Going Out The Door You Came In
Rabbi Noa Kushner
Parashat Shmini
1.
It is a big day, one of the biggest
I mean, in Torah
It is the consecration of the High Priest
It is the completion of the Mishkan, the place everyone has worked so hard to build
Aaron, who is to be the high priest, is standing at the ready
And God says to him:
קַח־לְ֠ךָ עֵ֣גֶל בֶּן־בָּקָ֧ר לְחַטָּ֛את
Take for yourself
a calf
…from the herd for a sin offering
Immediately Rabbinic heads across the centuries begin to spin, as if all at once
A calf?! The sin offering for the priest is a / a BULL (1)
Everyone knows that, says Chizkuni
A calf?! At a momentous and symbolic time like this
God is bringing up a calf?!
As in the golden calf?
As in, arguably, God chooses now to bring up Aaron’s very worst moment?!
Now? God chooses now to refer to the moment when
We, Israel, beside ourselves with fear and despair, not to mention shortsightedness, insecurity and immaturity — rather than wait for Moses’ return
Demanded an idol at the foot of Sinai
Leaving the whole God commitment project literally in the dust
Now? God chooses now to refer to the moment Aaron succumbed to our misplaced fear and despair
When Aaron, instead of saying, “Wait a second here.”
Or, “No.”
Or, “You are, we are better than this”
Or, “Trust me, I promise I won’t let you down” —
Instead of saying any of those things,
Aaron invited everyone to melt their jewelry down down down and to make
The kind of thing that would supposedly solve for fear and despair
A distraction beyond distraction
A distortion, a solution,
An illusion
of power and control
And as much as the rabbis find reasons, oh so many reasons, why Aaron was in a bind,
Why he had to give into the mob, to the fear and despair
As sympathetic as we might be
Couldn’t have been easy
At the end of the day, Aaron did not put out the fire, he stoked it.
Back then
When God finds out and is furious
After Moses goes down to see what is happening
Moses pointedly asks Aaron
“What did the people do to you that you would let them sin like this?!” (2)
“How could you let things get this far?!”
“How could you not be the grown up in the room?!”
And Aaron has his answers, excuses, really
But even the plain text lets us know, in an aside
Moses knows, Moses knows it was Aaron who had let the people get loose, out of control, wild
Aaron might be a victim but he is no innocent
And thanks to the astute question of one of the students in the weekly torah portion class
I realize now
That any scene of Aaron’s t’shuvah
Any scene of him changing or integrating what happened
is curiously absent
See
The people certainly don’t just walk away after,
Moses’ reaction to the golden calf is intense and violent, and they are each forced to choose a direction
And Moses himself doesn’t just go on to the next thing
He seems to undergo a spiritual crisis of his own, a transformation
Even God must change from angry, retributive to resigned and willing to accept and integrate serious aberrations in this ongoing relationship with the people
But Aaron?
It is left vague, open
Nothing happens
As if the trauma is recorded but there is a missing thread, and something is not completely resolved
And so, the rabbis understand with good reason, that the experience haunts Aaron, and follows him wherever he goes
Which is why
In this week’s Torah
At the very moment which should be the apex, the public highlight of his life —
When God tells Aaron
That apart from the sacrifices he will make on behalf of Israel
That first
Aaron should
קַח־לְ֠ךָ עֵ֣גֶל בֶּן־בָּקָ֧ר לְחַטָּ֛את
“Take for yourself” a calf from the herd for a sin offering
In the minds of the rabbis, there is no way that this can be a coincidence
Something big is happening, something big is going down.
2.
We imagine Aaron standing there, see
Looking small next to all the grandeur of the mishkan
We imagine him already with his own moments of doubt:
“Am I worthy of this position?”
All the fears tumbling to the front of his mind
And the Ramban even says (3)
Aaron looked at the alter — which of course had horns, one on each corner — (4)
And he has a vision, a delusion
The alter itself alters and becomes, you guessed it, a giant golden horned bull, a bull calf
Because it says in Psalms (5) that when we worshipped a golden calf we exchanged God for a bull that eats grass
And if that’s not enough, Da’at Z’kenim offers (6) that
Satan himself
Dresses up like a calf, a living embodiment of Aaron’s reoccurring nightmare
Braying and parading around Aaron
Taking the very form of the old unresolved trauma
I imagine him saying to Aaron
“As if you can forgive anyone’s sin
Darling you are actually the one who was responsible for the biggest idol of them all…
Why don’t you step down, Aaron, now’s your chance
Let the one who doesn’t have this stain on his record, this blemish, let that person step forward to claim the holiest office in the land.”
Ramban says Aaron, transfixed, saw that calf everywhere he looked
And perhaps he always had
So of course the calf was in front of him now, blocking his view, blocking his way
3.
Aaron is paralyzed
He cannot move
And we know he is paralyzed because just five verses later
Moses says to Aaron,
קְרַ֤ב אֶל־הַמִּזְבֵּ֙חַ֙
“Come forward to the alter”
This is before Moses tells him to sacrifice the sin offering
And all the rabbis agree, this command to come forward, it is, of course, extraneous
We can say all you want about Aaron but he definitely knew his way around an alter
Moses would only have to tell him to come forward in order to make his sacrifice, his sin offering of the calf
If Aaron was frozen in place
4.
I learned from my teacher R. Ed Feinstein
That before our tradition there was no such thing as t’shuvah
The miraculous idea that a person could be forgiven for her sins
Before our tradition, the gods were either pleased with us or they crushed us
We were either pleased with each other or we more or less used our power to crush each another
There was no such thing as t’shuvah
But the groundbreaking, everything-changing concept that God begins to learn after the disaster that was the incident of the golden calf —
Is that massive mistakes can be made
Mistakes that invite the destruction of trust,
Mistakes that invite the destruction of the basis of any relationship or communal project
That earth shattering betrayal can take place
And repair can still occur
T’shuvah is the idea that those fractures can be not only reset, rebound but strengthened
That our relationships with each other and with God can survive and evolve
And we understand, from some of the rabbinic rendering of t’shuvah
That it is dafka not about starting fresh
The whole wiping the slate clean doesn’t really take hold as an image in the rabbinic discussions of t’shuvah
Rather, t’shuvah is more about revisiting elements of the old place, but this time with a different intent, a different trajectory
We could say T’shuvah is going out the same door through which we came in
5.
Which is why I find it so moving that
Whether we think Aaron was having golden calf hallucinations or not
I find it startling and moving that God wants Aaron, dafka Aaron!, to be God’s high priest
The very high priest who will be in charge of all ritual forgiveness
God takes the very person who everyone most associated with the travesty of the golden calf
And elevates him, makes him unmistakably central
As if to say, there is no sin that exempts you from getting close to the alter
No mistake is too great to relieve you from being received by God, from the opportunity to make t’shuvah
As if to say in our ritual places, in the places where we meet God
It is not even that everyone is welcome
But that everyone is flawed, no one is without blemish, everyone can make t’shuvah
and that is the point
So Aaron is the perfect representative, the perfect High Priest
For he represents all of us
From the one who initiated the building of the calf, to the one who broke of his earring, to the one who watched but didn’t have the strength to say anything, to the one of us who secretly still wishes for a nice golden calf from time to time, to the one who blamed someone else for the calf when she was just as involved
Not only are we all welcome at the alter
The alter was built just for us, all of us
6.
And God
Who admittedly sometimes has a bit of trouble letting things go in Torah
Has our admiration here, hidden in Leviticus
For God says to Aaron, not only have I chosen you for this position
But
קַח־לְ֠ךָ עֵ֣גֶל בֶּן־בָּקָ֧ר לְחַטָּ֛את
Take a calf, for yourself
sacrifice that as a sin offering
As if to say
On this holy day,
Take a calf for me, yes,
but also for you, for yourself
For even if you want to run away from the calf, Aaron
I need you to do the opposite
I need you to bring that calf right up here where we can all see it and divest it of its power
Where we can take away the taboo and instead put the whole story in Torah, the story of then and the story of now so our children will tell story upon story upon story about what happened and what could be
So that no one can doubt the power of t’shuvah
Its validity and reality and expanse
So listen, God says, listen and come close, Aaron
Take a calf, for yourself and for me
Let us all go out the door through which we came in.
7.
Danya, you are one of the smartest students I have ever had the privilege to teach. Your comprehension exceeds that of many adults. My blessing for you is that you take that intelligence and determination into the world in ways so that we can all experience your light.
I would tell you that my other blessing is that you never make mistakes but you would then tell me that that would be impossible and you would be right.
So instead, I give you what I believe is our greatest gift, the gift of t’shuvah, the gift that allows us to grow and triumph over any mistake, the gift that allows us to grow ourselves, to regain trust in each other, to tell stories instead of running away, to know that even in the times we are paralyzed with fear, God whispers to us to come close, to not be afraid, for we have already been chosen and we have already been forgiven. (7)
1) See Chizkuni to Lev. 9:2 who cites Lev. 4:3 where Priests use bulls for sin offerings
2) Exodus 32:21
3) to Leviticus 9:7:1
4) See Ex. 27:2
5) Ps. 106:20
6) to Lev. 9:7:1
7) See Ramban, above
Photograph by Robin Schreiner
