Serving Hashem

Five things happened on the 17th of Tamuz and five things on Tisha B'av. The Maharal explains that the two sets of five mirror each other, the ones from Sheva Aser Betamuz are the beginning of the churban while the five things that happened on Tisha B'av are the end of the churban. The first thing the Mishna states is the breaking of the Luchas on the seventeenth day of Tamuz, after Klal Yisroel made and worshiped the golden calf. (Interesting to note that there is no mention of the making of the eigal in the Mishna, only the aftermath). What is the relationship between the breaking of the luchas and the churban of the Bais Hamikdash? What about that tragedy led to the churban Habais?
Let us try to understand a little bit of what the sin of the eigal was and why Moshe’s response was to break the Luchas.
In the Kuzri the King of Kuzar asks the Rabbi, how is it that the same people that received the Torah were able to turn around and sin the way they did and worship a graven image? To which the Rabbi answered- had they built a temple and built an alter in the middle and read from a scroll- would you be at peace with it? Of course we would- we do it everyday – it’s part and parcel of our Judaism. The problem we have in relating to the eigal is that the concept of worshiping a golden calf is foreign to us but to them a golden calf was the way everyone served g-d. One of the thirteen Ani Mamins is that Hashem is not a physical being and that no physical being can fathom him. At Matan Torah the skies opened and we all saw the highest levels- Klal Yisroel saw that there is nothing to see- that there is no physicality in heaven at all. Forty days later Klal Yisroel felt that they couldn’t relate to Hashem totally divorced from physicality, they felt that they needed something down here that could connect them to Hashem. R’ Shamshon R. Hirsch says that they were serving Hashem the way they saw fit, not the way that Hashem had told them to. Thus they had taken the G-dliness out of serving Hashem and that is making an avodah zorah out of Hashem. Moshe didn’t break the luchas as a punishment, he showed Klal Yisroel that if you take Hashem out of the picture, even something as holy as the Luchas- something that came straight from Hashem- is worthless and can be broken. Klal Yisroel’s mistake was not realizing that the only way to serve Hashem is by listening to him. The kapporah for the Eigal was the building of the Mishkan, which at every step the posuk says ‘Al pi Hashem’- everything was done solely because Hashem had said. The Meshach Chochma says that the Luchas had to be broken or else Klal Yisroel would have thrown away the Eigal and worshiped the Luchas as an alternative to their idea of serving Hashem and not the way that Hashem had commanded.
The same thing repeated itself many years later in Eretz Yisroel. Klal Yisroel served Hashem the way they felt appropriate and even with the Bais Hamikdosh they managed to lose sight of Hashem and his commandments. With that Klal Yisroel took Hashem out of his own city and only then were the Babylonians and later the Romans able to step foot into Yerushalayim.