Haftarat Ki Tissa recounts one of the great competitive triumphs of Israelite religion. Israel’s King Ahab and his pagan wife Jezebel have slaughtered dozens of God’s prophets, and the Elijah is the last prophet left. Finally, Elijah challenges the priests of Baal to a sort of religious duel: which god (or God) will respond to calls to set an altar on fire. The priests of Baal pray and beg their deity for hours, mutilating themselves to spur their frenzy. Nothing happens. Then Elijah calmly walks up to the altar, orders his assistants to pour water on it – not once, not twice, but three times – and then prays for the altar to catch fire. Sure enough, thunder and lightning come down from the heavens and consume the altar, the offering, the water, everything. “When they saw this, all the people flung themselves on their faces and cried out: ‘The Lord alone is God, The Lord alone is God!’”
Well, great! Terrific! Except for one little thing.
If this demonstration of God’s power was so great, why didn’t the Israelites get the message? They continued to be attracted to the Baal cult, which was not wiped out for more than 100 years (2 Kings 10:19); Israel and Judah also persisted in ignoring God’s will. At the beginning of the next chapter, Elijah is suddenly in flight for his life into the Negev, which will lead to his great “still, small voice” epiphany on Mount Horeb – a transition so jarring that the esteemed Biblical scholar Joseph Blenkinsopp “>Karel van der Toorn’s recent brilliant work suggests, probably a collection of scribes – decided that after this great contest, Elijah should be chased away, to Mount Horeb, and receive the still, small voice of the Lord.
That is the key point: faith comes from internal experience. That experience does not, pace William James, have to be solitary. Indeed, much of the most powerful religious experience comes in relationship with others, in the expectant waiting of communal silent prayer, and in traditional rituals where people feel close both to those around them as well as to generations long dead and those yet to be born.
Receiving God’s blessings does not create faith: billionaires who have gotten lucky often adopt Ayn Rand’s brutal atheism. Receiving God’s wrath does not destroy it: impoverished peasants, farmers, and workers often maintain the deepest piety. Faith comes from that part of the soul that can link to the divine – the potential prophet inside every one of us. With it, the rewards of the Spirit flow into us; without it, no miracle can mean anything. Little wonder, then, that the people's words at the end of the Haftarah — “the Lord alone is God!” — serve as the last words of prayer on Yom Kippur. God cannot atone for us; we must do it for ourselves. We atone through going inward, not through expecting an external demonstration of might.
The redactors of the Elijah tales understood this crucial, simple principle. Coming close to God needs not the triumph of the contest, but the intimacy of the still, small voice.
