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Experienced school teachers know that it's crucial to set clear rules in the first few weeks of the school year. The best teachers will usually seem very strict at the beginning of the year, and only when they’ve established classroom norms will relax and soften.   That’s because if the kids do not feel that the room is well regulated at the outset, they will act out. In order feel safe, the kids need to know that the person of authority in the room can be counted to keep the order.  

As it turns out, adults need that, too.

Our Torah portion this week includes one of the most disturbing stories in all of the Bible - because it is so psychologically astute. 

How could it be, at the foot of Mt. Sinai, just forty days after the people heard the ultimate voice of authority pronounce the words: “Thou shall not make for yourself a sculptured image,” that they should turn around and worship a calf made of gold?

When I dig into the story, I find that we are not so different. 

Let’s read verse 1 of Chapter 32, very carefully. Actually, just the first part of the verse for now.  I’ll read the translation, but then I want to take us through it in the original Hebrew, and I will also be bringing Rashi, the 11th century Torah scholar whose commentary is foundational to all Jewish scholarship since his time. 

“When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain,”  

So first of all, our translator added the word “When”, but it is not there in the Hebrew.  There was no “when”, no single, crystalizing moment of rebellion. It was more like a growing feeling of unease. 

וַיַּ֣רְא הָעָ֔ם כִּֽי־בֹשֵׁ֥שׁ מֹשֶׁ֖ה לָרֶ֣דֶת מִן־הָהָ֑ר

The people saw that Moshe boshesh - delayed - to come down from the mountain.

The verb boshesh, translated here as “was so long in coming”, I translated as “delayed”, is extremely rare. It appears in only one other place in the entire Bible. In the song of Deborah.  Deborah’s enemy, the army commander Siserah, was impaled in the head with a stake. In her victory song, Deborah imagine’s Siserah’s mother waiting impatiently at the window.  Why is my son Siserah “boshesh”, delayed in coming home?  We, the reader, know the truth. He is never coming home, he is dead. But his mother does not know. She is waiting, worried and uncertain. 

So Rashi, in his commentary on our verse, delves into the destabilizing effect of uncertainty.  He offers two related interpretations, both taken from the Talmud.

First, Rashi suggests that Moses told the people he would be gone for 40 days. But unlike a really experienced teacher, who lays out the classroom rules precisely within the first few days of class, Moses was vague about how he would count the passage of time. The people began counting from the moment he went up the mountain. Moses’s count began with the evening of his first day up. It was only a difference of half a day, but the people couldn’t wait that long. Moses failed to appear when they expected him, and he was their authority. Authorities can’t get it wrong!  It’s too upsetting! 

Next, Rashi suggests that Satan ערבב את העולם, mixed up the world. וְהֶרְאָה דְּמוּת חֹשֶׁךְ וַאֲפֵלָה וְעִרְבּוּבְיָה, לוֹמַר וַדַּאי מֵת מֹשֶׁה לְכָךְ בָּא עִרְבּוּבְיָא לָעוֹלָם, “He showed them an image of darkness, gloom and disorder, to say that of course Moses must be dead and therefore chaos has come to the world.”  In other words, the dark side of their psyche was whispering to them: The classroom has no teacher. The rules can’t be counted on.  

I used to be a scientist. Science is the art of navigating uncertainty. Scientists enter an intellectual space of darkness and murk, and create order and clarity.  It’s a long, slow process, and it’s never fully done.  My father retired from research science six years ago, and is now writing a textbook on spectroscopy. You would think that the ideas presented in a textbook would be solid fact.  But in the course of putting foundational ideas into writing, my father discovered a mistake in the field.  Hundreds, maybe thousands of research papers have been built on a mistaken calculation, resulting in claims that are imprecise or possibly even wrong.  For my father, this is incredibly exciting.  A new source of uncertainty!  He and a colleague are now eagerly writing up his discovery for publication.

Admittedly, my father’s discovery is very unusual. By the time a scientific idea is a couple decades old, it’s been tested in so many different ways that it’s very rare to find out that it was actually wrong. But on the frontier, where the newest research is occurring, scientists' understanding is constantly shifting. One of my good friends, Dr. Tzipor Ulman, runs an education non-profit called Science is Elementary. She has a great rule of thumb for her educators - never give the kids facts.  Ask them questions.

Medicine is different from science. Dr. Sabrina Braham, CBJ's medical adviser through most of the pandemic, shared with me that on average it takes about 17 years for a new discovery in health research to become clinical practice.  That seems a long time, but it makes sense. We don’t want uncertainty in our medical treatments.  As mush as possible, we want our doctor to be able to tell us, “This treatment has been used for years, and it’s very safe and effective.”  In other words, we want our medical authorities to be authorities - to know what they are talking about, so we can rely on them.

One of the challenges of the pandemic is that we have been forced to rely on medical science as it develops in real time. With its full set of uncertainties and mistakes and false leads. 

The impact of that uncertainty on national politics has sometimes been as ugly as what Moses encountered when he came down from Mt. Sinai.

Let’s read the rest of that verse now:

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.”

The medieval commentators debate what the people’s intention was.  Did they actually believe that an object made of gold could be a god?  Rashi and Abarbanel point out that their words suggest that they did: “Come, make us a god.” Nachmanides and Rashbam focus instead on the end of the verse - that fellow Moses, we do not know what happened to him - and suggest that the idol was meant to replace Moses, not God himself.  The idol was to be the new intermediary.

Like the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, for many Americans the uncertainty from our medical  authorities precipitated a crisis of faith. Some rejected science altogether. Others rejected the public health officials that we rely on to interpret the complex science for us, and set guidelines to keep us safe. It’s a distinction that feels a bit like the difference between rejecting God and rejecting Moses, and I don’t know if that difference is just academic.

But the aftermath of the Golden Calf was, in my opinion, far worse than the incident itself.  The Levites rallied to Moses for a civil war. They slaughtered the idolaters. So half the camp was guilty of idolatry, and half was guilty of murder. Many were guilty of both.  Few came out of the rupture clean.

Dr. Harold Keer, who has recently succeeded Sabrina as our medical adviser, is both a physician and a research scientist. He understands the tragedy of this dynamic exceedingly well. Here is something Harold said to me in a recent email on the question of masking in schools:

Sadly, the current environment doesn’t really allow for a nuanced discussion that allows for the large unknowns and risks associated with any approach. It would be nice to acknowledge how murky the data are, but there is a tendency to name call or lump skeptics with anti -vaxxers which doesn’t help a productive dialogue. The result is new groups of “marginalized” people who are just asking questions.

That inability to listen to each other and consider alternative perspectives, that polarization that pushes into hatred - it’s part of the archetypal psychology of the Golden Calf.

Throughout all this turmoil on a national scale, I have been deeply, deeply grateful for our Covid committee here at CBJ.  Sabrina was my Moses.  She brought the emergent science down for me, giving structure to the uncertainty, offering a confident voice of expertise that balanced authority with humility and compassion. And she didn’t just give us abstract advice. She took phone calls and texts from me and Ann at any time of day, helping us make actual decisions in the moment. 

Harold has now stepped into the role with his own style, but an equally vital mix of expertise, humility and generosity.

Elana, Bruce, Steve, and now Linda, are and were the best counsel one could ask for.  They have capacity for nuance. They understand competing interests, and each brings a different perspective to balance off each other.

And Ann, Rosa, Deborah, Bill and I had the task of putting all that discussion into action, and I believe we did and are doing it in a way that cared for the many, diverse, physical and emotional needs within our community. Just last Sunday, at our Religious School parent advisory committee, one of the parents said: “CBJ has been a stabilizing anchor for our family throughout the pandemic.”

But we have not been perfect.  Some people have felt alienated by the policies we developed. At times, some felt that we have been too cautious, and disregarded genuine, emotional and spiritual needs for social contact. Others felt that we have not been cautious enough, and have created situations that made them feel unsafe in their synagogue.  The weight of those voices is heavy on me. 

I sometimes hear people say, “It’s at moments of crisis that a person’s true character is revealed.”  I firmly reject that view, and I believe our Torah does, too.  Crises like the one we’ve been through - the one we’ve not fully emerged from yet - reveal aspects of our character. They also have enormous, lasting impact on the development of our character. But they do not define us.  At every moment, the choice stands before us - do we want to continue as we are, or do we want to learn from our failures and change?

When it was all over, God invited Moses back up the mountain.  And he stayed for another 40 days and 40 nights. And this time, the people sat with the uncertainty. They had learned from their mistakes. When Moses came down again, he brought two gifts. One - a second set of tablets, a symbol of the possibility of forgiveness and renewal. And the other, according to rabbinic interpretation, was Yom Kippur.  The date of his descent with the second set of tablets was Yom Kippur. Not just a symbol, but a concrete ritual for future generations to develop our capacity for renewal.

As a country, as a community, and each of us as individuals, we have choice. Over the past two years, we have all experienced fear, doubt, and anger. We can choose to move forward carrying these emotions with us. Or we can commit ourselves to renewal. To teshuvah. To a practice of listening, appreciating nuance, embracing complexity, and sitting with uncertainty.