Shabbat Parashat Ki Tisa - 5784

Shabbat Parashat Ki Tisa - 5784

Rabbi Hal Miller

  The people heard this bad tiding and they grieved and they, each man, did not put on

  his crown. God said to Moshe, say to the children of Israel, you are a stiff-necked

  people. If I ascend among you I may annihilate you in an instant. And now remove

  your crown from upon you and I shall know what I shall do to you. So the children of

  Israel were divested of their crown from Mount Choreiv. [Shemot 33:4-6]

Last year we looked at this word, crown, which is sometimes translated, ornaments.

Here we ask about the actions involved in these three verses. In the first, nobody put

on their crown. In the second, God says they are to remove their crowns. In the third

the people were divested of their crowns. On a simple level, this does not make sense.

In the Gemora Shabbat [88a] we learn that each Jew received two crowns, one for "we

will do" and one for "we will hear". Ramban and others explain that in our verses, the

people did not put on both that day, rather only one, the latter is what God ordered removed

in the second verse. Read this way, the third verse is merely summarizing what had just

happened. Torah Temimah cites this same Gemora but says that our third verse means

the angels referred to in the Gemora forcibly removed the crowns. Rashbam seems to

agree when he says that some people had not seen fit to remove them on their own.

Rashi adds that even though the people knew they had sinned and lost the right to wear

crowns, God added here to say that they were not able to continue to study Torah while

they were not fulfilling the mitzvot.

Rav Hirsch understands these crowns to be tefillin, which are removed by someone who

is mourning. Tefillin consecrates a Jew much as was done at Sinai (Mt. Choreiv), and was

commanded there. When the verse says they were "divested of their crown from Mt. Choreiv"

it means from the time of Mt. Choreiv. He sees this as related to mourning.

The Brisker Rav asks our question directly, "Why did God have to command the people

to remove their ornaments after they had already done so of their own accord? Why does

the Torah tell us once again that they did so two verses later?" He answers, "When they

first removed their ornaments it was explicitly an expression of mourning. After this God

informed them that they were being excommunicated, which is a separate reason for

removing ornaments." Instead of two removings, the Torah is giving us two reasons for

their removal, and summarizing in the third verse.