This week’s Torah Portion, Ki Tisa, teaches us that sometimes good things can be hard to wait for. Moses and the Israelites have escaped from Egypt and made it to Mount Sinai. Forty days later, Moses finally comes down from the mountain with the two tablets, only to find that the Israelites grew impatient and built a Golden Calf! Frustrated, Moses smashes the tablets and berates the people for not having patience. All they had to do was wait and have faith, but sometimes waiting can be harder than we imagine.
As I look back on this story, I’ve always resonated with the frustration of Moses, seeing his people disobeying him. However, I thought for argument’s sake, I would think of some relevant examples of times when waiting was not as easy for me as anticipated.
For starters, we’ll go with the light-hearted, funny example. Last year, the bands Blink182 and Taylor Swift both had pre-sale ticket buying opportunities. As soon as the online queue opens, you are inserted into a digital waiting room, which reads in big letters “DO NOT REFRESH YOUR PAGE, YOU WILL LOSE YOUR PLACE IN LINE.” As soon as the time arrives for tickets to go on sale, you are supposed to be redirected to the ticket buying site. Sure enough, I built my own golden calf and clicked refresh in a frustrated panic…. only to be sent right to the back of the line!
I’ll take it to a much more serious place. Many of us have found ourselves in situations where we, or our loved ones, have had emergencies and needed to go to the hospital. In the heat of the moment, we are all demanding answers from the doctors. So many times, we are told that we need to wait things out, but it is easier said than done. In times of stress and times of need, we tend to lose our patience the most, which often leads to us not acting like ourselves. In the case of doctors, most are trained on how to treat patients and families with empathy during those times. Moses reacted angrily and smashed the tablets – perhaps he should have taken a lesson from some of our amazing doctors and first responders.
As we look at these two VERY different examples (and no, I did not end up with Taylor Swift tickets), we should use this week’s portion as an opportunity to give the people around us and ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We all have so much going on in our lives, and often the smallest things can draw irrational reactions. After the tablets were smashed, Moses then chose to fix his mistake by carving the Ten Commandments into two tablets on his own. God and Moses acknowledged that mistakes happen and damage can be done, but we all deserve second chances.
Shabbat Shalom.