"A half-shekel by the sanctuary weight"

(Shemot 30:13)

In the midrashim are found

several reasons for the [tribute of the] half-shekel, and I intend to add three

more. The first – because the sin of the calf caused the breaking of the tablets

into two, therefore must they donate a beka (half-shekel – beka

means a break) which is a shekel broken in two. The second: inasmuch as this

was atonement for the soul (kofer nefesh – literally "covering' or

protection against punishment) and it is known that as far as the soul is

concerned no person has any advantage over his fellow, because the vital

soul is equal among all, and therefore rich and poor are equal in this

atonement, and because every person is a whole shekel, and every half is

included in the number 10, so calculated our sages of blessed memory (Niddah 31a) in their teaching that 'three are

partners in the creation of Man; 10 parts come from the father and mother, and

10 are provided by God', hence a complete man is 20 gera (20 gera equals

one shekel) and a half of him is an offering to God to atone for that part

which is the soul…

God said that the atonement is

mainly for the root, that is to say, for that component which was the cause of

all these sins, and that was surfeit of gold and the coveting of money which

led them to this sin, as the Sages taught (Yoma

81b) "and they made for themselves gods of gold" – Said Moshe

before the Almighty: You caused them [to transgress] because of the

abundance of gold which you showered upon them, etc. The explanation of

this is, that because he gave them so much gold, they became covetous and their

eyes could not be satiated, and they asked for it in the form of an ox … and

they thought that the constellation Taurus grants wealth and will bestow upon

them even more gold, as is written (Mishlei

14:4) "But a rich harvest comes through the strength of the ox".

And because Joseph was the provider for all the land, he was called a "firstling

bull". Therefore God commanded to give a half-shekel to atone for the

craving for wealth, because one never has more than half, as the Sages

taught (Kohellet Rabba 1;13) "If he

has 100, he craves 200, and if he has 200 he craves 400, thus we find that one

never has in hand more than half a shekel".

(Kli Yakar, Ibid. Ibid)

Chanting, explaining, concealing and revealing

Dalia Marx

The parasha 'Ki

Tissa' relates one of the most embarrassing stories in the history of the young

Israelite nation. After a chain of miraculous occurrences – the salvation of

Israel from Egypt, the splitting of the Reed Sea, the provision of the manna,

and then, after the founding event of the giving of the Torah at Sinai – the

Children of Israel act with a lack of faith, fashion a golden calf, bow down to

it, offer it sacrifices and even proclaim: "These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt" (Shemot 32:8). Harsh words are exchanged between

God who wishes to annihilate the people in his anger, and Moshe who succeeds in

deflecting the Lord's anger but smashes the Tablets of the Covenant in the

presence of the calf ritual. The slaughter of three

thousand

members of the nation quiets the divine fury, but the scars of the event remain

etched in the national consciousness forever.

I propose to

deal with the ways in which the Torah's expressions of censure of the Jewish

people or its leaders are read and taught. Underlying the discussion are

questions regarding the function of Torah reading. Is it just a ceremonial act?

Is the purpose of the reading the learning of the past? In what way does it

come to strengthen the people and to buttress its identification with its

legacy? And what about problematic content such as that of story of the calf?

What are the educational dimensions of this content? In other words, how are we

to relate to those texts so difficult in terms of theology, ideology, values,

and aesthetics?

First of all,

we may assume that the Biblical text before us has undergone editing, some

matters reaching stage front, while other remain behind the scenes. Hidden

mechanisms oversaw the process of creating the Biblical canon. For example, the

numerous stories about David reveal

a modicum of censure of the important king, criticism which is not expressed

directly but which peeps out between the slits (and even earned fascinating

expressions in modern literature. In this

context it is advisable to also consider which texts were privileged to enter

the Biblical canon, which gained entry only after controversy – for instance,

the Scroll of Kohellet and the Esther Scroll – and which remained outside. What

can be learned from Chazal's complex position regarding those external books? In

the following line we deal with methods of coping with uncomfortable issues in

the Bible.

One method of

coping with embarrassing phrases is to replace them with 'laundered' language:

The Rabbis

taught: All offensive texts written in the Torah are to be read as praise, such

as: 'yishgalenah' (will ravish her) is to read aloud as 'yishkavenah'

('will lie with her') (Devarim 28:30); for

'ba'afalim' ("with posteriors") read   ba'tehorim' (hemorrhoids); for 'heryonim' (dove's

dungs) read 'divyonim' (decayed leaves)

(II Kings 6:27); for 'to eat their hareyhem' (excrement) and to

drink 'meymey shineyhem' (waters of their teeth), read 'to eat

their tsoah' (deposits) and to drink 'meymey ragleyhem' (waters

of their feet' (ibid.28:27); for l'merhaoth'

(privies), read 'l'motzaoth' (retreats) (ibid.10:27)

.(Bavli, Megillah 252 and also Tosefta Megilla 4, 39, Translation from Soncino

edition)

In most

editions of the Tanakh, the 'tainted' word itself (the k'tiv – "as

written") appears in the text, whereas the replacement which is to read

aloud (kri – "as is voiced") appears in the margins. The

offensive word is never expunged from the holy text, but it is not voiced in

public.

Tanaic

literature presents another technique for coping with troublesome texts:

"Some

are read and explained, [some are] read and not translated, [some are] neither

read nor translated" (Tosefta, Megillah 3,

31)

As is known,

the Torah was read aloud in the synagogue in the original Hebrew, and clarified

on the spot in Aramaic, the lingua franca in the days of Chazal. These

were the words which were 'read and explained', namely the major part of the

text. The Mishna, the Tosefta and the Bavli, offer lists of texts which are to be

read but not to be explained:

Reuven's

action is to be read but not translated:

Tamar's

action is to be read and translated:

The first story

of the calf is to be read and translated

And the

second one is to be read but not translated. (Mishnah

Megillah 4:10)

The ritual public

reading of these texts establishes their presence in the life of the synagogue,

but refraining from translating them prevents their comprehension by most of

the people. Each the aforementioned texts requires a separate discussion; we

will concern ourselves briefly with the story of the calf which appears in our

parasha. The Mishna differentiates between "the first story of the calf"

and "the second story". The Talmud explains: "What is the second

story of the calf? From "And Moses said" (Shemot

32:21) until "And Moses saw" (ibid.

25). This is to say that the story of the making of the calf, its

worship and the smashing of the tablets are not censored, they are read and translated,

but the tough discussion between Moshe and Aharon is not explained. Moshe asks:

"What has this people done to you, that you brought upon it great offense?"

and Aharon answers, "Let not my lord's wrath flare. You yourself know that

this people is in an evil way (Alternate

translation: "in a bad state")… And they gave [the gold] to me

and I flung it into the fire, out came this calf." (ibid.22-24). In other words, the sin which caused the silencing

of the story is not the story itself but its telling.

In his

explanation of the discussion in the Bavli, Rashi holds that the description "And

I threw it into the fire and out came this calf" is liable to imply that "there

is substance to false worship", and indeed the Talmud, basing itself on

this passage, states: "One must always be careful in wording his answers,

because on the grounds of Aharon's answer to Moses, the unbelievers were able

to deny [God]" (Ibid.) In contrast,

the Tosafists, opining that the refraining from interpretation was out of

respect for Aharon, accept the words of the Jerusalem Talmud: "The public shaming

of an individual cannot be compared with the public shaming of a public." (Megilla 4, 10; 74:3). Or perhaps someone

thought that the repetition of Aharon's story might imprint itself upon one's consciousness

more than Aharon's report itself. The silencing of the story (and not the event

itself) teaches that speaking about something may sometimes have more

effect than that something itself.

A third – and more

far-reaching – way for coping with embarrassing matters in the Bible is the

ruling not to read them publically at all:

The Priestly Benediction

and the story of David and Amnon, are neither read nor translated.

We do not read

the Chariot portion for Maftir; Rabbi Yehudah permits it.

Rabbi Eliezer

says, we do not read for Maftir "Proclaim Jerusalem['s abominations]"

(Mishna, ibid)

We cannot know

what the exact criteria for exclusion of some passages from public reading are,

while others, which also have an embarrassing or troublesome dimension, are

dealt with in this context. For example, the denunciation of Jerusalem

in Ezekiel 16 ("Proclaim Jerusalem") is not to be read, but the

censure of Jerusalem

and Shomron in Ezekiel 23 is not banned. Many explanations are suggested for

the prohibition against the reading of the Priestly Benediction – the most

refined and pure blessing in our tradition–but we feel none of these really

solve our problem.

In this case

the changes are not out of aesthetic considerations, such as the kri-ktiv

changes. There is also no limitation on exposure only to those fluent in

Hebrew, the more educated, so we may rightly assume that that they knew how to

cope with the complexity of the text. In this case there is total refraining

from presentation of these passages in the ceremonial and public dimension of

reading the holy texts.

Another method

employed by Chazal in dealing with problematic texts is reinterpretation.( *For a survey of various interpretations see: Moshe Zipor,

"The Blessing of the Priests Is Not Read and Not Translated?" Textus,

24 (2009) pp. 221-238) Such is the case in the section enumerating

Biblical figures presented by the Tanakh as flawed characters:

Said R'

Shmuel bar Nahmani in the name of R' Yonatan: Whoever claims that Reuven sinned

is but mistaken… Whoever claims that the sons of Eli sinned is but mistaken… Whoever

claims that the sons of Shmuel sinned is but mistaken… Whoever claims that David sinned is but mistaken… Whoever claims that

Solomon sinned is but mistaken… Whoever claims that Yoshiyahu sinned is but

mistaken. (Bavli,Shabbat 55b-56b)

On the level

of pshat (plain-reading) this section deals with the progeny of great

personalities (Reuven, the sons of Eli, the sons of Shmuel) and with important

kings of the Davidic dynasty. It acquits them of the severe guilt ascribed to

them, and teaches that their transgression was considerably less serious than

one might conclude from explicit texts. Reuben, for example, is cleared of the guilt

of incest with his father's concubine, and is accused only that "he

removed her couch, and Scripture stigmatized his action as heinous as though he

had lain with her".

Only the third

method, the refraining from reading certain texts, forswears parts of the

culture and conceals them, even though they remain in the Biblical canon. The

other methods actually call attention to the problematic text, perhaps even

more than if it were read without special treatment; if problematic words are 'cleaned

up' in marginal notes of the Chumash, the reader is encouraged to check out the

uncensored version; if a particular portion is not explained, the result is special

attention; citation of the names of Biblical personalities together with the

claim that they did not sin, accompanied by a deep and detailed discussion of

the transgression they did not commit, raises the (seemingly?) rejected

accusation to the reader's consciousness and highlights its presence for the

student and reader.

How much human

effort is spent in avoiding coping with that which arouses anxieties and

threatens. But the Torah does not recoil from laying before us a rich human

picture of the great and the commonplace, of courage and cowardice, of vision

and pettiness, unafraid to deal with their revelations. It seems to me that

Chazal, too, did not want to hide the troublesome texts. Perhaps they actually

wished to arouse curiosity about the unexplained texts or about the character

whose behavior is not free of criticism, or to show – by presenting the

differences of the kri and the ktiv – that there is more than one

way of saying something. Perhaps the goal of 'silencing' a certain text is

actually to accentuate its place in the dialogue.

Dr.

Dalia Marx teaches Liturgy and Midrash at the Hebrew

Union College

in Jerusalem.    Her book "When I Sleep and When I Wake:

On Prayers Between Dusk and Dawn" was recently issued by Yedioth Sepharim.                       

They said: These are your

of Egypt.

(Shemot

32:3-4)

These are your gods Israel who brought you up –        Were

they then fools who did not know that this calf which was created today did not

bring them up out of Egypt?

But all those who worship falsely know well that our God in heaven created the

worlds, but this then was their mistake, that [they believed that] the idols possess

a spirit of impurity, just as the prophets have the holy spirit, and they

thought that the calf who spoke with the spirit of impurity spoke with the holy

spirit from above, and therefore they said "These are your gods Israel who

brought you up", that is to say it possesses a holy spirit and this holy

spirit leads us… and in order to try Israel he gave it the impure spirit of

sorts of witches. And he gave the inquirer of ghosts or of familiar spirits

power to deny the celestial company of above and to foretell the future, to

know if they will be whole with the Lord their God and there will not be among

them neither soothsayer nor diviner nor sorcerer, nor believer in signs or

omens as among the prophets of the impure spirit, as is written 'because the

Lord your God will be trying you to know whether you love the Lord your God…"

(Rashbam, Shemot 32:4)

These are your gods Israel – There is none so foolish in the

world as to believe that this gold which hung from their ears until today and

was fashioned into a calf is he who delivered them from Egypt, but they said that the

power of this form and the spirit in it brought them up from there.

(R' Isaac

Shmuel Reggio, ibid. ibid.)

Rise up and make for us a god

which will go before us – They presumed that Moses had had an accident and

was dead, and so they asked Aharon to give them a "Moses" whom they

could not lose,. But that they had the idea at all, that for them to have an

assured future had to had to be linked with the presence of a "Moses",

and the erroneous idea that Man can make, may make, must make a "Moses"

for himself, these are just the conceptions which are diametrically opposite to

the fundamental Jewish idea of God, and of the mutual relationship between God

and Man.

(R' Shimshon Rafael Hirsch, Shemot 32:1, Trans. By Isaac Halevy)

And no man shall go up with

you: The first tables which were given amidst noise and alarm, and in the

presence of a vast assembly proved abortive… there is nothing better than

modesty.

(Rashi, Shemot 34:3)

Midrashei tsafon – from the

pen of Ronen Ahituv

"That Moshe delayed…"

(32:1)

Inasmuch as they had been told

the parasha of Shabbat, Israel

said: Moshe is like our god. About this one (God) Scripture says "that

in six days" (32:17), and about this

one (Moshe) it says "that Moshe delayed" ["in six"

and "delayed" are both spelled with the consonants B'Sh'Sh' – and,

lacking vowels, can be read alike] Do not read 'Boshesh ("delayed")

but rather B'shesh ("in six"). About this one it is written "who

took you out of the land

of Egypt (20:2)

and this one took us up from Egypt, for it is written "And

sent a messenger and brought us out of Egypt.'(Bemidbar 20:16). And from where do we know that

they said so? For it says "This man Moshe who brought us up from the land of Egypt

…"

They said: Moshe is a man and a

god. We do not want a god-man, as is written "God is not a man" (Bemidbar 23:19) They came to Aharon and said, "Rise

up and make us a god."

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