Finding Patience In Our Search For God

When I was a young high school student I was in such a hurry to find my place in faith. I grew up in Mesa, AZ, not around many Jews and with rather nonreligious parents. I ran at the chance to learn about God in my own faith because I was so outnumbered by other faiths around me. This led me to Israel and to my five years of Yeshivah (all male orthodox Jewish school) after college and my experiment in the orthodox world. Many times I wondered how I had leapt to such an extreme transition in a short period of time – from my youth of eating pepperoni on my pizza and my love to BLTs to living in Israel, wearing primarily black clothes and refusing to shake hands with women.
Don’t get me wrong, I fondly recollect my time living in the orthodox world and I am grateful for the wonderful teachers I had and the experiences I went though. It made me a better Jew and a better person, but I often marvel at how the transition was so swift. When I look back at that time I realize that I was young and eager to experience God and thus not able to slow down and enjoy the experiences life had to offer. I see this now as an older rabbi reflecting on the zealotry of others in their pursuit for God and an eagerness to sometimes not look before one leaps into the pursuit of faith.
This brings me to this week’s section of the Torah, Parshat Ki Tesse. We read about the sin of the golden calf. Many rabbinical commentators wonder how such a people who experienced the great revelation of God at Mount Sinai could turn so quickly to idolatry. I believe the answer is also based on lack of patience in their pursuit of God. Exodus 32:1 begins, “When the people saw that Moses was so long coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, ‘Come make us a god who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.’” Our Torah portion describes the impatience of the people while Moses was on Mount Sinai. Doubt and fear assailed them and they gathered before Aaron demanding, “Up, make us a god who shall go before us.”
Failing to see Moses, the people in their desperation sought a visible god. It seems easier to put faith in tangibles, to find reassurance in what is visible. Looking at a physical rendering of what you want to worship is characteristic of many people. Most people have confidence only in what they see and thus they actualize everything on that physical connection. Judaism asks us to separate our senses from our pursuit of God and find our connections in our mind rather than a physical attribute.
This is a difficult concept, one that many faiths try to attain and fail at, but it is our duty as Jews to try and achieve this connection. The unseen commands of God are the keystones of our faith. Not so much what our ancestors saw of God, but what they heard from God was what was important. The children of Israel began our section of the Torah unable to achieve this lofty goal and so they sin by building a calf of gold and repeating past mistakes by copying the worship of their idolatrous neighbors. We can understand why so many turned in this direction but this section in our Torah tries to teach us patience in our pursuit of God so as to build a higher relationship.
It was the great Israeli poet Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg known as Achad Ha’Am who said that the most important commandment is “Thou shalt not make any graven images.” To represent God in any form is blasphemy for Jews, for God is the ideal. Too many people in our day fashion graven images in materialism. We put our trust in the things we possess to such an extent that frequently the things possess us and we lose sight of who we are. We labor to gather more and more personal possessions, yet we often fail to understand what these possessions are for and why we need them. In that blind striving for what is new we often forget where we are truly going. I look back at that young man so many years ago striving for the authentic without understanding why I was searching for something that seemed so foreign to me. I think I truly began to understand my pursuit of God when I stopped, slowed down and asked what was important in my life. Patience is the one thing we sometimes need to ask God to help us with and thus God will speak to us in our own time.
The sin of the golden calf is resolved with the building of the Mishkan, the tabernacle the Israelites build in the wilderness to worship God. Today, Jews have elevated the worship of God into the study of God’s word, trying to elevate the physical perceptions in our worship. God did not destroy the Jewish people when they sinned because he saw that they were impatient and thus he gave them patience and an ability to wait for God to speak to them when they are ready. That is the gift we learn in this week’s reading and a hope for all to take their time to think and learn in their pursuits of great endeavors.
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz is the spiritual leader Beth Judah Temple in Wildwood. He welcomes your comments at dvjewish@rof.net