Mircea Eliade of the University of Chicago was one of the most important religious thinkers of the twentieth century, changing the way we understand what it means for a religion to call something holy. In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade argues that religion’s essence involves ascribing supernatural significance to seemingly ordinary things. He writes:
“By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone...nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality” (Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane).
According to Eliade, anything can be made holy if we imbue it with sanctity. However, anything holy can also be made profane, if our actions serve to deny the sanctity of that same item, and idea that is found in how commentators approach the story of the Golden Calf in Parashat Ki Tissa.
When God tells Moses that the Israelites have built the Golden Calf, no instructions are given to Moses as to what he should do about the tablets God spent days inscribing on the top of Mount Sinai. At this point, the Torah describes the following scene:
“And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, with the two tables of the testimony in his hand; tables that were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written. And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables. And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses: 'There is a noise of war in the camp.' And he said: 'It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome, but the noise of them that sing do I hear.' And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and broke them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it with fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it” (Shemot 32:15-20).
In the above passage, the parasha tells us that Moses broke the tablets primarily because he was incensed at what he saw, not because of what God told him to do. As a result, the question is raised as to why God was not angry at Moses destroying an incredible piece of divine craftsmanship, and what lesson we might learn from the fact that God saw something powerful in Moses’ decision to destroy these tablets.
The Meshekh Hokhmah, the Torah commentary of Rabbi Meir Simkha Ha-Kohen of Dvinsk, writes a lengthy commentary on what we can learn from Moses’ decision to smash the tablets. Commenting on the verse “And it came to pass as he approached the camp,” the Meshekh Hokhmah says that asking how Moses could break the ‘holy’ tablets presumes that the tablets have inherent holiness. However, the Meshkeh Hokhmah argues that,
“Torah and Faith are the essential to the Jewish nation. All the sanctities--The Holy Land, Jerusalem, etc., are secondary and subordinate entities hallowed in virtue of the Torah…” (Shemot 32:19).
In other words, only “Torah,” or God’s divine teaching, and faith itself have inherent holiness, and cannot be de-sanctified under any circumstances. However, any other person or thing, no matter how holy we might consider it, is not inherently holy, but is a secondary entity made holy only by virtue of Torah.
As a result, what made Moses furious about the building of the Golden Calf was what the making of idol implied about how the Israelites deemed things holy and profane in the temporal world. The Meshekh Hokhmah writes:
“The people sought therefore to materialize for ways and means to materialize their conceptions, and when they saw that Moses was delayed, their faith was undermined and they sought to make a calf. It was this that Moses condemned, that they should imagine he was unique, and that there existed any intrinsic holiness outside God Himself…”(Ibid.).
Taking this perspective, by building the Golden Calf, the Israelites sent the message that they there was something in the world outside of God that possessed intrinsic holiness.
On its face, we might assume that the tablets God inscribed were intrinsically holy, since they were made by God himself. However, the Meshekh Hokhmah argues that “Even the Tablets-”the writing of God”-were not intrinsically holy, but only so on account of God.” As a result, he writes that,
“The moment Israel sinned and transgressed what was written thereon, they became mere bric a brac devoid of sanctity...For this reason God approved of Moses’ action and said “More power to thee for having broken them.” By this he had demonstrated that the Tablets themselves possessed no intrinsic holiness” (Ibid).
In the words, the tablets were only holy if and only if the Israelites lived lives that were worthy of sanctification. The minute God and Moses saw them dancing around the Golden Calf, the holy tablets simply between rocks with chiseled words on them. Furthermore, by smashing the tablets, Moses sent the message to the Israelites that even after receiving God’s Torah, holy things would only be a part of their community if they actualized God’s Torah in a way that made those things holy. Should the Israelites choose to de-sanctify things with potential sanctity, those things will no longer be holy, but just things.
The above commentary alongside Eliade’s notions of the sacred and the profane have profound implications for what it means to build Jewish Community, for this commentary reminds us that nothing in the Jewish Community is inherently sacred; not our synagogues, not our holiest books, not our most special places. These things only become sacred if we make them sacred, and we only make them sacred if people live lives that reflect God's vision for a holy world. As a result, when we encounter someone who does not find Jewish life meaningful, it is because the things we want them to hold most dear are simply things, and the task is to get them to a point where an ordinary thing becomes a sacred thing. May we proactively teach our children at Schechter what it means to make every thing a sacred thing, so that the tablets we give to them become sacred things that they will imbue with holiness every day for the rest of their lives.
Shabbat Shalom!
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