Shabbat Ki Tissa

Written by Rabbi Barbara Borts Thursday, 08 March 2007

A TALE OF TWO COWS

It was the best of cows, it was the worst of cows, it was the cow of wisdom, it was the cow of foolishness, it was the cow of belief, it was the cow of doubt, it was the cow of light, it was the cow of darkness, it was the cow of hope, it was the cow of despair, we believed that everything lay before us, we believed that we there was nothing before us.

This Shabbat is about two different cows, the Golden Calf of the Israelites in the desert and the Red Cow for the purifying of priests who had contact with death. The one cow  was built with the jewels of the Israelites by Aaron the Kohen, the Priest, after the people despaired of  Moses’ return from Mt. Sinai. The other cow was to be a beast without blemish, a miracle cow, to purify the kohanim, the same Aaron and his family, after contact with a dead person not from their own family. God certainly had a wry sense of humour – sending the miraculous purifying animal in the form of the impure, human-created creature of the Exodus story.

This is a strange way to teach us lessons, cows of gold and perfect red cows. The law of the red cow, or heifer, is one of the most baffling in the Torah.  The priests, or kohanim, were a people set aside to do the most holy of work, that of offering the sacrifices. In order to preserve their separateness and the spiritual power that came from it, they were to avoid some of the aspects of life that were considered to detract from holiness, among which was contact with the dead.  The red cow would help them regain their purity.

It cannot have been easy to find an absolutely pure red cow, and there was no Westminster Cow show in those days to encourage the breeding of the best in show. So maybe the message to the priests was how fragile the nature of holiness is, how difficult it is to remain in the world and yet not entirely part of it.

But what of this earlier cow, the Golden Calf of the desert? Moses goes up the mount to commune with God and leaves his brother Aaron, the Kohen, behind, to lead the people. The people, already riven by doubts, lose it when Moses takes too long to return. Their commitment and belief is tenuous, dependent on Moses and his relationship to God. They are not long out of slavery; it is Egypt and not Sinai that they remember. Sinai and its teachings are for the future.

So they lose heart and their belief falters in their now invisible leader’s invisible God. I don’t think that they reverted to idol worship when they ask for a god that they can see and I believe that is why Aaron was comfortable building the Golden Calf. He says, when it is done, eleh elohecha – this is your god – as if to say, the God with whom Moses converses so intimately, this is what that God looks like and  that God is now amongst us as well.

So what was their crime? A failure of imagination. A god who takes a shape and a form, a god who takes the form of life on earth, is no god at all, simply a human creation. This is a one-dimensional god. This god allows for no gray areas, no mystery, no imagination, no leaps of faith. This god would not give rise to religious searching, nor to intellectual musings about the nature of the divine. This god’s religion would be a shallow and superficial one. This cow represents the past.

The other cow, the red cow, is the cow of the future. Some in Israel have found the rare red cow on occasions in the recent past, and saw in that a sign that the messiah was coming. Whether you believe in a messiah, or a messianic age, a world of harmony and peace is a world one needs to work for. Holiness is complex, difficult to achieve, not entirely in our hands, yet it requires of us great effort, leaps of faith and imagination. When Moses had his own Golden Calf moment and wanted God to describe Godself, God answered, “I am what I am/I will be what I will be.” And since that day, we Jews have been trying to encounter and relate to that constantly evolving Being.

©Rabbi Barbara Borts