D’var Torah: Ki Tissa 2026/5786 כי תשא

Eitan Slutzman, Grade 8

The most well known scene in my Parsha, Ki Tissa, is when Moshe is just coming down Mt. Sinai after 40 days of waiting for G-d to be finished making the tablets (which makes sense, because I guess downloading from the cloud took very long back then), and he sees that the Israelites are bowing down and dancing to a golden calf. He then throws down and smashes the tablets that G-d had just made.

You may think that when he saw what they were doing, he did this because he was so angry, and that he had good reason for doing this, but a close reading of Perek 32 shows that G-d had already told Moshe what the Israelites were doing and that was why G-d sent Moshe down the mountain. 

This is what happened in chapter 32:

In verse 7, G-d tells Moshe what is happening down at the camp. The Israelites, led by Aharon, made a calf, bowed to it, offered sacrifices, and said that the calf is their god who brought them out of the land of Egypt.

In verse 17, on his way down the mountain Moshe encounters his assistant, Joshua, and he tells Moshe that he hears war cries coming from the camp. 

In verse 18, Moshe replies that it isn’t the sound of war cries, but rather singing, so we know he has already started to hear what’s happening even before he can see it.

Finally, in verse 19, Moshe sees the calf and the dancing, and throws the tablets at the ground and they break.

So what caused Moshe to smash the tablets if he already knew about the golden calf at least a few hours ahead of time? Two famous Torah scholars had the same question. 

Ibn Ezra, whose full name was Avraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra, lived in Northeastern Spain during the late 11th and early 12th centuries. And Sforno, whose full name was Ovadiah ben Ya’akov Sforno, lived from 1475 to 1550 in Northern Italy. 

Sforno says that when G-d told Moshe about the golden calf, Moshe didn’t know what the state of Bnei Yisrael was. Maybe they were still anxious and waiting for him. But when he saw the celebration, he was angry at them for being happy about having a new god, and thought that they won't be able to do Teshuvah, or repent to G-d. In summary, Sforno thinks that Moshe became angry because he saw just how far the people had strayed from G-d’s word.

Ibn Ezra connects Moshe smashing the tablets to an emotion, also shown in the story of Pinchas later in the Torah. Pinchas had also seen acts of idolatry, but instead of smashing an object, he started stabbing people. G-d later rewards him for this action, which G-d attributes to a feeling of Kin’ah, or jealousy and passion. Seemingly, it is an emotion that makes people defensive of G-d. Ibn Ezra says that Moshe felt Kin’ah when he saw the golden calf, and that’s why he smashed the tablets even though he had already known what was happening. Most of us can relate that seeing something with your own eyes is different from someone else telling you about it, and it also can make you feel more emotional. An example of this is when friends in my class told me how cool Times Square was, but when I got there I realized that it was just a crowded mass of people.

If we read the story like Ibn Ezra, Moshe smashed the tablets because he was overcome with Kin’ah, so he didn’t make the choice to smash the tablets, it was an emotional response that made him smash the tablets.

From Sforno’s point of view, Moshe was also overcome by emotion, but this time it was grief and sadness about Bnei Yisrael not caring about their relationship with G-d, and that’s what made him smash the tablets.

Being able to see a story from multiple points of view really changes how complex the story actually is, letting you connect with it in many ways.

Shabbat shalom!