Unscrolled, Ki Tisa: When the Jews and God Turned Back

“He finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai.”

With these words, the riverlike stream of prophecy, which has coursed through the past two and half Torah portions, ceases flowing. Suddenly, we are jolted back into reality.

The Torah’s next words further intensify this sense of coming to. “The people saw that Moses was late in coming down from the mountain.” Restored to our senses, we are forced to confront the fact that while we have been swept up in the divine word, we have in fact been standing here on the craggy peak of Mount Sinai the whole time, with the people of Israel below us, unremembered and unremarked by the text.

During Moses’ time on the mountain, the Israelites assumed his absence meant that he had abandoned them. Among child psychologists, this would be called an anxious, rather than a secure, attachment style. The securely attached child will cry when their caregiver departs, but will soon calm down, confident that their caregiver will, in time, return. The anxiously attached child has no such confidence in the future. Every departure is experienced as the last.

It is this anxious attachment that leads the Israelites into the sin of idolatry. The story of the golden calf is well-known and hardly needs to be recounted. Its images — the debauched bacchanal of the Israelites around their golden god and Moses shattering the tablets on the ground in anger — are burned in our memory as eternal symbols of transgression and its consequences.

What is perhaps less familiar is the aftermath of this affair, a narrative whose images are subtler but no less powerful. The second half of the parashah is about estrangement and the ways in which God, Moses and the Israelites haltingly find their way back to one another. Where previously we had lost our sense of space and time in the act of revelation, now we are hyperaware of both. Distance and duration are central to this reconciliation narrative.

Distance and duration are central to this reconciliation narrative.

“Whenever Moses went out to the Tent of Meeting, all the people would rise and stand, each at the entrance of his tent, and gaze after Moses until he had entered the Tent.” In this sweet and melancholy image, the anxiously attached Israelites stare at the figure of Moses from a distance, too terrified by the prospect of his disappearance to let him out of their sight.

Moses, meanwhile, is unready to forgive the Israelites himself. This doesn’t mean he has forgotten them. He works tirelessly to secure their forgiveness from God. When God assents, Moses is enraptured and exclaims: “Oh, let me behold Your Presence!”

But no human can see God’s face and live. God therefore devises a way to be both seen and not seen, like a silhouette through a screen. He tells Moses to position himself in the cleft of a boulder. “I will shield you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take My hand away and you will see My back; but My face must not be seen.”

More than a golden calf or shattered tablets, it is a turned back that is the main image of Parashat Ki Tisa. Looking down from the mountain, God sees that the Israelites have turned their backs to Him. Looking out from their tents, the Israelites watch Moses’s back as he walks to the Tent of Meeting. And now, tucked into this crevice of stone, Moses sees God’s back as He passes.

As with an infant watching its mother when she leaves the room, all of this back-gazing is a training session in secure attachment. The Israelites are learning what it means to be a people with a God — to trust that He is mindful of them even when He can’t be seen. God, for His part, is learning what it means to be a God with a people, bound to forever turn back, no matter how many times He looks away.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.