"Original Sin" 5th March 2010

            This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa, contains the familiar episode of the Golden Calf.  While Moses was up on Mt. Sinai encountering God face-to-face, the people below grew increasingly restless.  They began to lose hope and faith and rebelled against Aaron, the second in command.  Having just left Egypt where Pharaoh ruled over them, they again yearned for a deity they could see and touch.  So they gathered together their scrap gold and silver and built a visible statue they could worship.
            For later generations who read this story, the actions of the people were abhorrent, and they became a paradigm for collective punishment.  The generation who were freed from Egypt and later built the Golden Calf was not the generation that entered the Promised Land.  The reason the Israelites had to wander through the wilderness for 40 years was so that the first generation could die off.  Later authorities attached and attributed all the tragedy that befell the Jewish people back to the Golden Calf episode.  The reason the two Jerusalem Temples were destroyed was because the people sinned.  The reason for discrimination and persecution was because the people sinned.  I have even heard some people try to excuse the actions of the Nazis by saying that the Holocaust happened because the Jews sinned by assimilating and inter-marrying.
            This of course is nonsense.  Jews do not believe in original sin, whether it be the actions of Adam and Eve, or the actions of the Israelites at the foot of Sinai.  Each person is responsible for their own actions and each person’s merits or shortcomings are judged accordingly.  This is our theology today, and yet we have struggled with this question and these issues for centuries.
            Also in our Torah portion this week is a list of God’s 13 attributes.  Among them is the notion that God visits the iniquities of the father upon the third and fourth generation.  This would seem to imply that later generations are punished for the sins of earlier generations.  Later in the Torah and in other biblical books, this idea was discounted and modified, and yet even today we know that our actions do affect those who come after us, both positively and negatively.
            Right now, we are building the Asa Center for Lifelong Jewish Learning.  The retaining walls are going up at this very moment and next week, the footings for the actual building will be dug.  Our new building will be a positive force for many generations to come.
            But it also works the other way.  When tragedy strikes a family, we know that the effects can be long lasting, even across generations.  We know that certain genetic traits are passed down through DNA and certain tendencies and diseases also plague children and grandchildren.  So the idea that we are one, inclusive and exclusive human unit is simply untrue.  And this, I think, is what the Torah was trying to get at with the Golden Calf story and the later statement.  As I have written before, everything we do matters.
            Tonight at Temple is our family Shabbat service with birthday and anniversary blessings for March.  As always, the service will be carried live over the Internet at www.templebethtikvah.com (click on Live Services).  Tomorrow, Torah Study and religious school at 9:00 AM and our musically infused Intergenerational Shabbat morning service at 10:00 AM.  If you are interested in our upcoming trip to Israel in November, we will have an informational meeting tomorrow at 11:30 AM.

Kenneth Milhander