Can You Go Home Again? Making Mistakes. Torah Portion of the Week: Ki Tissa

I an composing this blog in what was my bedroom in my parents' home in rainy (how ironic for a vacation) Tustin, California.  My wife and kids and I just finished eating my mother's wonderful lokshen and chicken soup. While sitting at my father's computer, at what is now my father's home office, I just read an email from my childhood friend, from the age of four, referring me to my beloved elementary school teacher from the fourth grade, who was the only friend to attend my bar mitzvah.  And tomorrow evening, I am traveling to the home of an old high school friend, who has gathered fellow Tustin High School alumni to celebrate the memory of his beloved mother, Ingrid, who would have been 83.  So can you go home again? No, but with effort, you can celebrate and preserve relationships which helped make us who we are....with a little help from FaceBook.

So this week's Torah portion, from the Book of Exodus, centers around the heresy of the Golden Calf.  It marks the first of many slip-ups of the Israelites as they made their way through the desert.  First of all, what an honest accounting the Hebrew Scripture must be if it goes out it way to document the follies and foibles of its main protagonists, the Children of Israel!  But even more then that, how amazing it is that the head authority for the religion, Aaron, the High Priest, is the prime shaker and mover of the Golden Calf incident.  Afterall, it was Aaron who actively collected the gold needed to make the statue that got the people in trouble.

Yet it is this same Aaron, the High Priest, ha Cohen ha Gadol, who becomes the main intermediary between the worshipper, bringing his or her sacrifice to the alter, and the Almighty.  On first blush, one might say that Aaron is the absolute last person who should be facilitating the sacrifices.  Yet on closer look, Aaron is THE best person for the job. Who, more than Aaron, knows from sin and failing?  The people could have never gone to Moses with their sins: not Moses, up in the clouds with God, deep in the recesses of the Tent of the Meeting, with God.  Aaron, on the other hand, was an equal with the peopl in sinning.  The people could relate to him.  One might go so far as to say that it was precisely the Golden Calf heresy that made Aaron perfect for his job. 

Instead of running away from our mistakes, this week's Torah portion suggests that our mistakes help shape us and make us who we are.  That's Lesson Number One to take away from the portion.  Lesson Two is this:  If God, the Holy One, Blessed be He, can forgive Aaron and let him reach his full potential, then we, too, should be able to forgive our fellow their mistakes and allow them to reach their full potential. 

May we walk away from this week's Torah portion able to embrace our mistakes and see how they shape us, and also be more magnanimous when faced with the mistakes of others.