Tag Archives: Golden Calf

Tzav, Leviticus 6:1-8:36

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/tzav

Tzav 5774

By Ian Gamse

“So did Aaron and his sons, all the things which God had commanded by the hand of Moses.” (Vayikra, Leviticus 8:36)

The parasha ends with the account of the seven days during which the mishkan (the “tabernacle”) was dedicated – the culmination of six months of donations and crafstmanship. The eighth day will be the first day of Nisan, a new year and a new phase in the Israelites’ relationship with God. Rashi reads this final verse entirely positively: it comes to praise Aaron and his sons who have not deviated one iota from the instructions they were given.

Ramban, however, notices an oddity in the wording. The phrase that has been repeated many times in the account of the construction of the mishkan is “ka-asher tsivva”; here we have “asher tsivva”. The missing kaf makes a difference: whereas before everything had been done “just as God had commanded”, here it is merely “which God had commanded”. He accounts for the difference by reading forwards: on the next day, the eighth day, Aaron’s two elder sons will do something that they had not been commanded, bringing “strange fire” into the sanctuary and turning celebration into tragedy.

But what does he mean by making this comment at this stage? Presumably that the lapse was predictable and its cause already discernible – so we must ask what that cause was and why Aaron and his sons are appointed priests despite an apparent flaw.

I would like to suggest that what lies behind Ramban’s comment is an essential difference between Moses on the one hand and Aaron and his sons on the other. Moses – his head literally in the clouds – is able to exactly as God has commanded, with no interruption, no interference. The constant repetition of the phrase “just as God had commanded” is applied to things that Moses does himself and to the work done under his supervision. But the end of the seven days of dedicating the mishkan marks a transition: the mishkan moves from the world of Moses to the world of Aaron – a world that is fallible – a world in which the mishkan is not just an ever-present reminder of the immanence of God but an ever-present reminder of the golden calf, for which it atones.

Fallibility, however, may not be bad. The Kotsker rebbe cites Midrash Tanchuma: “Said the Holy One, blessed be He: if I wanted an offering, should I not instruct the angel Michael to offer Me an offering? But from whom do I ask? From Israel.” If what God wants is specific actions, says the Kotsker, He should ask the angels – beings without free choice who perform His will exactly. Instead, God instructs us, humans, who must put some effort into deciding to do what is required of us – and it’s that effort which is what God is looking for, even though it comes at the price of possible failure.

So perhaps we can read the Ramban’s words not as a critique of Aaron and his sons but as a celebration of the introduction of human fallibility, and thus human potential, into the pristine, sterile structure.

Gamse, Ian. "Tzav 5774." Limmud on One Leg. (Viewed on March 15, 2014). http://limmud.org/publications/limmudononeleg/5774/tzav/

On Not Trying to Be What You Are Not

By Rabbi Jonathon Sacks

The great leaders know their own limits. They do not try to do it all themselves. They build teams. They create space for people who are strong where they are weak. They understand the importance of checks and balances and the separation of powers. They surround themselves with people who are different from them. They understand the danger of concentrating all power in a single individual. But learning your limits, knowing there are things you cannot do – even things you cannot be – can be a painful experience. Sometimes it involved an emotional crisis.

The Torah contains four fascinating accounts of such moments. What links them is not words but music. From quite early on in Jewish history, the Torah was sung, not just read. Moses at the end of his life calls the Torah a song. Different traditions grew up in Israel and Babylon, and from around the tenth century onward the chant began to be systematized in the form of the musical notations known as taamei ha-mikra, cantillation signs, devised by the Tiberian Masoretes (guardians of Judaism’s sacred texts). One very rare note, known as a shalshelet (“chain”), appears in the Torah four times only. Each time it is a sign of existential crisis. Three instances are in Bereishit. The fourth is in our parsha. As we will see, the fourth is about leadership. In a broad sense, the other three are as well.

The first instance occurs in the story of Lot. Lot had separated from his uncle Abraham and settled in Sodom. There he had assimilated into the local population. His daughters had married local men. He himself sat in the city gate, a sign that he had been made a judge. Then two visitors came to tell him to leave. God was about to destroy the city. Yet Lot hesitates, and above the word for “hesitates” –vayitmahmah – is a shalshelet. (Genesis 19: 16). He is torn, conflicted. He senses that the visitors are right. The city is indeed about to be destroyed. But he has invested his whole future in the new identity he has been carving out for himself and his daughters. Had the angels not seized him and taken him to safety he would have delayed until it was too late.

The second occurs when Abraham asks his servant – traditionally identified as Eliezer – to find a wife for Isaac his son. The commentators suggest that he felt a profound ambivalence about his mission. Were Isaac not to marry and have children, Abraham’s estate would eventually pass to Eliezer or his descendants. Abraham had already said so before Isaac was born: “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” (Genesis 15: 2). If Eliezer succeeded in his mission, bringing back a wife for Isaac, and if the couple had children, then his chances of one day acquiring Abraham’s wealth would disappear completely. Two instincts warred within him: loyalty to Abraham and personal ambition. Loyalty won, but not without a deep struggle. Hence the shalshelet (Genesis 24: 12).

The third brings us to Egypt and the life of Joseph. Sold by his brothers as a slave, he is now working in the house of an eminent Egyptian, Potiphar. Left alone in the house with his master’s wife, he finds himself the object of her desire. He is handsome. She wants him to sleep with her. He refuses. To do such a thing, he says, would be to betray his master, her husband. It would be a sin against God. Yet over “he refused” is a shalshelet, (Genesis 39: 8) indicating – as some rabbinic sources and mediaeval commentaries suggest – that he did so at the cost of considerable effort. He nearly succumbed. This was more than the usual conflict between sin and temptation. It was a conflict of identity. Recall that Joseph was now living in, for him, a new and strange land. His brothers had rejected him. They had made it clear that they did not want him as part of their family. Why then should he not, in Egypt, do as the Egyptians do? Why not yield to his master’s wife if that is what she wanted? The question for Joseph was not just, “Is this right?” but also, “Am I an Egyptian or a Jew?”

All three episodes are about inner conflict, and all three are about identity. There are times when each of us has to decide, not just “What shall I do?” but “What kind of person shall I be?” That is particularly fateful in the case of a leader, which brings us to episode four, this time about Moses.

After the sin of the golden calf Moses had at God’s command instructed the Israelites to build a sanctuary which would be, in effect, a permanent symbolic home of God in the midst of the people. By now the work is complete and all that remains is for Moses to induct his brother Aaron and his sons into office. He robes Aaron with the special garments of the high priest, anoints him with oil, and performs the various sacrifices appropriate to the occasion. Over the word vayishchat, “and he slaughtered [the sacrificial ram]” (Leviticus 8: 23) there is a shalshelet. By now we know that this means there was an internal struggle in Moses’ mind. But what was it? There is not the slightest sign in the text that suggests that he was undergoing a crisis.

Yet a moment’s thought makes it clear what Moses’ inner turmoil was about. Until now he had led the Jewish people. Aaron his older brother had assisted him, accompanying him on his missions to Pharaoh, acting as his spokesman, aide and second-in-command. Now, however, Aaron was about to undertake a new leadership role in his own right. No longer would he be a shadow of Moses. He would do what Moses himself could not. He would preside over the daily offerings in the tabernacle. He would mediate the avodah, the Israelites’ sacred service to God. Once a year on Yom Kippur he would perform the service that would secure atonement for the people from its sins. No longer in Moses’ shadow, Aaron was about to become the one kind of leader Moses was not destined to be: a High Priest.

The Talmud adds a further dimension to the poignancy of the moment. At the burning bush, Moses had repeatedly resisted God’s call to lead the people. Eventually God told him that Aaron would go with him, helping him speak (Ex. 4: 14-16). The Talmud says that at that moment Moses lost the chance to be a priest. “Originally [said God] I had intended that you would be the priest and Aaron your brother would be a Levite. Now he will be the priest and you will be a Levite.”

That is Moses’ inner struggle, conveyed by the shalshelet. He is about to induct his brother into an office he himself will never hold. Things might have been otherwise – but life is not lived in the world of “might have been.” He surely feels joy for his brother, but he cannot altogether avoid a sense of loss. Perhaps he already senses what he will later discover, that though he was the prophet and liberator, Aaron will have a privilege Moses will be denied, namely, seeing his children and their descendants inherit his role. The son of a priest is a priest. The son of a prophet is rarely a prophet.

What all four stories tell us is that there comes a time for each of us when we must make an ultimate decision as to who we are. It is a moment of existential truth. Lot is a Hebrew, not a citizen of Sodom. Eliezer is Abraham’s servant, not his heir. Joseph is Jacob’s son, not an Egyptian of easy-going morals. Moses is a prophet not a priest. To say Yes to who we are we have to have the courage to say No to who we are not. There is pain and conflict involved. That is the meaning of the shalshelet. But we emerge less conflicted than we were before.

This applies especially to leaders, which is why the case of Moses in our parsha is so important. There were things Moses was not destined to do. He would not become a priest. That task fell to Aaron. He would not lead the people across the Jordan. That was Joshua’s role. Moses had to accept both facts with good grace if he was to be honest with himself. And great leaders must be honest with themselves if they are to be honest with those they lead.

A leader should never try to be all things to all people. A leader should be content to be what he or she is. A leader must have the strength to know what he cannot be if he is to have the courage to be himself.

Sacks, Jonathon. "On Not Trying to Be What You Are Not." Rabbi Sacks on Parsha, Orthodox Union. (Viewed on March 14, 2014). http://www.ou.org/torah/parsha/rabbi-sacks-on-parsha/trying/

Pekudei, Exodus 38:21-40:38

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/pekudei

Avoiding Deification in Creating the Mishkan

By Rabbi Noa Kushner

For the first time in the Torah, with the completion of the Mishkan, the presence of God has a regular home, an earthly residence. And this home is not only for God; it is a “Tent of Meeting” for Israel as well. When God’s presence enters the Mishkan, it is clear that Israel’s work in building this sacred structure has been blessed. For the first time, by learning from past mistakes, Israel–all Israel–has a place to experience God.

In other words, the same Israelites who once sought to contain power and divinity within the idol of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) now create the Mishkan (Exodus 35-40), which, while made of the same materials and by some of the very same processes, emphatically does not attempt to contain God. Having been given an explicit opportunity to fall again into the trap of deifying something material, having been handed the opportunity to make a cage for God, the people instead create the Mishkan and regard it only as a space, not as a stand-in or a container for God (Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture, 2001, pp. 480-481, 330-333). Once this purpose is established, God’s presence dwells in the Mishkan, in their midst; the process of t’shuvah (repentance) is complete.

Given the prohibitions against making images of God, the disaster of the Golden Calf, and the lesson the Israelites have begun to learn that God cannot be represented physically, we might expect the presence of God in the Mishkan to be without form altogether, invisible. Wouldn’t God’s complete lack of form at this moment make perfect sense in light of the Israelites’ new-found awareness and understanding?

However, God’s presence is manifested in the Mishkan in not one but two different ways: as a cloud by day and fire by night. Why does God come to the Israelites (and to us, as we read) in these very common forms? Wouldn’t the lesson of the Golden Calf be more clearly enforced if now God’s presence remained untainted by any physical form?

Perhaps these manifestations exist precisely in order to teach the Israelites that an experience of God can exist within the visual and tangible realms. That is, the problem with worshipping the Golden Calf was not that the calf could be seen; it was that the Golden Calf was worshipped as if it contained God entirely, as if God was nowhere else. Here, the Israelites learn that an encounter with God does not have to be so abstract, so removed from their sensory experience that they are left without any means of comprehending or describing it. In other words, the divine experience can include things seen. However, it must also transform our grasp of the seen object, our understanding of God, and, by extension, the act of seeing and the seer.

Remember the narrative of the Burning Bush that was on fire but not consumed (3:1-4). This phenomenon is contrary to our understanding of what happens when a bush catches on fire. For Moses, the very existence of the Burning Bush not consumed awakens the possibility that there is something divine in that fire. God could just have easily come to Moses without a Burning Bush; however, this is what enables Moses to find evidence of God’s presence. Before God even addresses Moses, he sees the fire acting differently and realizes that there is more to the world than what he knows.

Later, we read about two pillars that accompany the Israelites as they leave Egypt: a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (13:20-22). The cloud is a signpost and the fire an illuminated guide in the darkness; both show Israel the path to follow on their journey through the wilderness. But note that neither object acts naturally. The cloud does not blanket and obscure, as we expect clouds to do; instead, it is contained in a pillar and provides direction for the Israelites. Similarly, the fire does not spread and destroy whatever is in its path, as we expect fire to do; like the cloud, the fire is contained, a giant torch. In both of these manifestations, the Israelites began to see, just as Moses saw in the bush, the possibility of natural things, things of-this-earth, being bent and shaped in unnatural, divine ways.

Focusing on our parashah (40:34-38), God’s presence now dwells in the completed Mishkan, not as something invisible to Israel, but as something very familiar. Just as before, God’s presence is manifested as a cloud by day and fire by night. Here, too, the familiar acts in an unusual way. The cloud remains in the Mishkan; it does not drift or dissipate. Even more remarkably, the fire burns night after night and does not consume anything; each morning, the Mishkan remains intact (Zornberg, p. 492). These manifestations–these miracles–allow Israel to find and perceive God’s presence but still remain aware that their perceptions cannot begin to encompass the totality of that presence.

Had God dwelt invisibly in the Mishkan, had the Israelites never seen God’s presence there, they might have assumed that seeking visual encounters with God is a form of idolatry. By appearing “in the view of all the house of Israel” (40:38), God teaches that the problem with worshipping idols is not the visual experience itself; the problem occurs when the act merely confirms our preconceptions about God (Zornberg, p. 482). The Israelites see God’s presence in natural, familiar forms that then transcend and undermine those forms. This seeing, and this dissonance, tests their understanding of the world and leads to a more complex relationship with God.

So it is for us: We need not be wary of looking for visual evidence of God’s presence in the world around us. Seeking God’s presence with our eyes is not idolatrous; it is only idolatry when we “know” in advance what we will see, when our expectations restrain us. Unfortunately, we may have been so afraid of making idols that we have limited ourselves to divine experiences that are abstract and often detached, expecting ourselves to develop a relationship with God without using our eyes. What would happen if we started looking for God’s presence in fire and clouds once more? How much do our relationships with God stand to gain from our actually seeing what may have been there all along? At the very least, we will benefit from the search alone, from our looking day and night. And at best, it is possible that if we look, we will see. And then, we will never see the same way again, for we ourselves will have changed.

Kushner, Noa. "Avoiding Deification in Creating the Mishkan." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed on March 1, 2014). http://myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/Avoiding_Deification_in_Creating_the_Mishkan.shtml?p=0

Mindful Construction

By Rabbi Julian Sinclair

“Eleh Pekudei … These are the accounts of the sanctuary… as they were counted, according to the commandment of Moses.” (Exodus 38:21) With these words our sedra opens a detailed accounting of the materials that went into constructing the sanctuary. Rashi introduces his commentary on Pekudei: “In this parsha, all the values of all the voluntary contributions of gold, silver and copper are counted, together with a recounting of all the vessels for all the different service.” We learn that precisely twenty nine talents and seven hundred and thirty talents were needed; a hundred talents and one thousand seven hundred and seventy five talents of silver, and so on.

Who cares? Why does the Torah find it necessary to conclude the series of parshiot about the sanctuary by itemising the quantities of materials that went into building it? The sanctuary is a sort of a paradigm for all building in the world. Nehama Leibowitz demonstrates the literary parallels between the construction of the sanctuary and the creation of the world. For example, she compares the fact that “the heavens and earth were finished” to the completion of the work of the sanctuary. Through these comparisons, the Torah sets up the sanctuary as a microcosm of the created universe.

This idea is accentuated in the Hassidic tradition. The Sefat Emet, R. Aryeh Leib Alter from Gur (1841-1905), writes that the building of the sanctuary was meant to redeem all future doing in the world; to set up a model of physical building that would show the redemptive potential in all other acts of construction.

I’m struck by a similarity between this parsha’s accounts and those in another text about an act of model building. In his American wilderness classic, “Walden” (1854), Henry David Thoreau set out on a two year vacation from civilization and went to build a house on the shores of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, living a materially simple but spiritually rich life “by the labour of my hands only.”

Thoreau finds it necessary to regale the reader with precise details of all of his expenses, telling us that he spent $8.03½ on wooden boards, so much on bricks, lime, nails, etc, amounting to a total expenditure of $28.12½ on all the building materials for his house.

Thoreau wants to tell us that the truly spiritual life requires us to take responsibility for the material inputs that underpin that life, down to the minutest details. (He ridicules university students who bankrupt their parents with their thoughtless extravagance, while immersing themselves in the spiritual classics of civilization!) As a founding text of environmentalism, Walden’s message resonates powerfully today; you can’t live a genuinely religious life while heedlessly squandering the natural gifts that make your life possible.

Our parsha is making a similar point. The sanctuary is God’s house. A house fit for God to dwell needs to be constructed with mindfulness of the gifts that went into building it. So too, making our lives and our world fit for God to dwell in requires a careful and conscious accounting of the material resources we use in their creation.

Sinclair, Julian. "Pekudei 5768." Limmud on One Leg. (Viewed on March 1, 2014). http://limmud.org/publications/limmudononeleg/5768/pekudei/#another

 

Ki Tissa, Exodus 30:11-34:35

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/kitisa

Transformative Power

By Rabbi Ismar Schorsch

The story is told about Franz Kafka that the last time he visited Berlin, he chanced upon a little girl in a park awash in tears.

When he inquired as to the reason for her distress, she sobbed that she had lost her doll. Compassionately, Kafka countered that not to be the case. The doll had merely gone on a trip and, in fact, Kafka met her as she was about to leave. He promised that if the little girl would return to the park the next day, he would bring her a letter from her doll. And so Kafka did for several weeks, arriving each morning at the park with a letter for his new friend.

As his tuberculosis worsened, Kafka decided to return to Prague where he would soon die at age 41, but not before buying the girl another doll. Along with the doll came a letter in which Kafka insisted that this was the doll that belonged to his friend. Admittedly, she looked different, but then on her long trip the doll had seen many remarkable sights and gone through many searing experiences. Life had changed her appearance. (Jack Wertheimer, ed., The Uses of Tradition, p. 279).

Of the many meanings in this profound parable I wish to focus on the most obvious: that a transformative experience alters us externally as well as internally. This is the point of the closing narrative of our parashah. The second time that Moses ascends Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments–that is after the debacle of the golden calf–the Torah uncharacteristically gives us a profusion of details. In contrast to the brevity of description pertaining to his first ascent (Exodus 19:18-25; 24:1-4;31:18), the Torah now divulges that Moses stayed atop the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights without eating a morsel of bread or drinking a sip of water (34:28).

The intensity of this experience of the divine sets Moses’ face aglow permanently, striking his people with fear. Thereafter, Moses would cover his face with a veil, except when he entered the Tent of Meeting to talk with God or when he addressed the nation (34:29-35).

This exceptional passage is marked by vocabulary equally rare. While the noun keren–meaning “horn”–shows up often in the Tanakh, the verb karan (same consonants), meaning “to emit rays,” appears only here. Hence the mistranslation by the Vulgate to the effect that Moses came down with horns, a sign of sanctity. Similarly the noun for “veil” masveh, is unique to our narrative. Clearly, subject and language join to underscore the impact on Moses of being in God’s presence for an extended period of time.

The description interfaces with two earlier passages. As the Israelites grow uneasy over the delay in Moses’ return from Mount Sinai the first time, they suspect that he is but an ordinary, fallible mortal (33:1). Aaron, on the other hand, who serves as the Tabernacles’ chief priest, is distinguished by his ornate vestments. The radiance on Moses’ face counters both perceptions. Transformed by his experience, Moses stands out among mortals, a leader without need of special garments. The visible manifestation of his inner state sets him apart from the ordinary or conventional.

The midrash imagines the change to have occurred in one of two ways. One view suggests that God actually touched Moses as he cowered in the crevice of the rock. It was literally God’s hand that shielded Moses as God passed by to give him a glimpse of the divine presence (33:22). The other conjectures that as God instructed Moses atop Mount Sinai, Moses absorbed some of the divine sparks that emanated from God’s mouth (Tanhuma, Ki Tissa, no. 37). Either way, whether by physical or spiritual means, the aftermath of the golden calf effected a lasting transformation in the appearance of Moses.

To be sure, the external is only a reflection of a reality that is internal. Is that not the mark of a great portrait painter like Rembrandt that he makes the face reveal the soul of his subject? Grace should be visible. Thus when we find ourselves in the presence of a truly great scholar of Torah we thank God in a berakhah for having endowed someone who fears God with divine wisdom. The labor of a lifetime exudes an aura of equanimity.

On a smaller scale, what happened to Moses is replicated in our own lives each week with the observance of Shabbat, a topic taken up twice in our parashah (31:12-16; 34:21). As the light radiating from Moses’ face attested to his relationship to God, so integrating Shabbat into the rhythm of our lives infuses an extrasensory dimension of existence into our being. Both are a sign signifying the convergence of the holy and profane, of that which is eternal and that which is passing.

Janus-like the Sabbath reminds us of the cataclysms by which God created the cosmos, even as it provides us a tad of a foretaste of the peacefulness that awaits us in the world-to-come. By expressing our reverence in rest, we gain a measure of renewal. The combination of prayer and study, of food, family and friendship imbues us with an expansion of spirit, a veritable extra soul that leaves us only as the Sabbath fades away.

But we enter the work week illuminated and restored with a touch of eternity to carry us through the ordeal of the mundane. At best, the spiritual respite has transfigured our demeanor, like Kafka’s doll.

Schorsch, Ismar. "Transformative Power." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed on February 15, 2014). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/kitissa_jts.shtml?p=0

One G-d?

By Elisha Ancselovitz

Living can be painful. Economies can collapse. Does it matter whether people believe in one G-d, multiple gods, or no G-d? Does it matter whether the Jews in this week’s Torah portion serve the G-d who speaks through Moses or the merely superior god of a pantheon who rides on a young bull (Exodus chapter 32)?

Let us begin answering this question by acknowledging that Jewish mysticism has included various imageries of a multi-personality G-d and that Jewish philosophy has included a G-d without a personality, and that some Jews have even believed in Satan’s free choice. More importantly, let us acknowledge that if G-d cared about correct theology for His own sake, G-d would no longer be good, as in one who acts for the sake of others. In other words, let us begin answering by acknowledging that theology cannot be important for its own sake.

If theology is not important for its own sake, our other option for understanding the problematic of idolatry is to examine what G-d in Tanach ultimately desires of humans (however we imagine that G-d), to discover the contra to idolatry. In answer to that question, we turn to the three explicit prophetic statements of G-d’s desire. Each prophet states in oratorical parallelism that G-d desires goodness:

The first is: “He has told you, O man, what is good. And what does the Eternal require of you other than to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your G-d?” (Micah 6:8) The second is: “Let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me as the Eternal who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth. For these things I desire, declares the Eternal.” (Jeremiah 9:24) The third is: “For I desire kindness and not sacrifice Knowing [or Internalizing] G-d over burnt offerings.” (Hoseah 6:6)

According to the prophets, the point is to live with one solitary G-d, an underlying source of reality that is Goodness and calls for Goodness. Sometimes we will find ourselves in a period of Revelation and we will hear and see G-d in thunder and lightning (Exodus 20:14). Sometimes, with a blink of an eye, we will feel ourselves abandoned in the desert, like the Israelites this week. Other times, we will find ourselves in a world of evil like Elijah the prophet, and we will not find G-d in powerful manifestations but rather in a thin silent voice:

“…Then a very strong – mountain and stone shattering before the Eternal – wind blew, but the Eternal was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Eternal was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire, there was a quiet, gentle sound.” (1 Kings 19:12-13)

No matter what manifestation of G-d we experience and in whatever theological form, the Biblical commandment is to connect with and express the reality of Go[o]d[ness].

Ancselovitz, Elisha. "Ki Tissa 5769." Limmud On One Leg. (Viewed February 15, 2014). http://limmud.org/publications/limmudononeleg/5769/ki-tissa/