This week’s parshah, Kee Teesa, contains one of the ugliest transgressions in the long history of the Jewish people: Chet HaEgel, the sin of the forging and worshipping the Golden Calf.

Quite honestly, if I had my druthers, and the chutzpah to do so, I would consider excising this sordid tale from our public Torah readings in shul. After all, what good does including this humiliating story do for our people and tradition? How tragic that mere weeks after the greatest revelation of all time, Matan Torah — the epiphany at Sinai, when our forebears saw and heard God, up front and personal — they sank so low as to prostrate themselves before a human-made golden idol? How fickle and capricious. How ungrateful and insensitive. 

And yet, our Torah is a Torat emet, an unflinchingly honest portrayal of our people (and all people) and fully records even the most unflattering and embarrassing moments of our lives, in full color, excruciating detail. The obvious question is why? Why be so brutally honest and unvarnished? What does this kind of unmitigated candor accomplish or come to teach us, at least in potential? 

Perhaps the most profound lesson we can draw from this humiliating episode is that all humans misstep, stumble and sin. And despite this inconvenient truth, we never lose sight of the fact that atonement is possible. Despite our foibles and shortcomings, there is always a chance for expiation.

Jewish tradition has built into its very fabric, recorded in its formative text, the notion of second chances, do-overs — or, for golf enthusiasts, mulligans. In fact, later on in our sidra, the Almighty instructs Moses to carve a second set of Luchot, Holy Tablets, to replace the first set that he brusquely smashed. This second set, unlike the first that was forged BeEtzba Elohim, by the Hand of the Divine, were the work of a human being, the very person responsible for their shattering. 

At a recent wedding, one at which we were all required to wear protective face coverings and remain socially distant, I shared an insight about why we break a glass underneath the chuppah at the conclusion of a Jewish wedding ceremony. Counterintuitively, immediately following the smashing of the glass, all those assembled joyously exclaim mazal tov, good fortune and good luck.

But why celebrate the smashing, the utter destruction of the glass? I think the message is profound. Things break; that is the reality of our existence. But we cannot wallow eternally in the brokenness. We must move beyond the tragedies, both big and small, and move forward with life knowing we have another chance to create, to enjoy and to celebrate.

As my teacher and mentor Rabbi Lipnick (Z’L) would often quip following a moment of challenge, reversal or adversity: “It shouldn’t be worse.”

As we read this week’s parashah, let us not only celebrate the receipt of the second set of Tablets by our ancient ancestors, but also be uplifted by the notion that we are blessed by a tradition that generously offers us endless opportunities for second chances. May we be wise enough to never squander this precious gift. Amen.

With love and blessings for a Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Carnie Shalom Rose is the Rabbi Bernard Lipnick Senior Rabbinic Chair at Congregation B’nai Amoona and a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, which coordinates the d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.