Parashat Ki Tisa, one of the most famous parshiot, begins with the Law of the Shekel.  Back then, whenever men formed an army, each soldier had to donate half a shekel to repent for the killing he might be required to do on the battlefield.  In later ages, this became an annual tax collected to maintain the Temple.  Rich and poor paid the same amount: half a shekel.

Next, God commands Moses to create a laver, a washbasin, for the priests use to wash their hands before they enter the Tent of Meeting.  Then, God appoints two men named Betzalel and Oholiav to build many items for the Tent of Meeting.  After this, the Sabbath laws are reiterated again, and, on Mount Sinai, Moses receives the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, written by the Finger of God. 

However, at the foot of the mountain, something very bad is happening.  The people of Israel, believing that Moses is lost on Mount Sinai, come to Aaron and say, “Up, make us a god…for as for this Moses…we know not what has become of him.” Aaron tells the people to bring him their golden rings and the people do so.  Then, Aaron melts down the jewelry and fashions a golden calf.

He proclaims a feast in honor of God for the next day.  Meanwhile, at the top of the mountain, the real God knows what has just happened, and as the Torah says, “[God’s] wrath waxed hot”.  God tells Moses, “I will destroy the Israelites and make from you a great nation.”  Well, Moses would have none of it, so he cools God’s anger and advises God not to wipe out the Children of Israel, since the Egyptians might say, “For evil did God bring the people out of Egypt, to slay them.”  God listens and settles down.  Moses descends the mountain and sees the Israelites dancing and eating around the golden calf, and in righteous indignation, throws the stone tablets at the ground, smashing them.  He then destroys the calf, grinds it into powder, sprinkles it in the river nearby, and makes the people drink it.  Moses then turns to Aaron and asks him what happened. Aaron’s explanation is, “You know what these people are like!  They said, ‘Make us a god’, so I asked them for their gold, they gave it to me. I put it in the fire, and out popped this calf!”  After this, the golden calf worshippers start a riot.  Moses tells the people of his tribe, the Levites, to kill every sinner in the camp, and the Levites obey him.

Moses climbs back up the mountain and prepares to do the entire process of writing the tablets again.  Moses once more apologizes to God for the Israelites’ sinning.  God tells Moses to destroy all other nations in their path on their way to Canaan.

God and Moses then talk panim el panim, face to face, “as a man would speak to his friend”.  At the foot of the mountain, the remorseful people are worshipping and praying, this time to God instead of a golden calf.

Moses slowly hints that he wishes to see God’s glory in person.  God agrees and explains how it will be done: “You can’t see My face, for man shall not see Me and live… I will put you in the cleft of a rock, and will cover you with My hand until I pass by. Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back.”  Before this mystical experience, God has Moses hew two stone tablets.  Moses thanks God, and God makes a covenant with him.  God reiterates the game plan to enter Canaan and tells Moses that no more molten calves are allowed!  God, yet again, tells the rules of the Sabbath and the festivals, and that the people absolutely MUST keep them.  At the very end of the parasha, Moses comes down from the mountain with the two tablets.  Because of his close, personal contact with God, we read that from Moses’ face came forth a beam of light.  It was so radiant, that he had to put a veil over his face so the Israelites could see him and the tablets.

There is a lot to learn from this parasha, but I’d like to limit this lesson to three themes: faith in God, capital punishment, and anthropomorphism of God.

What does faith mean to you?  Does it mean not cheating on your partner, does it mean not breaking the rules, or does it mean accepting something or someone without evidence?   The Children of Israel have a long history full of ups and downs with faith.  Not the type of faith to a partner.  One could possibly say it’s the type of not breaking the rules.  However, the faith I am talking about is the personal relationship between the Children of Israel and God. Sometimes, the Children of Israel were very unfaithful, and sometimes they were even more faithful than a dog to its master.  When they were faithful, sometimes it was out of fear: the fear of God destroying them.  When they were unfaithful, it was also out of fear:  the fear that God was no longer with them and they were no longer God’s chosen people.  The Israelites decided to worship the infamous idol, the golden calf, because they feared their leader Moses was gone and God had left them alone in the wilderness. 

Three weeks ago, we read in Parashat Mishpatim that Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.  He says he will be back in forty days.  However, there is confusion between Moses and Israel, because Moses did not count the day of the walk up the mountain, but the Israelites did.  So, when the Israelites count the fortieth day, which occurs in this parasha, Moses does not come down.  Then, they panic and ask Aaron to make them a god.  Aaron makes the golden calf and the Israelites say “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”  Here, we have the prime example of unfaithfulness to God in Ki Tisa.  Why would the Israelites do this?  How could they do this?  The Israelites panicked out of fear that Moses was dead, or never going to come down from the mountain.  A Torah commentator explains that the Children of Israel wanted this calf to replace God, because they thought God had betrayed them with the disappearance of Moses, and did not know what else to do.  The Israelites do not really think that the calf is God; perhaps, the calf is a temporary god until Moses descends, and they can believe in the real God again. However, they are breaking the second commandment (having no other gods and making no graven images of God).

The faithfulness of the Israelites to God throughout the Bible is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth over the years, again and again.  After the golden calf incident, the Israelites were very faithful for some time and followed every commandment that God gave them.  Why?  The fury of God after the golden calf was so intense, that the Israelites did not want to see it again, and so made God happy as best they could.  Keeping faith has always been a problem for the children of Israel, but over the centuries, through good times and bad (mostly bad), God and the Israelites remain bonded together.

Dating back to 620 B.C.E. Athens, the punishment for nearly every crime was death.  Was this fair, or not?  The decision was up to the person in charge of the community.  Athens was not the earliest civilization to use death as a punishment. In fact, the Ancient Israelites apparently employed it, too.  They did not exercise it nearly as often as the Athenians, but they used it nonetheless.  In later years, the Talmudic Rabbis would do everything they could to avoid passing a death sentence.  But, in Ki Tisa, the punishment of death applies to many people, courtesy of the Levites.

After Moses saw the Israelites dancing around the golden calf and worshipping it, he had the Levites kill all the sinners.  There was a problem with this in that all of the people -- kol ha’am -- contributed their jewelry to the golden calf, but obviously not all were killed.  Otherwise, we would not be here, today.  One Midrash explains that the Levites killed only the people who danced around the golden calf.  But why was death the punishment for only the dancers?  It seems extreme.  Well, belief in God and only God is, after all, the Second Commandment.  Had it not been one of the Ten Commandments that was violated, there might have been a less severe punishment.  Furthermore, perhaps worshipping another god would be a more personal and hurtful thing to do to God than to steal or not honor one’s mother or father.  Therefore, God may have “taken it personally” and reacted more strongly than if another commandment had been broken.  God’s choice in using death as a punishment almost seems justified in this scenario, but was a little harsh, in my opinion.

The question of the fairness of the punishment for the sin of the golden calf leads us back to the Law of the Shekel. These two topics may not seem related, but in fact they are.  There has always been a struggle between the upper and lower classes, and in the parasha it says that both the rich (upper class) and the poor (lower class) paid the same amount: half a shekel.  This is still an issue today (remember Barack Obama, John McCain, and Joe the Plumber?).  It has yet to be resolved.  Should the rich and the poor be taxed equally, or should the rich be taxed more than the poor?  In Ki Tisa, they are taxed the same, so everyone is equal, and no one person can use money to buy influence.  Today, the rich are taxed more than the poor.

The fact that the rich and the poor are taxed the same amount brings up yet another issue in Ki Tisa.  At the beginning of the parasha, everyone is treated equally with the Law of the Shekel, yet when the golden calf dancers are being executed, not everyone is equal.  After all, everyone sinned and donated their gold jewelry to make the calf, so why should only the dancers be killed?  The parasha, or at least the commentary, doesn’t explain this to my satisfaction.

Everybody expects God to be, well, godly.  In Judaism, God is so far above and separate from humans, that God does not have the same attributes as a human.  Yet, in the Torah, there are many examples when God acts like a human, or is described as having human features.  This leaves readers and commentators wondering.  When God is described as having these humanlike features, it is called anthropomorphism.  Parashat Ki Tisa is rich with examples of the anthropomorphism of God.

When the Israelites worship the golden calf, God throws a major fit.  God threatens to kill the Children of Israel and begin a new nation starting with Moses, the only non-sinner.  But, Moses disagrees vehemently.  Throughout his role as leader, Moses is only concerned with keeping the Children of Israel alive, and, from time to time, cooling God’s anger.  He seems to be a very unselfish man.  Moses convinces God not to destroy the Israelites.  Here is a prime example of anthropomorphism:  God succumbs to an emotional outburst and feels sorry about it afterward, a very humanlike reaction. God’s anger waxes hot, and then it recedes. 

Soon after, Moses asks to see God’s “glory”.  God agrees, but will not allow Moses to see God’s face.  In the end, Moses gets a glimpse of God’s back.  A midrash says that what Moses actually saw was the knot of the tefillin that God wears.  This is anthropomorphic because it suggests that God has a body or some kind of form, and lays tefillin.  Yet, we know from the Yigdal prayer: Ein lo d’moot ha’goof, v’eino goof: God has no semblance of form, and no body.

Throughout the Bible, there are many anthropomorphisms of God.  In medieval times, there was a proverb which portrayed God very well:  “If I knew God, I would be God.”  This illustrates why only God can be God, because no human can fully understand God.  However, there is one human who understands God, and that is Moses.

Throughout the Torah, Moses gives advice and questions God, and vice-versa.  Is this anthropomorphism of God, or an elevation of Moses?  In Ki Tisa, Moses seems to be almost on the same level as God.  He cools God’s anger as discussed above, but that is not all.  Later, Moses talks to God in the tent of meeting “as friends”.  Moses doesn’t seem so human anymore; no regular Israelite would be allowed to talk to God like that, not even one of the priests.  Finally, at the very end of the parasha, Moses comes down from the mountain with the second set of tablets in his arms.  His face is beaming light so radiantly, the people of Israel need to have Moses veiled.  No normal Israelite’s face ever beams light.  What is the meaning of this?  Moses appears to be on a superhuman level.

I’d like to add a comment about the beams of light.  It says in the Torah, karan or ponov, “the skin of his face radiated [beams of light]”.  The Hebrew word karan has two meanings: beam and horn. That’s not so surprising: after all, a drawing of a sun’s ray or a horn have the same thin triangular shape. It was a mistranslation of “karan” in an Italian Bible that led Michelangelo, a famous artist, to make his statue of Moses with horns, as you see on the cover of your programs. OK, I guess it’s easier to carve horns than beams of light, but unfortunately the sculpture became famous, the image stuck, and the more ignorant people of the world believe that Jews have horns.

Back to anthropomorphism: maybe there is so much anthropomorphism in the Bible because it serves as our only tangible evidence of God.  Otherwise, God would just be an abstract belief. The only way we can relate to God is to do so in terms that humans understand.

Let’s take a break and talk about pronouns.  In this congregation, we worship a gender-neutral God.  No doubt you’ve noticed as we read from the prayer book how we substitute “God” for “He”, or “God’s” for “His”.  Sometimes, all of these “God’s” makes for a very awkward-sounding sentence just to avoid using a gender related pronoun.  Hebrew is an extremely inflective language -- its male and female forms of speech apply not just to pronouns, but also to nouns, verbs and adjectives. Everywhere in the Hebrew Bible, God is most certainly male.  Trying to make God gender-neutral is very difficult. When I was preparing my speech with Rabbi Weiner, I had to first write an outline.  The Rabbi circled all of the places where I used ‘He’ to refer to God in red pen.  I was amazed at how many red circles there were on the paper.  The worst part was that I hadn’t even realized it.  I had written ‘He’ or ‘His’ completely subconsciously.  Rabbi Weiner then told me a story of when he was a kid at temple.

His Rabbi, Rabbi ­­Weber, decided to do the service completely normally as always but with one tweak; he was going to replace every ‘He’ with the word ‘She’ when it referred to God.  He thought that this would show everyone in the community that ‘He’ was overused and that using it was anthropomorphic and even sexist.  After all, God has no body, no form.  How do we know God is not a ‘She’?

This problem has stumped egalitarian prayer book editors for years.  I am sure I am not the first person to suggest this, but, I think the best solution is to make up an English pronoun and possessive pronoun for God.  We can't use ‘He’, because God is not male, ‘She’ because God is not female, or ‘It’ because God is not inanimate, so what should we use?  People have surely suggested words before, but none have caught on with the English language.  So, the riddle of pronouns for God is still unanswered.

 Besides the pronoun trouble, is anthropomorphizing God a good thing or a bad thing?  We describe God with features that are humanlike because that is our point of reference.  But the Second Commandment states “thou shalt not make graven images of the Lord your God.”  Does this also mean that we are not supposed to anthropomorphize God?  According to the letter of this law, we are allowed to anthropomorphize.  However, according to the spirit of the law, perhaps we are not allowed.  A graven image literally means a carved, physical image of God, created by our hands.  When anthropomorphizing, we create an image with our heads.  The prohibition about making paintings or sculptures of God is responsible for the lack of Jewish art throughout the ages. The Torah has no pictures in it, and so, it does not create a physical image of God for us.  But, sometimes it will describe the different physical traits of God in human terms.  For example, the phrase often used in the Torah, b’yad chazaka u’ vizroah nituya, literally means “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm”.  In our minds, we picture an arm with the hand of God.  Is this breaking the Second Commandment?

The liturgical poem Anim Z’mirot is a case of anthropomorphism on steroids.  Much of the poem is an allegorical description of what God looks like, even which clothes God wears.   It says that God has black ringlets of hair, looks both old and young, and is most certainly male.  To me, it seems very close to breaking the Second Commandment.  This prayer is usually sung in traditional congregations, but some orthodox synagogues don’t sing it.  Is it because that prayer is too edgy?  One line in the prayer tries to explain what is going on: The poet says, “Though I have not seen you, from your deeds, I will describe you.”  This shows that the poet is respectful of the Second Commandment.  But when I read, “His tresses are black ringlets”, I can’t help but picture a man with Semitic features.  The poem creates a clear image of God in our heads.

Is anthropomorphizing God good or bad? It’s good because it helps us understand and relate to God, but it does seem very close to breaking the spirit of the Second Commandment.  Maybe we should treat poems like Anim Z’mirot as a metaphor with the sole purpose of being descriptive and creative.  Perhaps it could be both good and bad. 

Maybe we have a feeling it is bad, but it is so helpful with regard to understanding God, that it is tolerated.  It is almost like a curse word; it is bad to say but helps us explain our thoughts in a stronger, more attention-grabbing way. 

In conclusion, there are many things that we can learn from Parashat Ki Tisa.  For one, we see that faith to God is extremely important, and that when the Israelites disobey God, God’s fury is extreme.  No matter what the Israelites may think, the best decision is to follow God’s commandments.  We also learn about fairness with the Law of the Shekel.  Finally, we see many examples of anthropomorphism in Ki Tisa.

Now for some thank you’s:  I would like to thank my Mom for guiding me through the process of becoming a bar mitzvah and for all the planning she did to make this was the best day of my life.  I would like to thank my Dad, my Torah tutor, for making sure I quickly learned to recite my Torah portion slowly.  I would like to thank my sister Nina for surviving her Bat Mitzvah and giving me the courage to follow in her footsteps. I would like to thank Rabbi Weiner for helping me with this speech and for fine tuning my Torah and Haftarah portions to perfection, and Cantor Simmons for helping me with the music.  Finally, I would like to thank all of you for coming today, and sitting through this speech, and for Rabbi Richie from Camp Yavneh, who taught me my Haftarah portion and got me started on my Bar Mitzvah journey.  Shabbat Shalom.