Team Building By Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

How do you remotivate a demoralized people? How do you put the pieces of a broken nation back together again? That was the challenge faced by Moses in this week’s Parshah. The key word here is vayakhel, “[Moses] gathered.” Kehillah means community. A kehillah or kahal is a group of people assembled for a given purpose. That purpose can be positive or negative, constructive or destructive. The same word that appears at the beginning of this week’s Parshah as the beginning of the solution, appeared in last week’s Parshah as the start of the problem: “When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered [vayikahel] around Aaron and said, ‘Make us a god to lead us. As for this man Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’” Thedifference between the two kinds of kehillah is that one results in order, the other in chaos. Coming down the mountain to see the golden calf, we read that “Moses saw that the people were running wild, and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies.” The verb פרע, like the similar פרא, means “loose, unbridled, unrestrained.”