Photo courtesy of Chabad.org
A WEEKLY TORAH THOUGHT BY RABBI MORDY
This week’s Parsha (Eikev) continues Moses’s recapping to the Jewish people. One event mentioned, difficult as it may have been, was the sin of the Golden Calf and how it impacted another event, the Ten Commandments that Moses was carrying down the mountain at the same time. We treat this incident as one of the most significant in Moses’s “career,” and where his true leadership qualities shone. When Moses was telling it over however, he uses a strange term; he tells the Jewish people that upon seeing the sight of their sinning, he breaks the tablets “before your eyes.” Why the need to explain this incident as having happened before their eyes? What does this teach us? Moses is showing his disciples that regardless of how they came to cope with their “new normal” – after all, the tablets that replaced the originals contained more breadth and scope than the first – but there is more to this story. You see, while this was obviously an awful event, it was merely “before your eyes,” on the surface. But there exists, in some spiritual capacity, a world in which the tablets remained whole. As I often mention, there will come a time when all will be known and we will understand the Divine reasoning for all the events, difficult as they may be, that have taken place in the world. And yet, on some spiritual level, that “wholeness” already exists. There is a “parallel universe” in which these tragic events, and the many that followed throughout history, did not even happen but merely did so “before your eyes,” as we see it with the current lens of our limited world. May we soon see the time when can truly see the good in all events and may we have a Shabbat Shalom, a Shabbos of peace. Good Shabbos!