Torah Reflections on Parashat Ki Tissa
Exodus 30:11-34:35
18 Adar 5766 March 18, 2006
Imagine: After
communing with God on Mount Sinai for 40 days and nights, an inspired Moshe,
Tablets in his arms, returns to his people and finds them dancing around the
Golden Calf. With impulsive and
unrestrained anger, Moshe smashes the Tablets, and only later, after he has
destroyed the Golden Calf and made the Children of Israel ingest its ashes, does he ask Ahron why this sin has occurred. In the eyes of Moshe, his people betrayed
him. A part of himself, his spiritual
and physical community, malfunctioned to the point of non-recognition. When he first left camp to ascend Har Sinai,
this body had appeared united and strong.
However, the apparent well-being and cohesion had broken down. Clearly, things were not as they
had appeared to be. His assumptions of well being had been illusions
After this bone-shaking crisis, Moshe pleas with God for
reassurance, for the intimacy of intimacies—please, let me see Your very Being, let me know Your essence. Moshe yearns to grasp existence as a unified
whole. He wants to see beyond the
confounding uncertainties, contrasts and contradictions. God grants Moshe his request, but with a
twist. Moshe will not be allowed to see God’s face,
“but My back, you shall see” (Exodus 33:23).
Moshe asks for the piercing clarity that comes from viewing another’s
face and looking into another’s eyes, and God offers him instead, a view from
behind. A view of a part of the body
that remains concealed. When Moshe cries
out for insight, he is granted a glimpse of that which lies outside his normal
field of vision, for it is there that the revelation he so desires, resides.
Expanding on the image of a personified God, the Talmud
explains the viewing of God’s back: God
showed Moshe the knot of the tefillin at
the back of God’s head!1 The knot on the tefillin binds the physical
body to the invisible and the infinite; so the Talmudic language symbolizes
what Moshe sees in that moment—how all parts of creation tie into each other.2 Tefillin crowns and sits on top of the
head, above the seat of reason. The
clarity Moshe seeks lies beyond the world of rational thought, so God responds
with an image that requires examination from more than just the naked eye. It’s when Moshe allows himself to see with
the totality of his being, not just with his eyes, that he gets a glimpse of
the radiant unity of it all.
A knot can entangle and entrap as well as bind and
fortify. When we look at a physical
knot, we have faith that in addition to the parts of it that we can see, there
are other parts that lay buried and hidden from view. We understand and accept that the knot needs
both its exposed and its non-visible parts in order to exist. What appears connected and entangled in one
environment often unravels into distinct clarities when viewed in a broader
context. Intersecting lines on a two
dimensional piece of paper may transform into never-meeting skew lines in
three-dimensional space. Likewise,
interpersonal knots may dissolve when additional points of view enter the
picture. Whether physical or
metaphysical, we perceive and identify knots according to how the world looks
in our eyes, and to what we need, at a particular moment in time. We acknowledge their essential, binding
nature—or we untangle them—when our needs and current perceptions of reality
are broadened. Having faith in the
existence of other dimensions and perspectives encourages us to look at knots
in ways that are not immediately apparent.
Through his plea, Moshe asks to see unity in the world
around him. God’s response elevates
Moshe from passive recipient to divine collaborator: before his second visit, God tells him, human
involvement will be required. This time around,
Moshe, as an active partner, must make a second set of tablets out of stone,
just like the God-made Tablets that he broke.
It is during this second visit to Har Sinai, after the spiritual crisis
of Moshe and his people, that God allows Moshe to stand in the cleft of the
rock and to experience the transition point between the physical world and the
Source of creation. This interaction
with the Divine transforms Moshe’s consciousness.
As Moshe descends Har Sinai for the second
time, his face glows with Divine light reflecting his profound experience of
unity. Walking to rejoin his people, his arms
tightly cradle the stone Tablets that he made from his physical, revealed world
and upon which God wrote from the spiritual, hidden dimension. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch so beautifully
wrote, “The eye of Moshe is to see the underlying uniformity in all this
diversity, this highest harmony of all harmonies, not merely to get an idea of
it, to grasp it, to understand it, but actually to see it.”3
Just as the physical
body changes as it moves through time, the conscious body expands and contracts
as it moves through experience. Like
Moshe, we yearn to understand, particularly as we encounter crises and tangles
in our lives. And so, like Moshe, we must
see not only with our eyes, but also with the totality of our being. May we have the desire to examine the visible
knots in our worlds, and the courage to seek out and view what they conceal. May we find
there blessings, and strength, and peace.
1 Talmud Bavli, Berachos
7a.
2 Talmud Bavli, editorial commentary on Berachos 7a, Schottenstein Edition,
Mesorah Publications, Inc., 1997.
3 Rabbi Samson R. Hirsch, Hirsch Commentary on the Torah,
Vol. 2, Exodus, p.641, Judaica Press, 1966.
© Bay Area Jewish Healing
Center, Leah Golberstein
This Torah Reflection was
written by Leah Golberstein, MA, MFA, Mother, Artist, and Teacher, from The
Twin Cities Jewish Healing Program, 
