Ki Tisa: When Fear Inverts Leadership
Transcript(from the video captions)
Let's pray. The Venus Shabbash Shamay, we bless and sanctify your name in the heights of heaven and right here. We thank you for Shabbat. We thank you for preparation and that you just give us everything that we need on time. I pray for your presence to be strong in all of us today. that we would focus on you and lift you up today in our midst. You are our God, our rock, and our savior in Yeshua's name. Well, Shabbat shalom everybody, >> and it's good to see all your faces today. We had such a great time at the Porum Festival and and now we're Great job everybody on that. That was amazing. [applause] It was amazing. Amazing. And now we turn our focus to Shabbat Parah. Today is Shabbat Parah. And what that means is that we we think about really the red hepher para aduma because we have on the other side of it this golden calf. But in reality what it does is it prepares us for Pesak because we think about purification. Now there's two types of purification. there would be ritual in the Bible and that's really the the para aduma but then there's also moral the moral side of it and as we move towards peso these are
themes I want us to keep in mind but right now let's think about what's going on in the world just for a moment because right now the world feels very tense we can feel it we can sense it the world is tense right now Israel which may be yesterday's news, but it's also today's news, is at war with Iran. The US is involved now. Iran has a chokeold on the Persian Gulf waterway, the the straight of Harmoose, which is very bad because gasoline prices are rising and tensions are rising. Anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist claims and voices are growing louder and louder. And every day the news cycle brings a new warning or a new interpretation or a new prediction of how things are going to go. What is going to happen next? And people are getting sucked into this right now. And whenever the world becomes uncertain, well, something begins to happen in the human heart and it's there and fear starts to creep in. In fact, fear starts to disort distort perception. Fear can make us impatient. Fear can push us to act irrationally before we understand what is really happening. Fear causes us to oversimplify
complex situations as well as overstating our own assumptions on what we believe. This is what happens. Fear leads to miscalculations. And one of the most insightful observations about fear I believe comes from an unexpected place. Yoda in Star Wars episode one, the Phantom Menace, he says this, "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering. Yes, it's pop culture fiction. I get it. I get it. But it captures something profoundly biblical here. Fear changes how we see things. Fear changes how we think about things. And fear changes how we act upon things. And sometimes, this is the worst part, fear can distort how we see God and how we understand God in our lives. It can make us forget. It can make us turn aside from the way that God has prepared and made for us. It can make some people become stiff necked, which means that they're incapable of returning. And this week's Torah portion, I believe, is so timely with what's going on in the world because it not only prepares us for Peso, but it brings us into the attention of what God wants to show us today. It shows us what happens
when fear engulfs and takes over a community. These are great lessons for us as we think about our community, but also our personal lives with God. The story of the golden calf doesn't actually begin with a rebellion. It begins with anxiety. And the Torah shows us what happens when anxiety spreads like wildfire throughout the entire community. And then three things have to happen for the community's survival. The first one comes collapse. The second is the need for purification. And then the third is a boundary reset that restores the covenant relationship, the taccoon, the repair. And this is the pattern that Torah gives us today as we look into it. What happens when a community falls into chaos? When anxiety becomes fear, we can invert the leadership through which God wishes to draw near. When we think about inverted rel leadership, what does that actually mean? Well, it means that we are turning it upside down in the wrong direction. God comes to us. He appoints a a mediator and then we receive and there there is service flowing in. It's concentric and intersecting and then we receive
that from God. But in reality, what happens when we invert the the leadership structure that God has g given us, we flip it around and the community tries to control the leader or the mediator because there's an attempt to manipulate what God is doing. And that happens today in the Torah portion. First, we have the collapse in Exodus 32:1. We'll start out vo Moshe. When the people saw that Moshe delayed, there's the word delay right there. The voesh coming down the mountain. What happened when they saw he delayed? What happened when anxiety came in? When fear arose amongst the community when Moshe didn't show up on time according to their own calculations? Moshe has gone up to Sinai. One day passes, five days pass, 10 days pass. 20 30 40 and he's still not down. What's going on? What is going on? He's not Where is he? Where is he at? The clouds still rest on the mountain, but Moshe has not descended yet. And the people begin to panic. They begin to panic. And inside the camp there is panic. Think of thousands of tents across the midbar. And the people begin to spread rumors throughout the camp. Has anyone
seen Moshe? Where is he? He's not coming back. He must be dead. He must have died. Rumors. And then this kiz mohee haish for this Moshe the man. The man the man for we do not know what has happened to him. What do you mean the man? The man Moshe. That's you. Oh. Oh, you mean the man that confronted Parro or the the man that stretched out his staff to open up the the sea of reeds. And now he's reduced to these words, the man. Oh, that man Moshe. Fear began to shrink their vision of their fearless leader. And when fear shrinks our vision, communities start to go into emergency mode. What they think is emergency, trying to solve the problems themselves. The loudest voices will rise up. Elohim, get up. Make us gods who will go before us. Oh, we're solving the problem now. We're making gods. Well, wait a minute. I thought God made us in his image. Now we're making God in the image of ourselves or a everything's becoming inverted now. We were supposed to be building a Mishkan for God, but now we're building a golden calf. And they don't even ask Aharon to go out in front to seek God to lead
for them. You would think he's the natural successor. No, they command him. Leadership is becoming inverted. Let's command him to do this now. Let's make him do what we say. If we can control the intermediary, we can manipulate the God we cannot see. And the Torah doesn't just say that Moshe was late. It says vosesh. That means he lingered beyond their expectations. And when expectations collapse, what happens is that anxiety escalates in our lives. Rabbi Caim Richmond has some excellent insights on this. He says that the tragedy of the golden calf is that the people began reshaping God into their own needs, whatever they needed. Instead of asking who is God, they began saying let me tell you how I need God to be. A God who answers my fears. A God of that takes care of my expectations. That moves upon my schedule. And the sages tell us that the golden calf shows up in every generation. And not only as an idol, but whenever we decide to reshape God around our own expectations of him, when we put limitations on God or attempt to make God walk according to our own ways and our own life,
it's an inversion. And then something else is happening here in the camp when we see it here now. Leadership is collapsing under the weight of this inversion. Family systems leader Jewish scholar of blessed memory Edwin H. Friedman observed that anxiety rises in a community and when it does rise people demand immediate solutions right away. They pressure the leaders that are in charge to react to it. And the most dangerous leader is the one that actually begins reacting to the anxiety of the crowd. And that's exactly what happens here. Aon sees what's happening and he starts to become anxious and then fear sets in with him. Instead of stabilizing the community as he should as a cohen, he actually steers the anxious system. Instead of leading the people, his anxiety escalates to fear. And then he decides to make a feast, just redirect it onto this so-called feast. He turns it into a ritual that God never commanded. As leadership becomes inverted, fear led Israel to create a leader they could manipulate and control. When anxiety becomes fear, we can invert the relationship through which God
desires to draw near to us. There's a structure that God has in place that he wants us to pay attention to. There's an order in place. There are roles that we have. There's a leadership structure and God has appointed that at Hari. Moshe stood before God though and pleaded their cause. They had corrupted themselves. And the last time the the world corrupted itself, what happened? God raised up another Zadic. Noak and he cleansed the earth and started again. And we start to see and hear echoes in the passage about the flood and how Torah begins to echo that with this word when God says leave me alone or let it rest. Leave me alone. Let it rest so that my anger may blaze against them. I will make a great nation out of you instead. In 32:10, that word for rest there, that's the same root root as Noak's name, Noah, which means rest or comfort. But Moshe is going to go in a different direction than Noah here. Voshei eloh Moshe implored Hashem his God and this is where he he moves into intercession. He refuses that offer. Not going to happen. He refuses to abandon the people the very people
that just rejected him as the mediator. Yes, they thought he was dead or whatever, but they're trying to replace him with a a molting calf. Nakmanades tells us that, and it's in the text, but Moshe refuses that if you destroy this people, oh God, your name will be tied to this destruction instead of redemption. This is the Na'vi, the prophet, moving into repair mode, reasoning with God with his finest hour. And the Torah tells us something remarkable that he appeals to the covenant, something Noak didn't have yet to Abraham, Yeitzk, and Yakov. And this Harot. Hashem relented. Relented. And there's that word again from the disaster he had spoken of of bringing upon his own people. He relents. The Hebrew word is nam, no mistake, means to relent, to reconsider. It can also mean regret. In the flood story, God regretted even making humanity because of the evil inclination amongst the people. But here the pattern totally reverses. Instead of re regretting creating Israel, God relents from destroying Israel. Why? Because Moshe, the man that God appointed, stood in the gap in the breach and repaired the
covenant. He was the only one, the scent one that could stand in that breach at the most critical hour. And he descends down the mountain now with the tablets in his hand. The tablets were the work of God. He sees the calf. He sees the dancing going on. And he shatters the lucot, the tablets on the mountain. When corruption sets in, sometimes we have to become broken for repair to recur to occur. Before tun sets in, Moshe moves to dismantling the idol by a cocket aeru. He took the calf that they had made. He burns it. He grinds it into dust. He scatters it upon the water. And he makes Israel drink it. What's going on here? The idol, let's just say the idols in our lives must be grounded down to dust, back to the earth again, right back to the dust of the earth and washed away completely. That is what purification looks like as we prepare for Pesak. That's the purification, the orat or we symbolize it sometimes by the washing of our hands to wash away the corruption of the world so that we can enter in and keep the Pesak festival. It is striking that this portion lands weeks before Pesak
right on Shabbat Parah because we have the ashes of the red heer that resemble this entire process. The ashes of the red hepher mixed with the water of purification which would be the ritual in those days of cleansing one from ritual impurity corpse defilement or the touching of of a corpse or a discharge. But there's a moral side to this as well. And sometimes we want to think of both because they're both relevant. You have the ash, you have the water, you have the cleansing power of God. Before corrupt, before redemption can continue, the corruption must be washed away completely in our lives. That's what Moshe reminded Hashem if he needed to be reminded. That's what we need to be reminded of as we step into Pesak.
But Moshe is not finished yet. He stands before the camp and he says this, "Whoever is for Hashem, come to me." You see, his brother Aaron collapsed in fear. So now the the Na'vi has to step in. The role of the Cohen is to keep the order. If the if the Cohen if the priest can't keep the order, the prophet has to step in and bring the repair. And he says, "Come forward." And who comes forward? The Levites. The Levine come forward. And at that moment, the Levites become the guardians of the sacred order. They assume their role. And we learned that communities cannot survive chaos without holding sacred boundaries. Leadership alone cannot enforce them. We have to have a congregation of of soldiers that know who we are and that enforce them together. This is what the Torah is teaching us today. It requires a people that protect the covenant. The Levites became the gatekeepers. When I think of gates, I think of us. I think of of share shalom as being the gates of peace. And we are the gatekeepers of that, especially the Levites among us. Right? An order begins to return as the Torah tells us where fear inverted
leadership. Moshe restores the order through which God draws near. He's a restorer of the breach, the Na'vi. And to reject Moshe was to reject God himself. Centuries later, the anxiety levels return. This time not in the Midbar but in Jerusalem. Israel lives under Roman occupation. The temple leaders carry a constant burden, maintain a soul called order and prevent unrest. But there's corruption among the Zadakim, the Sadducees and also the Udoi, the Judea leaders there. And there a rabbi appears. Not just a man. He hears what's going on. He listens intently. He doesn't react right away. He heals a paralytic on Shabbat during a festival. And the crowds gather to see what he's doing. The leaders become alarmed. They start to conspire because of what he says next. Especially he speaks of God as his father. And the debate now turns legal as a Udoi. The Judeans approach him. Who sent you? This is Shalia language. This is scent agent language. Who gave you this authority? Remember Moshe was the scent one. who gave you this authority as if he's merely some man, some rabbi. And Yeshua says this, "The Father who
sent me has himself testified about me, but you do not trust the one he sent." Twice the word sent is used. The first in the Greek is commissioned. The second is agent sent. That's in John 5:37-38. And then he says something else astonishing. Do not think that I will accuse you before the father. The one who accuses you is Moshe. The one in whom you have put your hope. Wait a minute here. You didn't put your hope in him back at the golden calf though. But now you are. Okay. For if you believe Moshe, you would actually believe me because he wrote about me. That's in 45 and 46. But at Sinai, the Torah tells us, "We tried to replace Moshe when he thought he wasn't coming back, that he abandoned us or that he had died. And now they're appealing to Moshe." How ironic. But the one that Moshe pointed to stands before them. And now they reject him. And we see a cycle repeating itself. At Cinai, Moshe turned away divine divine wrath. But the ones standing before them in the temple court would go further still, not only to speak and intercede on behalf of the people, but to lay his life down, to give his life
for the people for the ultimate redemption and the ultimate cleansing and purification, which is really the symbolic the symbolism of the of the hepher. And now the pattern across the centuries becomes very clear. When anxiety becomes fear, we can invert the leadership through which God desires to draw near. These Judans, they were part of the temple leadership. They were leaders, all right? But the one standing before them was the agent of God. He was the divine Messiah who stood higher authority above them, the true mediator between God and man. And yet they were inverting that.
So in conclusion, the golden calf began with fear and fear led Israel to create a leader they could control. But the leader they doubted was the one who actually saved them. The one they doubted was the one who saved them. Just like we see in the Besser. And the lesson remains for every generation here and now at at Sinai anxiety drove the people to replace Moshe. Centuries later, they rejected the one whom Moshe wrote about, the son of God sent to cleanse them and all of us from all defilement, whether ritual and especially moral. Yet God continues to draw near through his divine son and through appointed leaders today. Commu communities survive moments of uncertainty not by creating leaders that they can control and manipulate but by recognizing the one through whom God wishes to draw near and that one is Yeshua. Let's pray. A shabbash we we bless and sanctify your name as you sanctify us today through your ruakodesh your holy spirit that gives us light and power in you. We thank you for that. We pray that we would use that for the good and that we would have order and that we would understand servant
leadership the right way as you have given us. and we call on your name today to help us in time of trouble and to protect us and strengthen us as a community. Touch our hearts now as we prepare for Pesak in Yeshua's name. Shabbash shalom.