Perhaps Moses didn’t cast those tablets of stone to the ground in anger. Perhaps, as the Midrash Tanchuma (Ki Tissa 30) suggests, an eighty year old Moses could only manage to carry two slabs of rock down a mountain because they were made lighter by the presence of the Ten Commandments’ holy letters on them; but once Moses saw the people dancing around a calf of gold, the letters flew from the tablets, rendering the stones nothing but . . . stone. Not even a twenty year old Moses could have carried that burden. Perhaps he cast the tablets to the ground because they were simply dead weight.

This past week we shared news with our OJC community that left many shocked and saddened. We learned several months ago that a minor in our community had been victimized by the inappropriate advances of an adult OJC member, and after a process of pastoring to the needs of the victim and their family, consulting with outside experts and gathering information, we released our plan to field more information via a safety assessment conducted by an outside third party. While the reported inappropriate behavior had not occurred in our building, and while the investigated actions had been verified by the authorities but had not resulted in criminal charges being filed, this matter should not leave us with any illusions about the sanctity of our community. Our covenant has been broken; the holy letters have departed the tablets; the stone lies in shards.

According to a midrash found in the Talmud (Bava Batra 14b), the broken pieces of the first set of Ten Commandments were kept in the ark alongside the second set. Were they there to bear witness to the past? To be a constant reminder of how easily trust can be broken if we are not vigilant? To teach us that we forever carry the broken pieces of ourselves while still being able to achieve wholeness? Yes, yes and yes. We must bear the burden of what may have transpired on our watch. We must ask ourselves why we didn’t speak up when we saw something in the past that made us uncomfortable. And yet, we must overcome these heavy questions and still report what we have experienced and felt. We must enter a new covenant as a community in the hopes that we can be whole again–more vigilant, more mindful, more sacred.

The second set of tablets didn’t come to Moses as easily as the first. He had to hew the stone himself and carry it up the mountain to receive God’s letters a second time. The rabbinic imagination of Midrash Rabbah reassures us that this burden was not a punishment. In fact, the second set of tablets was better than the first because it contained Halacha, Midrash and Aggadah. In other words, the new covenant between God and the people was informed by the wisdom and imagination born out of the Israelites’ experience.

We are completely engaged in the process of renewing our community covenant. As we share a mechanism to gather more information about your observations and experiences, we are already fully invested in developing new policies and procedures to prevent future opportunities for abuse and to safeguard our sacred space. We will be offering 2 town hall-style meetings next week to answer questions and clarify our responses to the best of our ability: one virtually on Wednesday night, March 2 after minyan, and one in person on Thursday evening, March 3 at 6:30pm in the sanctuary. We are fortunate to have this second chance–the opportunity to restore trust and faith in each other and in our institution. We owe it to one another, to our tradition and to our children to be better this time around.

May the sacred space we establish be worthy of God’s presence.

Rabbi Craig Scheff