Parshah Commentary

In late November 2023, I stared at photos of Israeli soldiers preparing for Chanukah by erecting a 15-foot tall menorah in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. Horrified but unsure how to respond, I texted myself the link. I began sending myself every instance I saw of Jewish religious ritual in Gaza. Soon I was watching as soldiers read the megillah for Purim—and in one case, set off explosives to fulfill the custom of drowning out Haman’s name. As Passover approached, I read about seders celebrated across the Strip and about a new halachic work published to guide deployed soldiers in their observance of the holiday. On Lag BaOmer, when it is customary to light bonfires, I watched as soldiers sang a traditional holiday song while burning down Palestinian homes.

As the year went on, the awful examples continued to accumulate. On Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple and the exile and homelessness that followed, I watched soldiers chant Eicha as a thousand Israelis gathered at Gaza’s border to read the traditional scroll as part of a call for renewed Israeli settlement in Gaza, apparently oblivious to the irony. In the lead-up to the High Holidays, I watched soldiers blow the shofar and do kapparot, a pre-Yom Kippur atonement ritual, in Rafah (in another case, soldiers altered the ritual’s words while directing explosives toward Lebanon). Not long after, I watched soldiers dancing joyfully at the end of Yom Kippur in Gaza and then started seeing pictures of sukkahs built in Gaza, as well as in Lebanon. Soon enough, it was Chanukah again, and I watched as soldiers burned Palestinian homes while singing about lighting candles—which they lit in the Netzarim Corridor, Rafah, Jabalya, Beit Hanoun, Zeitoun, and elsewhere across Gaza, as well in Lebanon and Syria. Throughout this all, I saw documentation of Israeli soldiers setting up makeshift synagogues in Gaza and Lebanon and performing countless other Jewish rituals. And I watched, too, as soldiers recited the Shema before blowing up a mosque and studied Torah amidst Gaza’s rubble.

Eventually, I converted my dossier of religious perversions from an endless text thread to a Google doc—an ongoing record that now spans many pages, single-spaced. Why have I kept this obsessive catalog? I have told myself that it’s for journalistic reasons, that there will one day be something to say about how religion has been drafted into the service of brutality. But I know that it’s also personal: that I’m morbidly captivated—and tormented—by seeing the rituals that are most dear to me being performed in the context of such violent abuse. It feels like a necessary, if insufficient, act of witnessing, to anchor myself in the terrible specificity of the misuse of our tradition.

I thought of my document when I revisited Moses’s response to witnessing the Israelites’ idolatrous worship of the Golden Calf in this week’s parshah, Ki Tissa. As I read about Moses angrily smashing the Ten Commandments, which he had just received from God on Mount Sinai, I immediately sympathized with his irate outburst—with the rage, despair, and grief our fellow Jews can inspire in us. My appreciation of Moses’s act has an ancient precedent: While the rabbis debated why Moses broke the sacred tablets entrusted to him, and some criticized or lamented his behavior, others lauded his conduct. One sage, Reish Lakish, draws on the sonic similarity between the word “that” (asher) in the phrase “that you broke” and the first word of an idiom meaning “congratulations” or “way to go” (yasher koach) to imagine God extolling Moses. Later rabbis extended this appreciation for brokenness beyond Moses himself. The 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas, drawing on the Zohar’s idea that a person’s heart parallels the Ark, as well as the Talmudic assertion that the shattered first tablets were kept inside the Ark along with the unbroken second tablets, argues that “to represent the shards of the tablets, one’s heart must also be broken and downtrodden, in order to be prepared for receiving the divine presence, as God’s presence resides only in broken vessels.”

I find some solace in this rabbinic esteem for brokenness. If the divine presence dwells in broken hearts, then God stands not with the soldiers who proudly pray amidst the ruin they have wrought but rather with those of us who are distraught watching this happen. And if Moses’s transgression born of anger can become part of our tradition, our ire at those corrupting that same tradition can likewise be carried within it. But how might we carry this brokenness responsibly? It is helpful to consider how the Bible situates Moses’s breaking of the tablets within a wider context of destruction, reflection, sorrow, and repair: The smashing, according to Rashi, occurred on the 17th of Tammuz—a date that later became one of repeated calamity for the Jewish people—and God delivers the second set of tablets on the 10th of Tishrei, the date of Yom Kippur.

Surprisingly, some Kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions liken that solemn holiday to the merry one we celebrate today: Purim. (Some even go so far as to understand Yom Kippur as a lesser version of Purim.) This suggests that what we usually conceive of as a festival of light-hearted revelry holds the potential for the serious work of teshuva. In this light, Purim might offer a lesson about the meaning of my record of Jewish ritual in Gaza—a record which I sadly added to today. The Book of Esther, more than any other book in the Hebrew Bible, which largely depicts a primarily oral society, is replete with references to writing, textuality, and documentation. And notably, every moment of writing in the megillah spurs significant upheavals—most importantly, King Achashverosh’s request to be read the “book of remembrances” on a sleepless night, prompting him to remember Mordechai’s deeds that had led to the king’s own salvation, which ultimately saves the Jewish people. Any contemporary “book of remembrances” recounting Jewish deeds would provide a much grimmer account; today we are not saviors but perpetrators. But perhaps documentation is the necessary first step toward a Purim-esque reversal. Indeed, after smashing the first tablets but before receiving the second tablets in our parshah, Moses asks God to “erase me from the record which You have written”—that is, to remove Moses himself from the Torah’s accounts, if God refuses to forgive the Israelites for the sin of the Golden Calf. Repentance, it seems, requires remaining within the record, however sullied it may be.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.