וַיֹּ֕אמֶר לֹ֥א תוּכַ֖ל לִרְאֹ֣ת אֶת־פָּנָ֑י כִּ֛י לֹֽא־יִרְאַ֥נִי הָאָדָ֖ם וָחָֽי׃
“you cannot see My face, for a human being may not see Me and live.” (Ex. 33.20)
“You can’t handle the truth.” – Col. Jessup, A Few Good Men, Aaron Sorkin, 1992
This Shabbat we read from parashat Ki Tisa, in close proximity to the story of Purim which we read on this day.
It could give you mental whiplash: from the fun “children’s holiday” of Purim to the depths of the spiritual chaos that leads to the heresy of the calf. There could be no better way for us to finally internalize the message that Purim is no children’s holiday; it is an ancient tale of political intrigue, human vulnerability and resourcefulness, and the reality of evil. In short, a tale with no end of current resonance. To juxtapose it to Ki Tisa is to risk opening a new level of learning, down, down, from surface p’shat past imaginative midrash to the level of the disturbing hints of remez.
Purim is ”a holiday made for a postmodern sensibility: a holiday of masks, inversions, comic mockery, concealment of God whose name is never even mentioned in the Megillah.” (Susan Handelman, “Crossing and Recrossing the Void” 2002). What better time to seek out the strange truth hinted at in the old rabbinic play on words observing that Yom Kippur is “yom ki-purim” “a day like Purim”?
On Yom haKippurim, which we generally call by its shorter name of Yom Kippur, we stand before HaShem in a radical awareness of all the ways that we fail to see what is real, and even when we can glimpse it, fail to follow what we do manage to see. Rather than see what is too difficult to accept, we take refuge in the veils of half-truth, partial awareness, and being too busy to think about it.
This Shabbat, the juxtaposition with Ki Tisa forces us to consider a radical concept: we too have replaced HaShem with an idol. We too, having been invited to follow a higher path, have opted for an easier, less complicated life.
For the Israelites, the idol – which should be understood here in a sophisticated way, not easily dismissed, but as that which you believe to be the grounding of your actions and ethics – the idol was made out their presupposed comfort zone. Egyptian imagery of power and precious metal translates for us into belief in power structures and resource accumulation as places of safety.
The great shock of our days is the revelation (I use the word deliberately) that the Jewish community’s golden calf in our days has become the State of Israel. This inescapable conclusion becomes obvious when we consider the spiritual chaos of Ki Tisa and recognize its resonance in the U.S. Jewish community’s approach to Israel as a Jewish nation-state. The stronger the case is made that a Jewish and Jewish-controlled state is the only way for Jews to be safe and thrive, in the face of the absolutely unJewish behavior of that state, the more the calf holds sway, and the farther we are from HaShem. And the more we condone violence in the name of that safety, the farther still.
The high priest of this idol is the idea of the centrality of the self. When we do what we do because we feel like it, we are serving only the level of comfort and convenience we currently need. We are serving the calf of the veils, and of the self-deception that allows injustice to exist.
On the other hand (the hand of mercy, hesed, of recognizing that we are just weak, scared, and overwhelmed): It’s too hard to look at that remez and know what to do. It’s too difficult: we cannot “see Me and live.” We cannot stand in the face of complete transparency and understanding and survive the shadows of regular, quotidian, day to day life.
In short, we cannot handle the truth – not for long, anyway. It is too complicated, and too many people will shun not only the remez but anyone who seeks to understand it.
This is the reason we need each other’s compassion, and we need this Place where we come together and, momentarily, find the occasion and the courage to peek behind the veil toward that which pulls us, despite ourselves and our desire for comfort and safety. Like Moshe, we want to see; and like Aaron, we want to live, and we can too clearly see the contradiction between truth and safety.
As we insist in our prayers, HaShem is truth, nothing else. Yet you and I are created in that divine image, and the Psalmist sings that truth springs up from the earth – from us, made of dirt and failure and dreams. (Psalm 85.12)
This is the very adult meaning of the holy day of Purim, this day which urges us to look behind the masks of our regular life and recognize that there is something more toward which we might walk, something truer, which we will never be able to completely see. Yet that vision is what makes our shared journey so beautiful.
חֶסֶד־וֶאֱמֶ֥ת נִפְגָּ֑שׁוּ צֶ֖דֶק וְשָׁל֣וֹם נָשָֽׁקוּ׃
Hesed (mercy) and truth meet;
justice and shalom (well-being) kiss.
(Psalm 85.11)
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 