Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11-34:35) March 6, 2021/22 Adar 5781

A month ago, we read about God proclaiming the Ten Commandments to the assembled Israelites. But what we read was just that, the voice of God speaking the words of the Commandments. The familiar scene of Moses descending Mount Sinai with the tablets only appears in this week's parashah. As Moses is making his way down to the camp, he hears celebration and singing. When he arrives at the base of the mountain, he finds the Israelites worshiping a golden calf that Aaron had made for them. Moses confronts his older brother about what is going on, and Aaron tells him, "You must realize that the people have bad tendencies. They said to me, 'Make an oracle to lead us, since we do not know what happened to Moses, the man who took us out of Egypt.'" Moses understands from this that Aaron had actually kept the most ardent of the mob from going wild. Not everybody in the camp was really invested in replacing God, but enough were that it didn't matter.

Sacha Baron Cohen is an actor and comedian who has made a name for himself by playing characters designed to draw a reaction from the unsuspecting public. Perhaps the most famous of these characters is "Kazakh" journalist Borat Sagdiyev. A virulent antisemite, Borat made headlines in 2004 when he led a Tuscon, AZ bar in a chorus of "throw the Jew down the well" to raucous applause and enthusiasm. Baron Cohen explained the idea of the song (and the whole character) by citing a Holocaust historian, Ian Kershaw, whose work Baron Cohen had studied at Cambridge, who described the metaphorical road to Auschwitz as "built by hate but paved by indifference." It was not necessary for everybody in 1920s and 30's Germany to be an ardent antisemite to bring about the Third Reich. Even if people harbored prejudice against Jews, they didn't have to believe that they ought to be exterminated in order for the Final Solution to go forward. All that was needed was for enough people to hate the Jews and a critical mass to be willing to go along with the program. The same is true for the Golden Calf.

Many, perhaps even most, of the Israelite camp were not actively looking for a new deity. On the other hand, everyone, even the most trusting in God, was nervous. Moses had disappeared up a mountain, and it wasn't clear when or if he would return. The faction which was really committed to deposing Moses's leadership and that of God himself was likely a very small number relative to the entire population. But that was enough because all it took was a small number to incite the masses, which were mostly apathetic, if susceptible to having their fears and concerns preyed upon, and the rest of the camp was swept up in the enthusiasm of the mob. It is far easier to just go with the flow. Stopping and saying "no, this is not right" is much harder. Even if we know that what the rest of the group is doing is wrong, nobody wants to be the one to speak up because that just opens us up to being ostracized from the group. So we (at best) keep silent, and we pretend not to notice.

On Tuesday, May 12, 1992, 21-year-old Adnan al-Afandi, a Palestinian youth from the Dheisheh refugee camp, attacked a group of Israeli teenagers near Mahaneh Yehudah in Jerusalem, wounding two. A mob chased after him and soon had him cornered in a parking lot, where they began beating him, intending to seek vigilante justice. A Haredi woman, Bella Freund, happened to be passing by, and when she saw what was happening, pushed her way through the crowd and laid for nearly half an hour on top of al-Afandi, shielding him with her body until the police could arrive, a decision which propelled her to headlines around the world. She and her children received death threats over her actions, but she explained that, as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, she could not ignore the injustice being perpetrated, comparing the situation to the residents of Oświęcim, Poland claiming ignorance of the atrocities being perpetrated in the Auschwitz death camp within their town. Nearly a decade later, Israeli hip hop/funk band Hadag Nahash released a song about the event, in which singer Shaanan Street sings: 

I wonder what I would have done in her place, had I been walking by at that very moment. I'm sure I wouldn't have joined in the kicking, but truthfully, I don't think I would have had the strength to act like her - I'd more likely just run away, and maybe find a police officer or something. 

If we don't confront hatred, extremism, and violence when we see it, if we are willfully ignorant of it, we end up complicit when the mild turns to severe, and it becomes much more difficult and nearly impossible to stop it once the momentum builds up. Anyone who has had experience with snow knows that if you clear your driveway as the snow is coming down, it is much more manageable than trying to shovel it after the snowfall is over, and there's a foot and a half piled up. If we see something that seems wrong to us, we cannot just ignore it, lest we find ourselves caught up in the mob