This past week, Jews read the portion of the Torah (first five books of the Bible) called "Ki Tissa" (Exodus 30:11-34:35), which includes the incident of the Golden Calf. Here's a D'Var Torah (sort of a sermon, literally "word of Torah") that I delivered at my synagogue this morning during Shabbat services.
Everything seems to going great. The people of Israel have been liberated from Egypt with signs and wonders, miracles and song. They received the Ten Commandments and heard God’s own voice. Moses goes up the mountain. He receives the great stone tablets.
Then he comes down the mountain and encounters horror – the sin of the golden calf. Moses is outraged. God is outraged. We’re outraged. Cecil B. DeMille is outraged. It takes a whole lot of negotiation and rebuilding of trust to keep the project of the people of Israel from being permanently defunded.
In Jewish thought, the sin of the golden calf was the great sin – the closest we come to original sin. The stuff with Adam and Eve, as far as Jews are concerned, was a misdemeanor compared to the sin of the golden calf. The Talmud, in describing it, compares Israel to “a shameless bride who plays the harlot within her bridal canopy” (Shab. 88b). In the New Testament, St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, turns that Jewish guilt against itself, declaring that as a result of the sin of the golden calf, God turned away from the Israelites and “and gave them over to the worship of the sun, moon and stars.” Islamic sources are more charitable, but add another twist, saying that Samiri rather than Aaron was responsible for giving in to the people’s demand for a golden calf. And who was Samiri? He was, according to some commentators, the slave for whose defense Moses killed the Egyptian taskmaster more than 40 years earlier, the incident that got the whole saga of Exodus rolling. What a poignant, ironic, betrayal!
Like any original sin, the sin of the golden calf had repercussions. According to tradition, Moses came down from the mountain on the 17th day of Tammuz. The Midrash links the golden calf to a day we already mark as a fast day, a day – like the 9th of Av – to which the tradition assigns one terrible event after another: the Babylonians breaching the walls of Jerusalem on their way to destroying the first Temple, the Romans breaching the walls of Jerusalem on their way to destroying the second temple, the end of sacrifices during the Babylonian siege. This is also the date on which Apustmus (not clear who he was) burned a Torah, and when somebody (not clear who or when) put an idol in the Temple.
Historians and some rabbinic sources draw another, less speculative, connection. The sin of the golden calf parallels the erection many years later by King Jeroboam of the Northern Kingdom of Israel of two golden calves in the temples of Beth-El and Dan (I Kings 12:26ff.). Jeroboam uses almost the exact same words as the Israelites in Ki Tissa: “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” Whether his sin repeated the crime of the desert generation, as the Rabbis would claim, or whether our parsha’s story is a mythical backward projection of the later event, as many historians would say, is almost beside the point.
There’s a yet deeper way to connect the sin of the golden calf to the sad cycle of God’s always-frustrated efforts to build a perfect structure in which humanity can live. In the very beginning, God creates the world, in six majestic days, declaring each step good and the final product very good. God plants the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve promptly spoil the perfection that God had created. Other disappointments follow: the generation of the flood, the tower of Babel.
Eventually, God systematically undoes creation, step by step, in ten great plagues, to give birth to a people. He gives Israel a perfect Torah, a universe of words to give a new shape to the universe of planets and oceans and birds and fish. He plants his people at the foot of Mount Sinai. They promptly spoil things again.
According to some strands in our tradition that are willing to reverse the Biblical chronology, God then, in reaction to the sin of the Golden Calf, orders the building of the mishkan – the tabernacle – so that his people can constructively channel their need for something physical to sustain them. The mishkan is often compared to the cosmos itself, and if you read the description of its construction carefully, you will notice clear parallels to the creation story in Genesis. The Mishkan is a model universe for a model people. The cosmos is shrunk to a tent, where words and deeds and people can come together in unity and peace. Then, right after the consecration of the mishkan, Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron, commit their own original sin, bringing strange fire to the altar and getting themselves zapped to death. So again, God has built a vessel for perfection, and we have shattered it. To make that tragic progression even clearer, some rabbinic sources suggest that Aaron’s sons died not only for their own transgressions, but also as delayed punishment for Aaron’s involvement in the incident of the golden calf. Everything comes around.
This whole pattern is powerful and tragic, and simple. Except for one thing. One very big thing.
We don’t know what the sin of the golden calf was. Maybe it was outright idol-worship. Maybe the calf was meant to be worshipped as a god. But the Rabbis tend to read the sin as less terrible than that. Some argue that the calf was not meant to be another god, a foreign god, but only a representation of the God of Israel, the God who did liberate them from Egypt. That would be a violation of the commandment against graven images, not a violation of the commandment against worshipping other gods. Maybe, some suggest, the calf wasn’t even a representation, but rather the seat for the true, invisible, God, just like the cherubim that eventually graced the ark in the holy of holies as the seat for God’s presence. Or maybe, Ibn Ezra argues, the calf didn’t have anything to do with any god at all, but rather meant to represent Moses, as a symbolic substitute for a leader who the people were convinced would never come down from the mountain. A mistake, but not a metaphysical betrayal.
But, of course, most of the great sins described in the Bible are similarly ambiguous. What was Nadav and Avihu’s sin, after all, exactly? They brought strange fire. Were they engaging in pagan worship? Or were they trying to worship God wrongly? Were they, as some sources suggest, just wrapped up in religious ecstasy, trying to avoid the sin of the golden calf by transcending physicality, going to the altar naked and without a fixed ritual? Or was this not a sin at all, but willful self-sacrifice, a means of purifying the mishkan and achieving immortality as their bodies and souls were directly consumed by the divine fire? All these are possibilities.
What was the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? It’s not entirely clear. Was it even a sin at all, or just an appropriate developmental landmark? What was the sin of the generation of the flood? It’s very obscure. What was the sin of the builders of the Tower of Babel? What was the sin of Moses for which he was denied entry to the Promised Land? Consider the endless divrei Torah you’ve heard on that subject alone.
The various punishments for our mysterious sins are also terribly inconsistent. The waters of the flood. The fire at the mishkan. The blood for the sin of the golden calf. Banishment for Adam and Eve. Pre-emptive banishment, so to speak, for Moses. Sometimes God takes it in stride, staying focused like a good parent on the infraction and its consequences. Sometimes, God seems to lose all sense of proportion.
So, if we’re imperfect, which we surely are, the shape of our imperfection is often obscure, and the connection to the consequences is often mysterious.
But ain’t that the truth? Isn’t that how we actually experience life? All our deeds, especially it seems our misdeeds, have ripple effects forwards and even backwards. We know we disappoint God, and we surely disappoint ourselves, but we can never be sure – and it comes close to blasphemy whenever we claim to be sure – exactly how we’ve transgressed, and exactly how or why God has reacted. Sometimes our worst sins seem to leave no mark at all. Sometimes our best efforts go terribly wrong. Sin is by nature messy, disorderly, and multi-dimensional, in ways that the Rabbis argue is actually necessary for human existence. This is not an excuse for building golden calves, God forbid. And it is not to deny that some crimes are crystal clear in their evil. But it does suggest that, in the face of the awesome beauty and majesty of God’s potentially perfect orderly creation, neither we nor perhaps even God is fully in control of the messily confounding mystery of our own, terrible but also oddly noble, repeated and ordinary falling short.
(Also posted on lawreligionethics.org)
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