Sermon for SHABBAT KI TISA / SHUSHAN PURIM 5785 – Friday, March 14, 2025

Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

The old Purim custom of drowning out the name of Haman comes to mind as I speak to you this evening about Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate and protest-movement leader whose name has dominated the press, especially the Jewish press, over the last week.  

As with Haman, I wish I could have stamped out the name Mahmoud Khalil, denied him media attention, prevented him from becoming a cause celebre, deprived his admirers a martyr to lionize, but rabbis do not get to choose the headlines any more than we get to choose parashat ha-shavua, the Torah portion of the week, so let’s consider ours for a moment and then return to the curious case of Mr. Khallil.

The portion Ki Tisa frames the most ignominious episode in the story of the Israelite people:  their dalliance with idolatry in the form of a golden calf.  Moses has disappeared up Mount Sinai while God inscribes for him the Law on two tablets of stone.  As days wear on into weeks, the people at the foot of the mountain grow anxious and restless and press Moses’s surrogate, his brother Aaron, saying:

ק֣וּם ׀ עֲשֵׂה־לָ֣נוּ אֱלֹהִ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֤ר יֵֽלְכוּ֙ לְפָנֵ֔ינוּ כִּי־זֶ֣ה ׀ מֹשֶׁ֣ה הָאִ֗ישׁ אֲשֶׁ֤ר הֶֽעֱלָ֙נוּ֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם לֹ֥א יָדַ֖עְנוּ מֶה־הָ֥יָה לֽוֹ׃

“Get up and make us a god who will go before us, for this man, Moses, who brought us out of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him” (Ex. 32:1).

Aaron—disturbingly, without hesitation—complies.  The men cast off their gold and Aaron casts it into an icon well known in both Egyptian and Canaanite society—the bull or calf associated with power and fertility.  The people cavort around their sacred cow, offering sacrifices, feasting and dancing, and even exclaiming, 

… אֵ֤לֶּה אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר הֶעֱל֖וּךָ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃

“This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Ex. 32:4, cf. also 32:8).

Needless to say, things do not go well for these Israelites, and to this day the phrase “golden calf” can refer to any form of idolatry, overt or covert.  On this matter, I found the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on idolatry illuminating: “Gross, or overt, idolatry consists of explicit acts of reverence addressed to a person or an object—the sun, the king, an animal, a statue…. A person becomes guilty of a more subtle idolatry, however, when, although overt acts of adoration are avoided, he attaches to a creature [or any thing, or even an idea] the confidence, loyalty, and devotion that properly belong only to the Creator.”

Because we are human, we are all susceptible to these “more subtle” idolatries.  And in this era of bitter partisanship, I worry that we are especially susceptible to the fetishes of our respective political camps.  

On the left we have an idolatry that worships powerlessness and victimhood as virtues, that, in its most extreme expressions, justifies and even glorifies any act of terror, any rhetoric of violence, no matter how depraved, making the condemnable commendable—so long as it is espoused or perpetrated in the name of a group perceived to be “oppressed.”  

In this form of idolatry, recent headliners like Luigi Mangione, who stands accused of murdering a healthcare executive in cold blood, and Mahmoud Khalil, the protestor at the center of this week’s news, become golden calves—icons worshipped as gods, paragons of the right and the good.

Lest we pile on the left to the exclusion of other idolatries, let it be known that the right has its fair share of golden calves as well, including the fetishization of order and authority, of traditional notions of masculinity and strength, of so-called “traditional family values,” of racial purity and historical narratives that play fast and loose with the truth.  Take, for instance, the myth of the “Southern Gentleman” as a model of chivalry which of course obfuscates the brutal truth of slavery and the aims of the Confederacy, for starters.

It seems to me that the idolatries of both the left and the right have collided in the curious case of Mahmoud Khalil, leading me to conclude that both are wrong.  I have found company in an article by Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld, published this Wednesday by The Free Press.  It is called “Both Right and Left Are Wrong About Mahmoud Khalil,” followed by the subtitle, “Anyone who says the law is obvious here is not telling the truth.”

To recap the facts of the case as we know them:  Khalil, having recently graduated from Columbia University, played a leading role in the virulent anti-Israel protests there, acting as spokesperson and negotiator for a group called CUAD—Columbia University Apartheid Divest—which describes itself as “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and which, since October 7th, has mobilized the erection of the encampments and the takeover of several buildings on campus.  “Khalil was suspended from Columbia last April for his participation in the protests, but the school reversed his suspension the next day. Arrested on March 8, Khalil is currently being detained in Louisiana. On March 10, a federal judge in New York stayed his deportation pending a hearing.”

Rubenfeld continues:

The administration has not yet definitively stated its legal grounds for deporting Khalil, but a federal statute, the Immigration and Nationality Act, says that aliens—even those who, like Khalil, have green cards—can be deported if they “espouse or endorse terrorist activity.” It also permits deportation on the basis of an alien’s beliefs or statements if the Secretary of State determines that the alien’s continued presence here “would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”

The rest of the article is a difficult but rewarding read, and I commend it to you.  The thrust of the piece is that if Khalil were a US citizen, the matter would be more or less straightforward, as Rubenfeld makes clear:  “Political opinion, no matter how abhorrent, is protected speech in America.  Expressing support for even the sickest terrorist butchers, like Hamas, is protected speech.”  

“But,”—and this is critical—“he’s not a citizen. His green card makes him a lawful permanent resident, but he’s still an alien. Thus the real question is whether, or when, or to what extent aliens have the same constitutional rights as citizens. Unfortunately for both left and right,” Rubenfeld advises, “the answer is complicated.”

I’ve made the whole article available as a handout which you can take as you leave the sanctuary this evening.  The point I wish to emphasize is how our golden calves, our idolatries—our ideological sacred cows and shibboleths, amplified by the most extreme voices in our respective echo chambers—blind us from seeing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”  

In the case of Khalil, loud voices on both the left and the right have adopted predictable positions in line with their ideological fixations.  The right, enamored with the perceived strength of the current administration in its standing up to antisemitic bullying, sees in Khalil a Jew-hating provocateur and terrorist sympathizer who is simply getting what he had coming to him.  

The left—not only reflexively sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but also reflexively antagonistic to anything the current administration says or does—sees in Khalil an avatar of resistance to an administration that overreaches in silencing its opponents.  

Both camps are participating in the shared preoccupation du jour, what my friend Rabbi Jeff Salkin calls “aerobic offense” — working ourselves up into a frenzy over the latest outrage, day after day. Both have fallen into a seductive, whirling dance around their own camp’s ideological golden calf: the core beliefs that dominate each one’s echo chamber and which keep each camp from apprehending the whole truth.  

One of my favorite Jewish authors and public intellectuals, Jay Michaelson, responding to the fracas over Khalil, has this to add:

“On the Left, rushing to pull the fascist fire alarm every single time will lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf exhaustion on the one hand, and a flattening of anti-democratic offenses on the other.  On the Right, supporting the deportation of an unpopular (to the Right) individual is, to me self-evidently, extremely unwise and imprudent, not to mention anti-democratic and illiberal.”

Seeking truth, in all its messiness and complexity, is, I suppose, perennially unpopular, especially compared to the cheap satisfactions of “being right” or sticking it to one’s ideological opponents.  

Were either camp to distance themselves from the golden calves of their own dogmas, the left might take a moment to reflect that making a hero of a virulent antisemite who harassed and intimidated Jews on their own campus is bad, not just for the Jews but for all people; and the right would be wise to recognize that depriving anyone of due process—even a green-card holder—is bad news for every American, not only their ideological opponents.  Capital-T Truth encompasses both of these small-t truths.

And so, the Talmud affirms:  חוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא ״אֱמֶת״ — “The seal of the Holy One is Truth” (Shabbat 55a). God’s essence, God’s name—so to speak—is Truth:  the ultimate and all-encompassing reality, which necessarily embraces ideological complexity and even contradiction.  

It may be easier to stay within our camps and dance around our golden calves.  We did it back then and do it today.  But the One whose seal is Truth summons us back to the mountain where true Torah is found.

Shabbat Shalom!