Shabbat Chol HaMoed by Rabbi Lionel Moses
The Torah Reading for Shabbat Hol HaMo’ed Pesah is a reprise of part of the Parashah that we read barely a month ago, Parshat Ki Tissa. It begins with the intercession of Moses with God, after the sin of the Golden Calf. Moses convinces God to renew the Covenant with the Israelites after they had violated the cardinal sin of the Ten Commandments, worshipping an image of a god who was not that God who had taken the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses carves a new set of Tablets and returns to the top of Mount Sinai, where God inscribes the very words that were written on the first set of tablets.
Renewal of the Covenant (Brit) is critical to the fulfillment of the promise that God made to Abraham that Abraham’s descendants would be slaves in Egypt and that God Himself would redeem them from slavery and return them to the land that God had promised as an inheritance to Abraham and his descendants. God’s attributes of Truth, Forgiveness and Reliability to fulfill a promise are the unspoken themes that underlay the central theme of Freedom that dominates the story of Pesah.
The renewal of the Covenant is then followed with some of the specific terms of the Covenant, beginning with the obligation to obliterate all the symbols of idolatry and the uncompromising command not to worship the gods of the inhabitants of the Land of Canaan. The reading ends with a rehearsal of the three Pilgrimage Festivals, Pesah, Shavu’ot and Sukkot and the commandment not to cook a baby goat in its mother’s milk, that is biblical “prooftext” that we are not permitted to mix together any dairy and meat products when we cook or eat.