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| William de Brailes: The Israelites Worship the Golden Calf and Moses Breaks the Tablets (C. 1250) |
By Rabbi Yehuda Hausman
If the word of God, in stone engraved, can crumble as easily
as bread; if God’s voice, chiseled in rock, can shatter like a pitched dinner
plate; if the children of Israel can cast off their heavenly covenant with a
casualness not unlike the unclasping of an earring or a necklace; if it is all
so easily dismissed, what chance is there for loyalty and faith, when weighed against
the allure of a pot of gold, or the lustrous aura of a gilded calf?
The narrative of the molten calf is unique on account of its
plethora of vivid images. Moses and God, high upon the mountain, are engaged in
august discourse, while far below, the restless people, dance their way from
anxiety to frivolity, from fear to wretched faithlessness. Somehow, Aaron becomes
a harassed sort-of baby-sitter, longing for the sound of an engine in the
driveway, his ear tilted in the hope of the sound of jingling keys outside the
door, all while the children run amuck.
First they want gods
to lead them. Perhaps, Aaron wonders, they will settle for a single graven calf. The people desire
sacrifices; perhaps the ‘construction
of an altar’ will provide some delay. They
wish for merriment, so Aaron declares a night vigil, a final interlude for the
people to reconsider or Moses to return and intercede: ‘Tomorrow, a feast to
the Lord,” he says (Exodus 32:1-6). We know what ensues.
However there is no image more vivid than Moses’ reaction as
he spies his people making sport of all that he holds dear: “And it was when he
neared the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned, he threw
the tablets from his hands and smashed them beneath the mountain” (Exodus
32:19).
We have journeyed with Moses, our teacher, as he led Israel from
slavery to freedom, from the dry-bed of the Red Sea to the sloping mount of Revelation.
His defeat now is palpable. There is wrath in his eyes, rage on his face. It is
as if he has found some stranger in bed with his spouse. What use are words when
the pain is physical? The covenant has already been smashed to pieces.
But quite possibly, wittingly or otherwise, Moses conveyed
in rage what could not be conveyed in thunder and lightening, in the great columns
of smoke and flame that accompanied the giving of the Ten Commandments. Perhaps
what was missing in the fireworks was an essential lesson about the meaning of
loyalty. In the moment when Moses’ anger mirrored God’s anger, the children of
Israel began to see the thunder anew. Partnerships, covenants, trust … they flow
both ways. The voice of God could only be engraved on stone, but it is the
image of Moses’ burning rage that gets chiseled in Israel’s heart.
The verse that follows compounds the lesson: Moses took the
calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to fine-powder, scattered
it over the water and made the Israelites drink it (Exodus 32:20).
Moses appears to want Israel to “taste” what it has done. His
people must ingest the concoction and savor its distastefulness. In this way,
they may come to appreciate the foulness of the whole affair. Many commentators
wonder: From what source was this water drawn? Some, including Torah translator
and interpreter Robert Alter, suggest this was the water that Moses
“miraculously provided for the people, which would be a compounding of irony.”
In a different vein, the 12th Century rabbi, Abraham ibn
Ezra, points to Deuteronomy 9:21 where Moses states that he took the grounded
dust of the calf and flung it into “the stream that came down from the
mountain.” This was hardly any old wadi, it was the very stream that swept down from Sinai and sustained the camp.
Faithfulness has little meaning without some awareness of
the repercussions of faithlessness. How disloyalty dissolves the bond of trust,
how it pollutes the waters of love — human and divine. Faith is no paltry
thing, because the memory of broken faith endures forever. Stone tablets shatter,
and God’s voice is lost in the wind; perhaps more than anything else, it was
the Golden Calf that sealed the covenant.
Rabbi Yehuda Hausman
is the spiritual leader of the The Shul on Duxbury, an independent Orthodox
minyan. He is a teacher at the Academy for Jewish Religion, CA, and a lecturer
at American Jewish University’s Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies. He writes
about the weekly parasha on his blog, rabbihausman.com.
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