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109  twenty–one Mounting Sinai Parashat Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11–34:35) Amichai Lau-Lavie I Friday night on a Tel Aviv dance floor: I am surrounded by hundreds of shirtless men, a pulsing mass of dancers, the air thick with sweat, lust, and—for me, eighteen years old, my first time out at a gay club—excitement mixed with a heavy dose of guilt. The club is only twenty minutes away from theIsraeliOrthodoxneighborhood where Igrew up, but also thousands of light years away from childhood. I close my eyes, and for a moment I am reminded of dancing at the Yeshiva, surrounded by young men in white shirts, faces glistening with sweat, rocking wildly in tight circles around the Torah scrolls. Eventually I too take my shirt off, fear replaced, temporarily, by a newfound freedom . My eyes meet those of a handsome man dancing close by. He is checking me out, and I like it, but then the guilt kicks in—a medley of voices invades my mind— every rabbi who ever taught me: “Abomination. Sin. Modesty. What of desecrating the Sabbath or disrespecting your parents who would be mortified to know you are here?” I stumble off the dance floor, heading outside for some fresh air, and as soon as I am alone I burst into tears. How can something that feels so right also feel so wrong? How do I reconcile my religious and gay selves? What of my old life do I keep as I embrace this new and confusing reality? Torn between passion and prohibition, body and Bible, I found myself that night yearning for clarity, for a healthy balance, a yearning that will chart my journey and continues to underscore my personal and professional life. Almost twenty years and many dance parties later, the yearning for clarity lingers, but a healthy balance has been steadily built, thanks to great teachers, wise lovers, and unexpected encounters with the sacred, providing me with possible models of fusion between my sexual and spiritual identities. One such fusion was revealed, surprisingly , at a Bible class, several years ago—transporting me back to another dance party: an event of mythic proportions containing both the fragments of separation and the seeds of reconciliation itself. I opened the book and found myself at the foot of Mount Sinai, surrounded by a gyrating mass of ecstatic dancers, circling a shining sculpture—the golden calf. I was always taught to judge these sinners harshly, but now, as I imagined myself dancing with them, I discovered another angle—an untold story, the other side of the coin. Through a careful rereading, this terrible tale reveals a subversive message that offers a compelling fusion of sex and spirit, body and soul. 110 Amichai Lau-Lavie II Chapter 32 in Parashat Ki Tisa in the book of Exodus opens with an absence and with a yearning: “And the people saw that Moses was delayed in descending the mountain” (Ex. 32:1). Moses had been gone for forty days and by this time was presumed missing by the people who had grown to depend on him for security and direction. They demanded reliable leadership and a tangible proof of security and turned to Aaron, high priest in training and interim leader, who led them in the first successful fundraising campaign in Jewish history. They collected gold, molded a recognizable icon from their Egyptian days, and were comforted. When Moses finally returned on the following day, bearing the Ten Commandments, he discovered a wild party, centered on the golden calf—his unlikely replacement. The frenzy was interrupted by the literal shattering of the sacred words, as the physical depiction of divinity clashed with the metaphysical. It ended badly, with the first religious conflict within the Israelite ranks leading to three thousand casualties. Although the “official” moral of this Biblical text focuses clearly on the rift between monotheism and the worship of idols, I want to read it as a pivotal metamyth that can be seen allegorically as a coded description of the perennial, all-too-human conflict between spirit and matter. It is an incident that exacerbates the divide between our base instincts and our highest consciousness—symbolically happening simultaneously at the bottom and on the top of the mountain that represents the vertical connection between humanity and divinity. Seen from this angle, the Golden Calf story is more than a stark warning against worshiping matter. It is a reminder of a skeleton in our collective closet...

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