Carve New Ones

On Wednesday morning in Jerusalem, air raid sirens sounded at dawn. Missiles from Iran — the country that used to be called Persia, the country where the Megillah is set — were inbound. It was Shushan Purim, the day Jerusalem celebrates the holiday one day later than the rest of the world, because Jerusalem is a walled city, and the Jews of Shushan were walled-city Jews too, and they needed an extra day to fight.

The Home Front Command had banned public gatherings. People came anyway. They read the Megillah in shelters and in shuls and in living rooms. They dressed their kids in costumes. One boy in Beit Yisrael — a haredi neighborhood in central Jerusalem — posed for a photo in an IDF soldier costume. Yiddish techno echoed through the stone alleys of Mea Shearim. The light rail, closed since the war began on February 28th, reopened that morning for the first time. Families in matching costumes waited at the platform to ride into the city center.

This is a week after the "supreme leader" (why do these despots always have such grandiose titles?) of Iran was killed. The man who funded Hamas, who armed Hezbollah, who bankrolled a forty-plus-year campaign to wipe the Jewish state off the map — gone, on the first day of a war that started just before Purim.

The Megillah opens with a Persian court drunk on its own power. It ends with that power turned against itself. You'd have to work hard not to notice.

And then, the next Shabbat — this Shabbat — we read Ki Tisa.

Ki Tisa is the parsha where everything breaks. It contains the golden calf — the single worst moment in the Israelites' history as a people. Moses has been on Sinai for forty days. The people panic. They collect gold, melt it down, build an idol, and declare it their god. All of this happens barely forty days after the revelation at Sinai.

The same people who heard God's voice are now dancing around a statue.

Moses comes down the mountain carrying two stone tablets — the ones God carved, the ones containing the covenant — and sees what they've done.

וַֽיְהִ֗י כַּאֲשֶׁ֤ר קָרַב֙ אֶל־הַֽמַּחֲנֶ֔ה וַיַּ֥רְא אֶת־הָעֵ֖גֶל וּמְחֹלֹ֑ת וַיִּֽחַר־אַ֣ף מֹשֶׁ֗ה וַיַּשְׁלֵ֤ךְ מִיָּדָו֙ אֶת־הַלֻּחֹ֔ת וַיְשַׁבֵּ֥ר אֹתָ֖ם תַּ֥חַת הָהָֽר׃

As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, he became enraged; and he hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.

— Shemot 32:19

He shatters them. The holiest objects in existence, broken at the foot of the mountain where they were given. The covenant, in pieces on the ground.

And here is where the parsha does something that would be easy to miss if you weren't paying attention: it keeps going.

Moses pleads with God. God relents. And then God says — to the man who just shattered the tablets in fury, to the leader of a people who just betrayed everything they'd been given:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה פְּסׇל־לְךָ֛ שְׁנֵֽי־לֻחֹ֥ת אֲבָנִ֖ים כָּרִאשֹׁנִ֑ים וְכָתַבְתִּי֙ עַל־הַלֻּחֹ֔ת אֶ֨ת־הַדְּבָרִ֔ים אֲשֶׁ֥ר הָי֛וּ עַל־הַלֻּחֹ֥ת הָרִאשֹׁנִ֖ים אֲשֶׁ֥ר שִׁבַּֽרְתָּ׃

GOD said to Moses: “Carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered.

— Shemot 34:1

Carve new ones. The same words. A new set of stone. God doesn't pretend the first set wasn't broken. The verse says it plainly — asher shibarta, which you shattered. You broke them. Now carve new ones.

There's a teaching that both sets of tablets — the whole ones and the broken ones — were placed together in the Ark of the Covenant. The shattered fragments traveled with the people through the wilderness alongside the intact replacement. The broken set was never discarded.

The broken pieces, kept. Not repaired. Not glued back together. Not hidden — carried forward, in the same sacred container as the ones that replaced them.

This is also Shabbat Parah, one of the four special Shabbatot before Pesach.

The additional Torah reading describes the parah adumah, the red heifer — the ritual of purification.

The logic is strange: a perfectly red cow, without blemish, is burned to ash, and those ashes mixed with water can purify a person who has come into contact with death. The person performing the ritual becomes impure in the process. The rabbis called it the quintessential chok — a law whose reason we cannot fully understand. (Or understand at all).

Purification doesn't arrive clean. The process costs something.

On a coffee shop on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem this Wednesday, three women — Amber, Maya, and Vicky — kept their family business open through the sirens.

They've run You Need Coffee at that spot since 2011, through every war. Maya said the community keeps showing up. Vicky said they know their customers. There's a sense, she said, that they're all in this together.

That's a woman making espresso under missile fire because the people who come through her door every morning still need a place to sit. That's carrying the broken tablets and the whole ones in the same ark.

Ki Tisa is not a comfortable parsha. The golden calf is a betrayal. The shattering is a catastrophe. But the parsha doesn't end there. It ends with Moses coming down the mountain a second time, carrying the second set of tablets, his face glowing — karan or panav — and he doesn't even know it. The renewal happened, and the person it happened to couldn't see it on himself.

The parsha which contains the worst failure also contains the deepest repair.

A few days ago, the Jews of Jerusalem read the Megillah under sirens from Iran.

They dressed their children in costumes.

They gave matanot la'evyonim — gifts to the poor, one of the four obligations of Purim — on a street where a boy stood asking passersby for tzedakah.

They celebrated the downfall of a Persian tyrant while the spiritual successor to that tyrant was being buried.

The light rail ran. The coffee was hot. The techno was loud.

They carried the broken tablets and the whole ones in the same ark, and they danced.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham