Fear vs. Hope

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, February 19, 2005

We usually think of the book of Exodus as a very dramatic text. After all it begins with the moving story of the liberation of the Israelites. Moses stands before Pharaoh demanding, ”Let My People Go,” bringing on the ten plagues with all their vivid consequences. The splitting of the sea and the revelation of the Torah on Mt Sinai, are also very dramatic moments, described in a way as to leave a lasting impression.

Then we come to the last five parshiot of Exodus and confront long descriptive passages, giving instructions concerning the tabernacle, the movable sanctuary the Israelites built in the desert, its furnishings, and the garments that the priests were to wear while officiating in it. Some find these soporific, that is sleep inducing.

Jewish commentators believe that there is a dramatic story in these portions as well but that it is hidden by the order in which we read them. The Torah is arranged such that the dramatic story of the Golden Calf is buried in the middle of column after column of descriptive detail. Next week, we will talk a little bit about why priests interested in upholding Aaron’s honor might have arranged things in that way. More important for our purposes this week is to understand that through the ages many Jewish Biblical commentators believed that all of these instructions concerning the tabernacle were in reaction to the incident of the Golden Calf.

If we think of the Exodus as the revolution that took place in Jewish life, then the incident of the Golden Calf was a sort of counter-revolution, a backsliding, an attempt to impose the former status quo. The Exodus was not only a political revolution, but it was even more importantly a theological revolution. Moses preached to the people a belief in a God, who though He could not be seen or touched, was still the most powerful force in the universe. He liberated the Israelites not only from Egypt, but also from their belief in the many Egyptian gods, whom they had believed ruled over their lives. With his message of the power of One God, he brought hope to a people who had been living in fear. When the people reached the other side of the sea, and saw the Egyptian chariots covered by the raging water, they believed in Adonai and in Moses his servant. But that belief in an unseen God was difficult to maintain, and as soon as Moses went up the mountain, the people began to doubt this new idea about God, reverting to the idolatry in which they had been steeped for 400 years. They lost confidence in the hope that had given them the courage to leave Egypt and reverted to the fear. “Were there not enough graves in Egypt” they cried out, “that Moses brought us here to die in the wilderness.”

The tabernacle, according to many Jewish commentators, came in response to the people’s creation of a Golden Calf. Though it did not give them a physical representation of God, it did provide a physical center for the worship of God, and a place where the people could be confident that God dwelt. The tabernacle and in particular its use of light, as described in this weeks Torah portion, allowed the people to reconnect with their hopes and overcome their fears.

This week the cantor and I heard a talk by Michael Lerner at our local interfaith council. He argued that the basic tension within humanity, remains that tension between fear and hope. When we operate out of fear, we are constricted and anxious. We believe the world is an inhospitable place where we must always be looking out for number one. From a place of fear, one always assumes that one’s neighbor is out to take something, and therefore the best stance is a defensive pose, protective of our own interests. How different that is from the way we are when we operate from a position of hope. Then we can believe that joining with others can better all of us. Then we can believe that being compassionate and generous is not foolish or naive, but rather it is the way to make our communities and our world a better place.

Moses’ role as a religious leader was to help the Israelites find a way out of fear and to connect with hope. In a similar way the message of religion today must be to bring people to this same place of hope. The Ner Tamid, a central feature of this week’s Torah portion, captures that hope. Light is a symbol of the divine, and the presence of even a small amount of light, cuts through great darkness. We are a people who have believed that the light of God exists within each of us. Even in the darkest times we have proclaimed that belief as these words inscribed on the wall of a cellar in Cologne Germany proclaim, ” I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.” May we continue to be a voice of hope, connecting each person to their highest self.