In this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa, the Jewish people make and worship the golden calf after which Moshe comes down the mountain and breaks the tablets.   This parsha is bookended by God giving the instructions for making the Tabernacle to Moshe and Moshe telling the Jewish people how to build it.

Rash”i reads these parshiot in a different order.   He says that the Torah is not always in chronological order and that the episode of the golden calf and the breaking of the tablets happened first, on the 17th of Tammuz, followed by the instructions for the Tabernacle, and then the giving of the second tablets on Yom Kippur, and the construction of the Tabernacle which was completed on the first of Nissan.

From Rashi and also Maimonides, it seems the Jewish people were at first to have no sacrifices, and only after they brought the golden calf, as an accommodation to their idolatrous tendencies, did God command them to build and worship in the Tabernacle.  This brings up an important religious meta-question: Should we find ways to accommodate religious weakness or desire for worship which is not Jewishly ideal within a permitted framework, or should we, perhaps in fear of the slippery slope, dig in our heels and draw a religious line?

For the last year in my daily 8:30am Kesher Zoom class we have been studying 19th century orthodox rabbinic responses to the early Jewish Reform movement.  In 19th century Europe, especially Germany, playing an organ was seen as an important way to give honor.  Though hard for us to relate to, it was not only a church instrument, but the way in which cultured and upstanding people gathered for formal occasions and celebrated important days such as the secular holiday of the birthday of the king or weddings.

The Reformers and some more liberal Orthodox Rabbis wrote that the organ should be permitted in Shul as it is a way to honor God.   Other orthodox Rabbis permitted the organ on weekdays but not on shabbat, (though the Shulchan Aruch permits having a non-Jew play a musical instrument for Jewish people for an occasion such as a celebration for a bride and groom on Shabbat).   Still others, especially by the mid to late 19th century, forbid the organ entirely as they think it is a violation of “u’vichukotahem lo telechu,” not to imitate the ways of the non-Jews, or since it may strengthen the hand of the reformers.

In every generation the Jewish people have been faced with the challenge of deciding when and how much to assimilate into their host culture, when is allowing something that could lead down a negative path a good idea, akin to the seemingly dangerous act in our Parsha, of giving the people who just worshiped the golden calf, a Tabernacle filled with gold objects and even two cherubs which, as some commentaries say, had the faces of calves.