In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Ki Tisa ('When you take', Exodus 30:11-34:35) moves from the half-shekel census and the appointment of the craftsmen to the crisis of the golden calf, Moses' shattering of the tablets and his intercession, and the revelation of the thirteen attributes of divine mercy and the second set of tablets.
The golden calf's construction, initiated while Moses remained on the mountain receiving the very laws against idolatry the people were about to violate, is read by rabbinic commentary as compounded by timing, the sin occurring on what the people miscounted as the fortieth day of Moses' absence, a miscalculation later linked in tradition to the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz, when Moses is said to have descended and shattered the tablets upon witnessing the scene (Exodus 32:19). Moses' intercession, offering to have his own name blotted from God's book rather than see the people destroyed (Exodus 32:32), is read across the commentary tradition as among the most radical instances of vicarious pleading in the Hebrew Bible. The second set of tablets, carved by Moses himself rather than given ready-made as the first had been (Exodus 34:1), is read by commentators as marking a shift toward human partnership in the covenant's physical renewal, following the community's own failure that had shattered its first, wholly divine, form.