Turning a Tragic Wrong Into Triumph

Moshe’s retrospective history of the children of Israel’s trek through desert was filled with moments, high and low. There was God’s revelation at Sinai, but there was also the tragic sin of the golden calf. It was Moshe who was integrally involved in saving his people from the gravest consequences of their catastrophic betrayal of God:

I (Moshe) started down the mountain, a mountain ablaze with fire, the two Tablets of the Covenant in my two hands, I saw how you had sinned against the Lord your God; you had made yourselves a molten calf; you had been quick to stray from the path that the Lord had enjoined upon you. Thereupon I gripped the two tablets and flung them away with both my hands, smashing them before your eyes. I threw myself down before the Lord – eating no bread and drinking no water forty days and forty nights, as before because of the great wrong you had committed, doing what displeased the Lord and vexing him. (Deuteronomy 9:15-18)

The Mishnah Taanit 4:6 established that Moshe broke the first set of tablets given by God on Mount Sinai on the 17^th day of Tammuz when he confronted the people for the sin of the egel hazahav – the golden calf. If there ever was a sin committed by the Jewish people that ranks right up at the top of the list, it is the sin of the golden calf. This is the Jewish “original sin”! The one, one might think, we could never live down.

The rabbinic tradition managed to take even this lowest of moments in the sacred story of the children of Israel, and turn it into a means for reaching spiritual heights. In a unique rabbinic text from the period of the Mishnah, Seder Olam Rabbah, a work which attempts to create a chronology of biblical events, the above story is put into a time frame:

…‘Moses went inside the cloud and ascended the mountain; and Moses remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights.’ (Shemot 24:18) On the 17th of Tammuz he came down and shattered the tablets, ‘The next day, Moses said to the people: “You have been guilty of a great sin. Yet, I will now go up to the Lord; perhaps I may win forgiveness for your sin.” Moshe went back up on the 18th of Tammuz and pleaded for mercy on behalf of Israel, as it is written ‘When I lay prostrate before the Lord those forty days and forty nights, because the Lord was determined to destroy you,’ (Deuteronomy 9:25) At that moment, the Holy One once again viewed Israel with favor and said to Moshe to carve new tablets and to come up the mountain once again, as it says: “Thereupon the Lord said to me, “Carve out two tablets of stone like the first, and come up to Me on the mountain; and make an ark of wood.” (Deuteronomy 10:1) He came down on the 28th of Av and carved the second tablets, as it says: “So Moses carved two tablets of stone, like the first, and early in the morning he went up on Mount Sinai…” (Exodus 34:4) He went back up on the 29th of Av and the Torah was repeated to him a second time, as it says: “I had stayed on the mountain, as I did the first time, forty days and forty nights; and the Lord heeded me once again: the Lord agreed not to destroy you.” (Deuteronomy 10:10) ‘As I did the first time,’ just as the first was a time of favor, so too, the second were a time of favor- we can derive from this that those in the middle were a time of anger. He came down on the 10th of Tishre, which was Yom Kippur, and announced to them that they had found favor before God (HaMakom), as it says “Pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for Your own!” (Exodus 34:9) Therefore it was established as a fixed day and a remembrance for the generations, as it says “This shall be to you a law for all time: to make atonement for the Israelites for all their sins once a year…” (Vayikra 16:34) (Seder Olam Rabbah Chapter 6; Milikowsky ed. pp. 238-9)

This story makes Yom Kippur – The Giving of the Torah 2 – The Sequel, but more importantly, the second giving of the Tablets signals the reconciliation of God with His people after the most grievous of sins!

This story is of enormous religious significance because it created for all times a paradigm for Jews throughout the ages. If God was willing to forgive the sin of the Golden Calf on the 10^th of Tishrei, then for all generations afterwards, this model still holds sway. Yom Kippur, is a day set aside from the very beginning of our sacred history. It is a day created as quintessentially different – made to offer us an opportunity to change ourselves, recharge ourselves and become new again. It is a gift not to be set aside. It is a day to experience renewal, to become revitalized and to come out as better Jews and human beings – all born from the tragic story of the golden calf.