A Taste of Shabbos – Parashat Ki Tisa

An anonymous queen saves the day in the nick of time by asking her people to fast on Passover! How bizarre can you get?  Well there’s more; this week we have a Shushan Purim Shabbat with a sprinkle of Red Heifer ashes – quite unique in our calendar. When we read the Megillah on Purim, one of the most important and dramatic of Jewish holidays, we find strangely, that like Moshe’s name last week, G-d’s name is nowhere to be found in the book of Esther. In a striking linguistic ‘coincidence’, there is a story of a young boy with a father who was an atheist and was determined that his son adopted his perspective. One night he put a sign around his bed with the words, ‘G-d is nowhere’, emblazoned on it. When the boy woke up in the morning he jumped out of bed all excited and ran to his father, crying ‘You see, you see.’ At last thought his father, but his balloon was burst when the son pointed to the sign and cried, ‘G-d is NOW HERE!’

You see, so much is about perspective. As they say about archeological findings, ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ And as many other wise people maintain, ‘the most important things in life cannot be apprehended by the physical senses.’ This is what the worshipers of the Golden Calf also forgot when they longed for a physical image of either G-d or Moshe, who was still on Mount Sinai. That sin corrupted the senses that had been purified at Sinai. Otherwise we could ask, So if G-d is meant to be revealed, what was so bad in this Torah portion about the desire to worship a golden calf, or for that matter, any totemic image that is considered one of the three transgressions that a Jew should be willing to die rather than commit? And if according to the sages, the calf was meant to be a replacement for Moshe, why was that so wrong? After all, some moderns quip, ‘we should not put down the calf worshipers so much; they were willing to give up their gold for a deeper connection to G-d, but so many nowadays are willing to give up a relationship with G-d, to acquire more gold! Furthermore, what about the golden cherubim in the Holy of Holies? A succinct answer is that the cherubim were commanded, while the calf was not, and therefore it separated the physical and sensual from the spiritual.

However there was one sense that had always been pure – that was the most subtle and intangible of senses – the sense of smell. The mystery of the spices in the Temple, also in this week’s Torah portion, is also related to the main heroes in the Megillah. Mordechai’s name is related to one of the spices, myrrh. And actually Esther’s original name was Hadassah which means myrtle. Her fragrance emerged to save the day when the right time did come. In fact, the name MEGILAT ESTHER, actually means ‘revealing the hidden.’  This name fits with Mordechai asking Esther to keep her Jewish identity hidden, till the right time comes. So too G-d’s protection of his people comes out when it needs to.  I think this is related to the teaching that the sense of smell was not contaminated by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, so some lofty souls related to that level have the potential to not only eradicate evil, but transform it to good, by revealing its hidden potential.

You probably can guess what I’m going to say is also a healing for these challenges. As a matter of fact it so happens that in this parasha which highlights the Golden Calf, there are quite a few verses devoted to Shabbos! And if we partner this Shabbat with the paradoxical command of the Red Heifer, we can arrive at a solid formula: As we let go of the week day challenges and distractions in preparing for Shabbat, we enter a more ethereal world, at the same time as we increase our joy in the pleasures of life as we do on Purim. As for the ashes of the Red Heifer, they too purify someone who has come in contact with a dead body, reminding us all that when we are ready to leave this plane of existence, our departure is merely a sign that we are moving on to a more exalted realm. Shabbos is meant to give us a taste of that realm, while remaining in this world. The more delicious food, the more thoughtful conversations, even the festive atmosphere of Shabbos, lifts us way up beyond anything we could access through the golden calves of our lives. All we need to do is to both anticipate and prepare for our weekly rendezvous with the ‘royal queen.’