Parashat Ki Tisa: On Learning to Wait

Here we are confronted with the classical “sin” of the Israelites – the making of the Golden Calf. What is at its root? An inability to sit with the feeling of not knowing the future. Moshe has been up on the mountain for a long time, and he seems to be “late” coming down. The people say: “This man Moshe, who brought us out of Egypt, we don’t know what has become of him.” We don’t know. Did he die up there? Is he late because he is still with God, or is he late because he starved to death and is never coming back? We don’t know, and this not knowing is uncomfortable; it makes us worried, anxious, restless.

All that would have been fine. We all experience such moments of worry and anxiety over an unknown future. Waiting and not knowing is hard. The problem was that the Israelites did not have the fortitude to ride through such emotions; they felt the need to immediately act on them. Before they even say why – express their worry – they already want to act. They say to Aaron: “Get up and make us a god who will go before us, for this man Moshe, who brought us out of Egypt, we don’t know what has become of him.” Aaron, you must act, create, do, because we can’t stand this state of not knowing! The golden calf is a symbol of action borne out of anxiety, out of an inability to wait patiently to see how life will unfold.

We all have these moments, moments of doubt and uncertainty, of a kind of restless anxiety which tells us – act, act, act, fix, fix, fix – otherwise the world will fall apart! But such actions, borne out of an atmosphere of confusion and lack of clarity – out of a nation that is paru’a, “out of control” (32:25) – only muddy the waters (like the ash-sprinkled water the Israelites are given to drink) and ultimately create a bigger mess than we already had.

This is not to say there is no role for human action and human fixing of the world, only to caution us that moments of deep anxiety and restlessness, those very moments when we are most apt to want to act, but to act rashly and haphazardly, are not the time for action. They are the time for sitting still, for sitting with the worry, the uncertainty, and not trying to change a thing, but trying to recapture that sense of faith, that sense that the world is already perfect, that all is already well. They are a time for learning how to wait restfully, to see how things turn out, before we jump into action to fix them.

Perhaps the need for such restfulness amidst doubt and anxiety is the reason that the commandment to keep Shabbat appears right before and right after the Golden Calf incident. Shabbat stands guard against future Golden Calfs. It is a day when no creative action is allowed; one simply exists in the world, with none of that restless sense that the world needs changing. If we have doubts and worries, that is fine; on Shabbat, we can feel them and watch them come and go, not in the workaday context of action, but in the peaceful context of spiritual consciousness.