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Welcome to the Torah portion of Ki Tissa which tells of Moses receiving the ten commandments on Mt. Sinai. Seeing the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf, Moses smashes the tablets. Our themes this week focus on idolatry, brokeness and wholeness, and truth.
                                                                      Michael (mjstrassfeld@gmail.com)
Intention/kavanah for the week:

    Non-idolatry practice:
Idolatry today does not mean worshipping stone images of gods or worshipping modern equivalents of "false gods" such as money or fame. It occurs when we believe that we know the whole truth when, in fact, we can at best only discover partial truths.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

 

Mordecai Kaplan wrote:
 From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
From the laziness that is content with half-truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
O God of truth deliver us.
 
Reflect this week on the issues these quotes raise.
 
Song:
 
ve-taheir libanu le'avdekha be-emet

Make pure our hearts to serve you in truth

Our hearts understand in ways that our head can't that as much as we long to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth we only get glimpses of pieces of the truth
                                                       
To listen to the song

 A word of Torah:

     
The broken tablets:
     In this week’s Torah portion, Moses descends Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments. Upon seeing the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf, he smashes the tablets.
     How did the world begin? For Jewish mystics the world began with an act of withdrawal. God did tzimtzum. God contracted the Divine self to leave space for the world to exist. Before that God was everywhere, filling every space and every dimension. After this tzimtzum—this withdrawal—some divine energy entered the emerging world. This divine light was too strong, overpowering the worlds that tried to contain it. The universe exploded with a cosmic bang. Shards of divine light, of holiness, were scattered everywhere, in everyone, in every situation. They are the life and meaning of the universe.
     We live in this world of shattering. We feel in our bodies and in our souls the brokenness of the world. We feel at times the resonance in ourselves of that initial cosmic shattering. Our bodies, like that primordial world, try not to contain, but rather to hold onto the divine light and energy flowing around us and in us. But, as in the world’s origin, our bodies are too frail, made only frailer with the passage of time, and so we begin to leak our divine energy. In this world of shattered hopes and expectations, we search for wholeness.
      Moses shattered the first set of tablets containing the Ten Commandments. He returned to the mountain and got a second set that he helped to write. When the ark was constructed for the sanctuary/mishkan, the rabbis tell us that not only the were the second set of tablets put into the ark, but the pieces of the first set as well.
     Wholeness comes not from ignoring the broken pieces, or hoping to magically glue them back together.
     The shattered co-exists with the whole, the divine is to be found amidst the darkest depths and the heaviest muck of the universe.
      Every moment has the potential for redemption and wholeness. Our brokenness gives us that vision and the potential to redeem some of the divine sparks scattered in the world.
       
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