Revalation and the Golden Calf

Ki Tissa
Exodus 30:11-34:35

Précis: The parasha begins with a census of the people, accomplished by the collection of a half shekel. We then return to a description of Tabernacle items, including the basin, anointing oil, and incense. The holy work of building the Tabernacle is to be interrupted by Shabbat. Then we return to narrative. Moses is given the two tablets and he descends from Mount Sinai. There he sees the people worshipping the Golden Calf. The tablets are smashed and the evil doers are punished. Moses returns up the mountain, and we next have the articulation of the 13 attributes of God. Moses carves a new set of tablets, and returns to the People, his face radiant.

Exodus 32:1 “When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make us a god who shall go before us from the land of Egypt - we do not know what has happened to him.’”

As JTS Chancellor Ismar Schorsch has taught (Chancellor's Parashah Commentary, 2/26/05) “The jarring truth about the episode of the golden calf is that it occurred at Mount Sinai.” Just when Moses is receiving the Tablets of the law, the People demonstrate a loss of faith and demand that Aaron create a “god who shall go before us.” The spirit of Revelation is replaced by wanton idolatry.

How is it possible that this people - who had only recently seen God’s miracle of redemption from Egypt and had witnessed Revelation at Mount Sinai - could so suddenly demand that Aaron fashion an idol (specifically barred by the Second Commandment)? The Rabbis suggest that the people were motivated by fear. Moses was gone, and the people felt abandoned. Some opine that the People retained a slave mentality and lacked the courage to maintain their new convictions. Others suggest that the People felt the need for an alternative intermediary with God, and that an idol was needed (in Moses’ absence) to serve the function.

The juxtaposition of spiritual heights and moral depths is indeed “jarring” as Schorsch teaches us. On the other hand, this is not the first such literary collision we witness in the Bible. Creation and Eden are followed by sin and expulsion. The Flood is followed by a rainbow. The hope of Abraham and the long-awaited birth of Isaac collide with the Akedah and with the death of Sarah. The People rejoice after their deliverance through the Sea, but immediately complain about a lack of food and water. Here, the Law is given to Moses as the People worship a Golden Calf.

We live in a universe filled with uncertainty. Our human ancestors, trying to establish a mental framework to understand what they could not comprehend, imagined a pantheon of gods who could be responsible for the physical manifestations they observed – the wind, the rain, the sun, the sea. It was the divinely inspired Abraham who first understood the Unity which rests behind all that is.

But as the incident of the Golden Calf suggests, we are not all Abraham’s equal. We retain much of the mentality of the People who worship the idol. We anoint our own “intermediaries” to protect us (or divert us) from the vagaries of life, from sports figures to politicians, from religious leaders to rock stars. We worship our own idols, be they money, or food, or ostentatious homes, or pathetic TV pundits.

Because human beings seek to control things, we have the erroneous belief that the world is supposed to be logical and stable. As our text demonstrates, the world bounces from side to side, in stark difference to what we believe “should be.” Einstein famously stated that “God does not play dice with the universe” but it is Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” which we accept as an explanation of how the universe really runs.

Like Moses, we can come into contact with the Ineffable, but such contact is unpredictable and fleeting. We yearn for emotional peaks which only rarely occur. But just as an orchestra must engage in hundreds of hours of practice to produce a moment of inspired musicianship, we need to strive continually for that fleeting contact with that which is beyond our day to day lives. It is only when we continuously seek Abraham’s vision of Unity that we can leave behind the slave mentality and find the courage to live by the best of our convictions.