by Rabbi Richard Hirsch

February 21, 2008

The story of the molten (aka “golden”) calf in this week’s portion is not as obvious as it appears. What exactly is the sin committed by the Israelites? The film The Ten Commandments presents a titillating combination of riot, orgy, and biblical tailgate party. But the precipitating narrative is not so clear: “When the people saw that Moses delayed descending from the mountain, the people ganged up on Aaron and demanded: Get up! Make gods for us who will go in front of us, because this man Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we don’t know what has become of him!” (32:1)

The understanding is that the people experience Moses’ prolonged absence as a source of anxiety and demand that Aaron do something.

The customary view is that the sin was idolatry, as if the text describes something akin to an out-of-control class that realizes the teacher isn’t coming and they can get away with the type of behavior they’ve been longing for.

But wouldn’t the logical step be for the people to say to Aaron: “Look, Moses isn’t coming back, someone has to be in charge, you’re from the same family — why don’t you take over?” Instead, we are left to puzzle out the connection between the missing Moses and the molten metal.

Perhaps what the text suggests is that at least for some of the people, Moses had become quasi-divine, and in his absence some other representation of divinity needed to be created. From this perspective, the sin of idolatry may have begun well before anyone imagined a calf: After all, if the response to Moses’ absence is to ask for a replacement god, we might deduce that the people have already made the man Moses into something more — and perhaps that is the true idolatry.

Then consider Aaron’s bizarre behavior. Jewish tradition inherits the obligation to exculpate Aaron’s apostasy. He was stalling for time, some say, or he simply tossed the gold into the furnace — and out popped a golden calf. Others suggest that Aaron feared for his life and had to submit to the people’s demands.

But the Torah is almost brutal in describing Aaron’s complicity: “And when Moses saw the people, that it was turned loose, because Aaron had turned it loose…and the Lord struck the people because they made the calf, which Aaron had made.”

So what appears to be a story of idolatry and rebellion turns into a political narrative, written and transmitted by those who were clearly no fans of the priestly prerogatives claimed by the Aaronide kohen clan. It is certainly plausible that the Golden Calf story involves the attempted invalidation of the kohanim through the representation of their ancestor as incompetent and idolatrous.

But what did Aaron do? Some scholars suggest that bovine imagery was a common feature of ancient Near Eastern iconography, raising the possibility that Aaron was attempting to shape a bull-throne on which the invisible presence of YHVH — the same presence that some of the people seemed to think Moses embodied — could be imagined.

In this regard, we should remember that the Golden Calf story interrupts the Torah narrative of the plans for and building of the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary that includes an ark upon which two molten images of keruvim, or cherubs, are placed, presumably as resting places for the tangible presence of God — the God who in some biblical texts is called Yosheiv Keruvim, the one who sits upon the keruvim, or Rocheiv Keruvim, the one who rides on the keruvim. Aaron’s sin may in fact be presumption: claiming authority over Moses by crafting the imagery that will presumably assure the Israelites of God’s presence.

But in the popular imagination, the nuance between the imagery that supports and hosts the invisible deity and the deity itself dissolves; the people cannot read the refinement. And so the story becomes one of misread symbolism and misunderstood ritual, suggesting the multiple levels of understanding — from the simple to the sophisticated — on which religious ritual operates.

The Golden Calf story ends with Moses presiding over the melting down of the image and scattering its residue into the water that the people are then compelled to consume. In what appears to be a trial by ordeal, those guilty of participation in the incident presumably display some sort of reaction and are executed by the avenging Levites.

The Golden Calf text illustrates the difficulty in navigating the journey between the abstract and the corporeal, between concept and application. If scholars agree on anything, it is that the biblical texts embody a pervasive polemic against paganism. For all the parallels between ancient Israel and the cultures among which it lived, this profound distinction — the sublime and sophisticated suggestion that God is not of nature but beyond it; not in the world but transcending it; not bound by creation but presiding over it — lies at the heart of the Israelite religion and later Judaism.

Richard Hirsh is executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.

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