A lovely man in his early 80’s who had just started learning Hebrew for the first time came to service early, stayed late, and asked me one morning, “Do you think it’s too late to really be part of this?”. I smiled and said, “The Jewish world is constantly being rebuild. We are still here. You are not too late. You are right on time.”

Parashat Ki Tissa, is about both catastrophe and covenant, failure and forgiveness. It begins with a census, a moment of counting, of making every soul visible. But quickly, it moves into one of the most painful narratives in the Torah: the sin of the Golden Calf.

Moses is on the mountain receiving the tablets. The people below grow restless. Afraid. Disconnected. They build a golden calf. They dance. They say, “This is your god, O Israel.” And when Moses descends and sees it all, he shatters the tablets: “He cast the tablets from his hands and shattered them.” (Exodus 32:19) This is moment of rage.

The Talmud in Bava Batra 14b teaches that both the broken tablets and the whole new tablets were later placed inside the Ark. Even the fragments were holy. Because failure, too, belongs inside the covenant. Belonging does not mean we never fall. It means we return. We rebuild. We bless even the broken pieces.

The consequences are that God wants to destroy the Israelite people. Moses pleads. And in one of the most daring moments in all of Torah, he says: “If You will not forgive them, erase me from Your book.” (Ex. 32:32). Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called this moral audacity, a leader who refuses to walk forward without his people.

Later in the Parasha, Moses asks to see God’s glory. But instead of a grand vision, God answers: “You may see My back, but not My face.” (Ex. 33:23)

Perhaps it is a theological lesson to be learned. We never see God in the moment, only in hindsight, when we trace the footprints through pain, growth, and transformation.

This is what becoming looks like. It’s not linear. It includes betrayal and recommitment, silence and rediscovery. And God responds not by withdrawing the covenant, but by rewriting it, this time, Moses carves the tablets himself. Now the people are part of the making.

This is how Judaism evolves, through human hands shaped by divine hope.

Judaism is about persistence. To affirm Israel’s place, to affirm Jewish continuity, is to carry the broken and the whole together in the same Ark, day after day.

May we honour the tablets we have dropped, the ones we are still shaping, and the complicated story we are all still writing together.