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FEBRUARY 17, 2022 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
From the Fire Parshas Ki Sisa
Raising Holy Tablet Breakers By Rav Moshe Weinberger Adapted for publication by Binyomin Wolf
O
ur parsha contains a lesson regarding what it means to grow up. Every year, it is so hard to read the story of the Golden Calf and the breaking of the Tablets, the luchos. How could the Jewish people have possibly fallen so far so soon after personally hearing Hashem’s voice on Sinai merely because of a slight perceived delay in Moshe’s return from the mountain? One way we can understand it is through the lens of the Kuzari by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, zy”a. He explains that the root of the people’s sin was not actually idol worship. Rather, their mistake was that they attempted to channel their faith in G-d into something which they could feel and touch. This desire, while misguided, is understandable and natural. The reality is that it is very difficult to talk to and serve a G-d we cannot see. In one of my shiurim at yeshiva a few years ago, I asked the boys: “What is more difficult: davening or learning?” They all answered that davening was more difficult. I asked them why. One young man asked me if I was sure I wanted to hear the truth. I confirmed that I did. He answered, “It is so hard to daven because I feel like I am just talking to the wall.” The desire to see and feel Hashem’s presence is very strong because it is truly difficult to internalize Hashem’s presence before us when we cannot see Him. That is why the Kuzari explains that “the intention of the nation was not to depart from the service of G-d. Rather, they believed that they were working toward the service [of G-d].” They were really saying (Mechilta D’Rabbi Yishmael, Yisro, 2), “Our desire is to see our King!” The truth is that what the Jewish people went through is the paradigm
for the growing pains every person experiences when he grows up. That is the path from spiritual immaturity to spiritual adulthood. The Torah tells us (Shemos 32:16), “The luchos were the work of G-d, and the writing was the writing of G-d.” Everything came from G-d. And in reality, nothing could be greater than that. But as a person grows to spiritual maturity, he begins to wonder, “Where am I in all of this?” We felt like children whose parents did everything for them. That is wonderful, but as children mature, they will never feel like whole human beings until they begin creating a life for themselves by making their own choices. Moshe descended from Sinai and saw the people dancing around the work of their own hands. He recognized that a mature nation can only rejoice in spiritual accomplishments it makes on its own. The Jewish people were like children who rejected that which their parents gave them. Moshe saw that, in the end, forcing us to accept the Torah (Shabbos 88a) simply did not work. That is why he threw down “the work of G-d” and
“the writing of G-d.” And Hashem acknowledged that Moshe did the right thing when He said (ibid. 87a), “You acted correctly by breaking [the luchos].” We have never had a generation of children when parents were able to give more to their children. We give them everything, including the beliefs and the Torah life of our fathers and mothers. But our children continue to rebel like in previous generations. It is apparent that the problem is not a failure to bring down more Yiddishkeit on our children from above. At some point in their lives, they must make Torah their own. And in order to do so, they feel that they have no choice but to shatter the luchos given to them by their parents. There are so many ways to serve G-d within the parameters of Yiddishkeit. But we must understand that many of those will not coincide with the exact brand of Yiddishkeit we feel most comfortable in or in which we raise our children. They must blaze their own path in the service of G-d. Only then will they feel ownership of it. Only then will it last forever like the
second set of luchos which Moshe, not Hashem, carved. The root of this principle is the fact that (Menachos 99b) “the foundation of the Torah is its nullification.” While the Jewish people stumbled and sinned grievously by building the Golden Calf, their attempt to fashion their own way in the service of G-d was actually a step toward a more mature, ground-up way of serving G-d. So, too, when our children stumble in their efforts to forge their own identity, independent from the way we raised them, we pray that they eventually will find a path within Yiddishkeit that they have taken personal ownership of, which belongs to them. We also find this underlying concept in halacha. When a father redeems his first-born son from the Kohein (the pidyon haben), he makes a festive meal because the child is transitioning from the sanctity of being set aside for holiness to the more permissive mundane life of a regular Jew. But why is this a reason to celebrate? It sounds more like a reason to mourn! The child is going from a state of holiness, with which he was born, to a lower state, one in which he will have to eventually be involved in humdrum physical life. The answer must be that a state of holiness which only exists because one is born with it is like the first luchos which came from G-d. It is wonderful, but it is not the ultimate goal. The pidyon haben ceremony is like Moshe’s breaking of the luchos. It signifies the transition from a G-d-given, unearned Yiddishkeit to one in which a person will work to find his own way toward Hashem’s service. The breaking of the luchos brings about a tremendous loss of the Torah which came before. But ulti-
