsthand, barely two months ago? Second of all, how could Aaron be so weak as to affirm these crazy delusions? Perhaps, the MGI here —most generous interpretation (Dr. Becky, anyone?) — is that Aaron was simply stalling for time, a delay tactic, maybe? That’s the best I can come up with. And third, it is God who tells Moses to hurry down the mountain, “The Lord spoke to Moses, “Hurry down, for your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, have acted basely (32:7).” Interestingly, in this one sentence, he calls Israel Moses’ people, not His, and he assigns the credit of the Exodus to Moses. God. Is. Furious.
A Stiff-Necked People
What happens next in the parsha is almost hard to read. God is not frustrated. He’s furious. We already know He’s a self-proclaimed jealous God. And witnessing Israel acting a fool by immediately worshipping a false god… well. Who can blame Him? He wants to start over entirely — to wipe them out and build a new nation from Moses alone. The chosen people, the people of the Exodus, the people who watched the sea split — forty days later, God wants to erase them.
When Moses comes down the mountain and sees the calf with his own eyes, he shatters the tablets. Then he turns to Aaron, his own brother, the one who built the thing, and demands an explanation. Aaron’s answer is a masterclass in not taking responsibility — he essentially tells Moses: you know how these people are. They are set on evil (32:22). Even the man who made the idol is pointing at the crowd.
He even adds, almost comically, that he threw the gold into the fire “and out came this calf” — as if the idol built itself. As if his hands were never involved. Even the man who cast the thing is pointing at the crowd, and then at the fire, and essentially at fate itself.
And yet, Aaron is not a villain in this story. He’s a leader who couldn’t hold the line when the pressure got loud enough. The people came to him panicked, grieving, unmoored — and he gave them what they asked for instead of what they needed. We’ve all been Aaron at some point. Caved to the room. Told ourselves it was just a stall tactic, just temporary, just this once. And then stood there afterward, gesturing at the fire, wondering how things got so far.
Remember…
Moses then pleaded with God, invoking the covenant: “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your own self.” He doesn’t argue that the people deserve mercy. He doesn’t pretend what they did wasn’t catastrophic. He simply reminds God of a promise made long before these people were born — a promise God made by His own name. And remarkably, God relented.
But the rupture isn’t fully healed. In Exodus 33, God tells Moses the people can still go to the Promised Land — He’ll send an angel ahead of them. “But I will not go up among you, lest I consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people (33:3).” Read that slowly. God is saying: I cannot trust myself to be near you right now. My own holiness, in contact with your stubbornness, will destroy you. The separation isn’t punishment. It is, in its terrible way, protection.
I think a lot about that. As a mother with a colicky newborn baby. A toddler who is kicking and screaming at the top of their lungs for 30 minutes. Sometimes, separation, walking away for a moment, is the best protection. I have felt that intense anger that goes from 0-100 in .2 seconds flat while around my children before. Wondering if I could drop them off at the fire-station. We’ve all had those thoughts. And God has too. But instead of leaving them at the fire-station, His wrath was so intense, He was willing to wipe these people off the face of the earth instead.
Show Me Your Face
The Golden Calf is often read as a story about idolatry, and it is. But I think it’s also a story about what happens when we can’t tolerate the feeling of things being unfinished. Moses is gone. There’s no word. There’s no update. The Israelites had just witnessed the most extraordinary string of miracles in human history — and still, in the silence, in the unfinished, they falter.
I don’t think they stopped believing in God. I think they stopped being able to bear the uncertainty of waiting for Him. Later in the parsha, after the calf has been shattered and the fallout has settled into grief, Moses does something remarkable. He doesn’t just ask God to forgive the people. He asks God to show him His glory. “Har’eini na et k’vodecha” — show me Your face.
It is a breathtaking request. The people did the worst thing they could do. And Moses — instead of tightening up, instead of managing and organizing and recovering — opens wider. He asks for more presence. More intimacy. More God.
God’s answer is strange and beautiful: you cannot see My face, but I will pass before you. I will let you see My back. The afterglow, not the blaze.
I’ve been sitting with that image all week. Maybe the weeks where we can’t see the full picture, where we’re behind and choppy and catching glimpses rather than the whole view — maybe those are the weeks we are still, somehow, in the presence of something passing before us.
I think about the census at the opening of the parsha a lot this week, too. Each person: half a shekel. No more. The wealthy couldn’t give more to count more. The poor weren’t diminished by giving less. The unit of belonging was fixed and equal.
On the weeks when I show up fully — podcast published, blogs posted, gym done, cards sent on time, all of it — I count. And on the weeks like this one, where I’m choosing between things, letting some of it go, sitting with the incompleteness — I still count the same.