Shabbat Parashat Ki Tisa - 5786

Shabbat Parashat Ki Tisa - 5786

Rabbi Hal Miller

  Aharon said to them, remove the golden rings that are in the ears of your wives, your

  sons and your daughters and bring them to me. [Shemot 32:2]

  The entire people unburdened themselves of the golden rings that were in their ears

  and brought them to Aharon. [Shemot 32:3]

The root of the word translated here as "remove" and as "unburdened" is pey-reish-kuf. As with all Hebrew, its meaning is dependent on context. What does it mean in these two consecutive verses?

The usual word for removing something is hasar. Another common option is hotzei, to take out. Aharon's use of our word must have some special connotation beyond what one might usually picture as a removal. Parku means to unpack, unload, set free, or dismantle. Hitpareik means to be disarmed or released or dismantled. Alcalay interprets our first verse as a command to "break off the earrings".

Rashi, followed by Or HaChayim, says that parku is an imperative form of pareik, meaning a command to remove, in the singular. But he does not explain why this verb is singular and the rest of the verse is in the plural. Rav Hirsch says it means "take the golden rings", which could mean either that the people were giving them voluntarily, or that Aharon was to go grab them. Onkelos says "take off the rings", which indicates that whoever Aharon was speaking to was to go perform an action.

Thus first we must ascertain who Aharon was giving this command to. Rashi seems to think it was to each individual man separately that he should take the rings out of the ears of his wife and children. Ramban writes "The entire people removed the gold rings" and Rav Hirsch concurs that it was to the people as a whole. Where that would differ from Rashi is in enforceability and accountability.

All of this assumes that our root means to remove. Yet it appears that Aharon had something more in mind. Rashi analyzes the word in our second form, vayitparku. He defines it as "they unburdened themselves" that "they were unburdened of their earrings". He explains that if the Torah had written vayifrku in the transitive form, it would have meant "they removed" but here the word, as defined by Gur Aryeh, "is reflexive and expressed what they did to themselves, not what they did to their jewelry". Thus "to remove" is not the proper understanding here, rather "unburdened themselves" makes sense.

So what was Aharon telling them to unburden? If it was just the gold earrings, that would not have required this word, instead Aharon could have used 'remove'.

Torah Temimah brings the Yerushalmi on Shekalim [1:1]. "Rabbi Yehudah ben Pazzi said in the name of Rebbi ... for good (contributions for the Mishkan) it is written 'all the generous of heart contributed' [35:22] but for evil (the calf) 'and all the people removed'." While this does not directly answer our question, it gives us a point to work from. In both cases, people were handing gold over to Moshe or Aharon, so the fact that gold was involved is not distinguishing. Thus the gold here, while being physical, must be an allusion to something else.

In the case of building the Mishkan, people gave toward the purpose given by God. In our verses, they are giving toward an entirely non-Divine purpose. In the first, they were sanctifying the gold, in the second they are lowering it from holiness. What Aharon was doing here was telling the people to rid themselves of the burden of what they had desecrated. In verse [32:24] Aharon tells Moshe "they unburdened themselves and gave it to me, I cast it into the fire" which was Aharon's attempt to cure the disease, but "and this calf emerged" because the people had not truly unburdened themselves of this desecration.