Welcome to KOE's project, dt@koe. Thank you to Shoshana Lopatin for writing the dvar torah. If you'd like to participate in this project through writing or receiving divrei torah, please contact Jason Herman at dt@koe.org. Shabbat shalom.

1. The early morning lights flicker with confrontation as Moses appears in the distance. White hair flowing, his body laden with the absence of forty nights' rest, Moses holds tightly to the divinely-hewn tablets as he makes his way down the mountain and back to his wayward nation. "And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tablets out of his hands, and broke them beneath the mount." (Shemot 32:19.)

The image is seductively haunting. Artists like Rembrandt (1659) and Kruger (1771) labored to capture Moses lifting the tablets high above his head, a moment before throwing them to the ground. Musicians such as Schoenberg, in Act II of his unfinished opera, Moses und Aron (1932), sought to memorialize Moses' furious scorn as he shattered the tablets in despair. What is so complicated about this simple moment of human frustration, and why does it captivate so?

Three elements of the story stand out at the start:

First, the story lacks spontaneity. Moses knows that the people have built a golden calf because God tells him. (32:8.) Moreover, no less than two times, Moses tells God to calm down and turn from "[his] fierce wrath." (32:11 & 12.) So why does Moses' anger wax hot when he sees the calf with his own eyes? Why does he break the tablets in a sudden act of violence?

Second, although the holy tablets and the golden calf represent polar ends of sanctity and profanity, in this story the two are chillingly intertwined. The description of God's fashioning of the tablets literally wraps the story of the fashioning of the calf on both ends. Chapter 31 closes with a description of the tablets; chapter 32:1-15 opens with a description of the fashioning of the calf and God's response; chapter 32:15-16 again, almost verbatim, revisits the construction of the tablets. In chapter 32, verse 19, Moses destroys the tablets, and a verse later he destroys the calf. What is the interplay between these objects? What qualities do they reflect in each other?

Third, in this awesome moment of conflict between the Jewish people, their leaders and the divine word, God's presence is conspicuously absent. Although God eventually enters stage left with a plague, this happens almost twenty verses later, in verse 35, only after the tablets have been eviscerated, the calf has been burnt, and civil war has ravaged the nation. Why does God not take a more active role? And why, after painstaking efforts to fashion the tablets with his own hands (31:18 & 32:15-16), does God not require Moses to leave the tablets with him for safekeeping? Doesn't He know they will be broken?

To answer these questions, let us return to a verse from Parshat Terumah, chapter 25:8. There, as the nation begins the task of collecting contributions for the Tabernacle, God declares: "Veasu li mikdash û veshakanti betocham." "And you shall create for me a holy place, and I shall dwell amongst you." One would expect the phrase to say - and you shall create for me a holy place, and I will dwell in it. However, the goal of the Tabernacle, like the Temple, and the synagogue, has always been to facilitate man's relationship with God, not to replace it. The Jewish God dwells in his people.

The tablets and the golden calf, like the Tabernacle, were molded from the rationale that humans' need a physical manifestation for their devotion. But what is God to do with his people, when they have elevated an object of holiness into a deity itself?

It was this elevation of the calf to a deity that surprised Moses. If one compares God's description of the golden calf (32:7-10), with the description of what Moses saw as he descended the mountain (32:15-19), only one factor is different: song. As Moses approaches the camp he hears noise. Listening carefully, he says to Joshua: "It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, nor the voice of them that cry for being overcome, but the noise of them that sing do I hear." (32:18.) In His description of the people's sin, God explained that the Jews had built a golden calf, had bowed and sacrificed to it, and had declared "this is the God that took us out of Egypt." Yet still, Moses was willing to believe that the people had sought a mere vehicle for their devotion. When Moses learned that the Jewish people had broken into song as well, his anger was kindled. While men may sacrifice and bow their necks, by calculation, as a vehicle of devotion, song is a form of spont! aneous worship. Song meant that the people had found joy and refuge in the calf fashioned from their own jewelry. Song meant that the people had made the calf not a temple but a god to whom they could pray.

To bring the three points together - Moses' was surprised by the people, but his decision to break the tablets, and God's decision to let him break the tablets, were deliberate. Confronted with the calf, Moses destroys the tablets to show the nation that no object is intrinsically holy, only that people, through their worship of God, make it so. When the object becomes a subject of devotion itself, there is no room for God in man's heart, and therefore no resting place for His presence. The tablets, like the calf, crumble to dust as God watches from a distance.

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