Parshat Ki Tisa4 min read

Moses Wrote the Plural Word, Then Prayed for Mercy

The quill stopped at Let us make. Below the mountain a calf had gone quiet. Moses shook, then asked whose people these were.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Quill Stopped
  2. Write It Anyway
  3. The King and the Unused Glass
  4. The Camp Smelled of Gold Dust
  5. Your People
Moses Wrote the Plural Word, Then Prayed for Mercy Click for full size

The Quill Stopped

Moses sat with the Torah still unfinished. Day by day he had written what God spoke. Light. Water. Earth. Lights again. Swarming things. Cattle. The days stacked. The page filled. Then the sentence arrived that did not sound like one God.

"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26).

The quill froze. Ink hung at the tip and would not drop. Moses's hand, which had been moving with the days, went still. "Master of the Universe," he said, "why open a mouth for those who want to divide heaven?" One throne. One Creator. The line on the page looked like a crack someone could put a whole other god through.

Write It Anyway

God did not sand the plural off. "Write," God said, "and whoever wants to err may err."

Then the harder answer. From this human being would come great and small. When a great one refuses to ask a lesser one, the lesser can point upward. Learn from your Creator. Before making the human, God took counsel with the ministering angels.

Moses heard it and still did not like the look of the words. He lowered the quill. He wrote them. The door stayed open. The humility stayed in the sentence with it. A king who asks advice is still the king. A God who says us is still One.

The King and the Unused Glass

A king walked near the gate of his palace and found a piece of fine glass lying unused in the dust. He stopped. Some attendants said, make public baths of it. Others said, private rooms. They argued in the doorway while the king turned the glass in his hand. Then he spoke.

"I will make a statue from it. Who can stop me?"

The counsel did not weaken him. It showed him. The angels could speak. The King still made the human being. Moses set the plural on the page the way that king set his will on the glass. Advice in the room. One hand doing the making.

The Camp Smelled of Gold Dust

Later, below the mountain, Israel smelled of smoke and gold. The calf had been ground down. The dancing had stopped. Dust of the thing they had worshipped stuck to sandals and hair. God had a new name for the people. Not Mine. Yours. Let them be consumed, and a greater nation will come from you.

Moses did not stand taller. His knees knew first. The mountain held a sentence over the camp, and the offer sat in the air beside it, a crown made out of other people's deaths. He was shaken with fear, and he began to pray. The man who had been told to write a dangerous word now had to speak a dangerous prayer. He did not take the nation. He asked for mercy instead.

Your People

"Why should Your wrath prevail against Your people," he said, "whom You brought up from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?" (Exodus 32:11).

God had handed Israel to Moses with a pronoun. Moses handed them back with the same word. If wrath was going to eat them, it would have to walk through Egypt first, through the sea, through the hand that had already claimed them. He prayed it while his voice still shook. He did not wait to be calm. Calm would have been a lie.

He had learned both labors in one life. Write the difficult word exactly. Pray the merciful words while still shaking. Below, the camp had no defense that would hold. Above, a trembling man would not let God call the rescued people by any name except Yours.

MosesPrayerCreationTorahGodGolden CalfJudgmentRepentanceDevarim Rabbah
← All myths

From the tradition

Sources

2 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Bereshit Rabbah 8:8Bereshit Rabbah

Translation of the source text.Midrash Rabbah -- TE · Public Domain

Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman said in the name of Rabbi Yonatan: When Moses was writing the Torah, he would write the work of each and every day. When he reached this verse, as it is said, "And God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26), he said before Him: Master of the universe, why do You give an opening to the heretics? It is astonishing! He said to him: Write, and let the one who wishes to err, err. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: Moses, this man whom I have created, do I not raise up from him both great and small? For if the great one should come to take permission from one smaller than himself, and he says, "Why should I need to take permission from one smaller than myself?" they say to him, "Learn from your Creator, who created the upper beings and the lower beings, yet when He came to create man He took counsel with the ministering angels." Rabbi Levi said: There is no kingship here; rather, it is a parable of a king who was strolling at the entrance of his palace, and saw a clod lying cast aside. He said: What shall we do with it? Some of them say: public baths; and some of them say: private baths. The king said: I shall make it into a statue. Who can object?

Full source
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 32:11Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

The great intercessor did not rise to his prayer from confidence. He rose from terror. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the detail the Hebrew leaves out: Moses was shaken with fear, and began to pray before the Lord his God (Exodus 32:11).

Why begin the story of Moses's prayer with his trembling?

The sages noticed that almost every great moment of Jewish intercession begins this way. Abraham, pleading for Sodom, says I am but dust and ashes (Genesis 18:27). King David, interceding after his census, falls on his face (2 Samuel 24:17). Esther, about to confront King Ahasuerus for her people, fasts three days in dread (Esther 4:16). Fear is the mother of every real prayer. Calm, self-assured petition is often the prayer of someone who does not fully believe the stakes.

Moses understood what was on the line. The people he had led out of Egypt were about to be consumed. The covenant with the patriarchs was about to be voided. The name of God was about to be mocked in Egypt and Canaan. And Moses was being offered a personal promotion at the cost of his nation.

The targum's phrasing is careful. Moses did not argue. He did not rebuke. He began by asking a question, Wherefore should Thy wrath, O Lord, prevail against Thy people whom Thou didst bring up from the land of Mizraim, with great power and with a mighty hand?. Notice the pronoun shift. God had called Israel thy people, handing them off to Moses. Moses immediately called them Thy people, handing them back. The whole theological battle of the verse is in that one possessive.

The sages saw in this the art of Jewish intercession. You do not tell God God is wrong. You remind God of God's own investment. You invoke God's own stake. You make God's history with you the argument for God's future with you.

The Maggid takes this home: pray shaken. Pray afraid. Pray with the knowledge that something real is at stake, and the covenant will meet you in the trembling.

Full source