Torah reading: Exodus 30:11-34:35
Haftarah: 1 Kings 18:20-39.
And so now we come to the story of the Golden Calf. The Israelites, impatient and worried that Moses has vanished forever on Mount Sinai, tell Aaron to make them "gods that will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him."
Aaron (surprisingly, for Moses' right-hand man) doesn't put up much or, really, any resistance. He tells all the people to bring their gold jewelry, then takes it and makes it into a golden calf -- and the people are delighted. "These are your gods, O Israel, that brought you up out of Egypt." A festival is declared, and the people spend the next day making sacrifices to the idol, followed by a riotous night of feasting, drinking, and "indulging in revelry" (which I'm assuming refers to sexual activity.)
Needless to say, when Moses comes down the mountain and sees this, he is furious. He smashes the tablets of the Law which God has made, grinds the idol to powder and makes the Israelites drink it. Then he calls the faithful to his side; the Levites rally around him, and a mass slaughter of the idolaters begins. "And that day about three thousand of the people died."
The next day Moses goes back up the mountain to plead before God for the people of Israel, as he did the previous day when God had told him what was happening in the Israelite camp. "Please forgive their sin --" he begs -- "but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written." God tells Moses he punishes those who have sinned against him, nobody else. Moses is to continue to lead the people to the Promised Land -- but God strikes them with a plague first in punishment for their sin of idolatry.
I'm rather tired today so I'll keep it short, but I have one big takeaway from this story -- along with a few questions which I'm curious about :)
To me, the big theme to this story seems to be: people, human beings, need to worship something or someone. We crave an object of worship -- the more beautiful, the more magnificent, the better. The people of Israel were so desperate for a god, something divine, something they could see and bow down to and pray to, that they were willing to give up their own personal jewelry for the common goal (creating the golden calf) -- which is a rather remarkable example of community spirit, when you think about it :D If we do not have a god, or at least an ideal (which some might argue is a god in a sense), we will invent one. And there's nothing intrinsically bad about this. If people hadn't been so inspired by, say, the ideal of human rights or democracy or ending slavery that they had been willing to die for those things, we would live in quite a different world today.
The problem comes when we are so desperate for an object of worship that we turn to something not worth worshiping: something that glitters and gleams, outwardly beautiful, but inwardly empty. I'm thinking of much celebrity culture, for example, or the allure of consumerism: owning expensive cars and dining in fine restaurants. And then there are even darker forms as well, where we turn to the worship of Moloch (for example, the worship of brutal force and power in Nietzsche's writings and then, of course, Nazi Germany.) And perhaps the most dangerous temptation of all is to worship ourselves.
Now for the questions that came to mind as I was reading this:
1) Why did Moses grind up the idol, mix the dust with water, and make the Israelites drink it? Does this have some ritual or symbolic significance (i.e. by consuming the idol they had worshiped, they symbolically destroyed its "power")? Or did Moses simply want to ensure it could never be put back together again?
2) "Please forgive their sin, but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written." Growing up in a Christian church, I was taught that this refers to the Book of Life in Revelation, where the names of the saved are written. Of course, now I know that (if anything) it's undoubtedly the other way around and Revelation is referencing Exodus. But what does this line, in itself, refer to? Is it a meta-reference to the Torah (which in the story hasn't been written yet, of course!) or to something else that I'm not familiar with? I'm quite curious. :)
That's all, folks :) Shabbat Shalom!