Ki Tissa: “Both Sides Now”

This week we reach one of the most famous of our Torah passages. “Ki Tissa” stars the incident of the Golden Calf. So much has been written and discussed about this story. So much that I would like to look at a small passage from Exodus chapter 32.15. This is just as Moses is taking the tablets back down the moungtain,. It is a verse or two before the Golden Calf emerges. Moses starts back to his people; “Thereupon Moses turned and went down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Pact, tablets inscribed on both their surfaces, they were inscribed on the one side and the other”.
I just returned from a wonderful conference that dealt with issues of medicine, mortality and morality. Some of the finest scholars in the field of Jewish bio-ethics, from every denomination, presented papers on issues relevant to contemporary issues in this field. One of the overriding themes of all the scholarly presentations was the importance of context, of seeing things on a case by case basis; even at times, allowing Jewish law to bend to fit the humaneness of a situation. What does this have to do with our verse and us? Well, I was thinking on this and the fact that one of the “gifts” of years is the understanding that few things in life are a simple matter of black or white. Often, when we are younger, we see things in a fixed manner. Life experience teaches us that we best first understant the context of a situation before we make a judgement, that each life, and thus each life situation, reflects a particular universe of experience and to make a blanket judgement on everything may do a disservice to all.
This lesson reflects how we read Torah. There is no ONE way to read or understand the text. How we read it often is reflective of where we are in our life, which is why,from one year to another, we can read the same text and have the message be different. Our life experience teaches to look at things, channelling that Joni Mitchel song, “from both sides now” As we get older, we understand that rarely are things black or white, but that one of the great inventions is “grey”. The Tablets are written on two tablets, perhaps letting us know that there may be many ways to approach the text, Jewish tradition and decisions in life.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Richard F. Address.

1 Comment

  1. Rabbi Address – A book relative to your blog – that facinated me is one that was written by the futurist -Ray Kurzweil – entitled “The Singularity Is Near”. Singularity in this sense had to do with the crossing of the biological and the bio-medical (technical) improvements and repair to the human body. The first half of the book may leave you somewhat confused – unless you have a technical or medical background, but the second half deals with the subject of your symposium. In it he addresses how the world may look at this particular singularity. Quite interesting and a good read. His personal objective is too live long enough to live forever – i.e. when singularity is biomedically achieved seeking to repair the body and even – using nanobots – clean up the body’s DNA. Imagine what one may think about the implications of such an event.

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