Skye Nelson - Dvar Torah

Hi Everyone, welcome to my B M ceremony. Thank you so much for being here.

My portion of the Torah is found in Exodus, which is the second book of the 5 books of Moses. Over the past few weeks I have been studying with Rabbi Greg and learning about my Torah portion. I had to focus on one aspect and give my interpretation of how I understood it.

For a quick summary it begins with Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt and travelling all the way across the desert until they came to Mount Sinai.

It is at Mount Sinai where Moses is called by God to walk to the top of the Mountain. Moses goes and leaves the People in the hands of his trusted and beloved brother Aaron.

However when Moses does not return for 40 days and 40 nights, the Jews become restless and impatient. They start causing havoc. Their strong faith in Moses vanishes with him gone. So they go to Aaron, Moses brother and tell him to build an idol so they can have something to pray to.

Aaron being a priest and being a man who works with people, sees that with Moses gone the people need to put their faith into something they can see. And so he takes all their jewellery and makes a golden calf.

On top of Mount Sinai, Moses receives the 10 Commandments from G-d. However, when G-d sees the people below celebrating with their golden calf, he becomes enraged and says to Moses “I can wipe out all the Jews and create a new faithful nation”. Fortunately, Moses argues against it and G-d was willing to give them another chance.

Some people say that G-d was testing Moses to check whether he was a good and faithful leader, but when Moses came down the mountain and saw all the worshipping and celebrating, he too became furious and smashed the 10 commandments and threw the Golden Calf into the fire.

In Moses’ situation having grown up in a palace, I can imagine that when you give an order no one questions you twice. He probably didn’t  imagine that they would doubt his word or loose faith so easily in G-d.

Then Moses went to his brother Aaron and asked what became of him to support this? Aaron’s response was that the people needed something to pray to and were going to get up to even worse mischief.

This is where it becomes really interesting and quite gruesome. Moses tells the Jews whoever follows and will be devoted to G-d come stand with me. All the Levis stood with Moses.

And then Moses did the unthinkable and told the Levis to slay all the men and men’s neighbour that did not stand with G-d. Moses acted not only with anger, but also in a way that led to bloodshed. He made a massive decision of who he was going to lead into the Promised Land.

It is amazing how Aaron and Moses, two brothers connected by blood and DNA can have such different ways of sorting something out.

Moses on the one hand deciding that he cannot lead these people forward if they doubt their faith in G-d . Whilst Aaron on the other hand, if he was like his brother could have behaved by bringing punishment when the people asked him to build the golden calf, which immediately was showing their lack of trust and faith, yet instead he gave them what they wanted and went along with it to avoid worse behaviour.

In a way Aaron was more compassionate, but he also understood the human condition well and how people think and behave.

It reminds me of my sister and me when we were younger.

Sometimes we would fight and I would use probably the more Moses way by reacting with violence, whilst my sister would be more like Aaron and use logic. And now that I think about it, she was probably the cleverer one. She knew how to annoy me with just three words.

With age I have become a lot more tolerant and patient and don’t hold my anger or hold on otherwise. If I still did, I might do something I would regret.

Moses and Aaron had a very different way of handling the behaviour of the Israelites.

If they both thought the same, treated people the same and dealt with everything in the same way, would they have even made it through the desert to the Promised Land?

Without a Moses and an Aaron, two different styles of leadership, they might not have made it and I wouldn’t even be here having my Bat Mitzvah today.

Now that I am becoming a Jewish adult I realise that we all function differently.

From my younger self it was a little, but now I can see its a lot more than that.

And so we humans have learnt to use all of our different amazing minds and create all these amazing things we have with us today that we wouldn’t have if we all thought the same way.

Shabbat Shalom everyone.