Ki Tisa: The Golden Calf Or What I Did on My Winter Vacation

Roberta Baruch, February 28, 1997

"The rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating." Anne Lamott

I'm going to tell you two stories tonight. One is the parsha for the week we have just read, Ki Tisa, and the other is a story of my vacation a couple of months ago in Florida.

First the parsha. You may have seen the Hollywood version of this, but I think the text from Torah just as it is written contains many story lines and enough drama for a thousand Star War trilogies. I'd have to do a d'var on this section every year for the next 50 to do it justice. It is complex, has a great deal of overlap, numerous stories retold a little differently or a lot differently, perhaps by different authors, and several exciting climaxes as well as a few disappointing anticlimaxes. It has song and poetry and prayer and rules for the Shabbat. It has prescription and description. It has elements of familiar folk tales and forms the basis of legal statutes we observe today. It has narrative and dialogue. God describes Himself to Moses, so we have a sense of the God that the Children of Israel knew in the Exodus. And in it is one of the most bizarre incidents we have ever tried to comprehend, the story of the golden calf, that traverses from the supernatural to the most human of scales, from the sublime to the depths, the fears of the vulnerable, very human Children of Israel who remain ignorant of Moses' theophany, his face-to-face encounters with God. We have a story of transformations, of creations, of choices, and finally, of a nation preserved.

As you recall, the Children of Israel have accepted the covenant, they will do as God asks them without actually knowing what the covenant they've agreed to consists of. When this parsha begins, God is telling Moses that the Children of Israel must pay, whether rich or poor, a half-shekel for a census (the gap between rich and poor not being as wide then as it is today). God gives Moses instructions for building a washstand, a prescription for mixing a potion to anoint not only the Tent of Meeting and the Ark of the Pact, but also Aaron and his sons. God is architect, designer, engineer, contractor, pharmacist, and talent scout. God tells Moses to remind the Children of Israel to observe the Shabbat using the words we now sing as "Veshamru."

No sooner has God written the words on the tablets of stone with His own finger than He warns Moses to hurry down the mountain, because your people, as God calls them, have built a molten calf and have bowed down to worship it. God threatens to destroy the Children of Israel (that is, the children of the transformed Jacob) and offers to make of Moses and his descendants a great people. But Moses pleads with God to spare the people, Moses soothes the face of God, and asks God to remember his covenant as He has with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And also, by the way, to remember what the Egyptians might think of the God of Israel if He now kills those He brought out of Mitzraim. God agrees to let these people live.

Moses descends the mountain with the stone tablets inscribed with the finger of God. Joshua collars Moses along the way and says he hears sounds of war in the camp. Moses replies in poetry:

Not the sound of the song of prevailing/Not the sound of the song of failing/The noise of them that sing do I hear.

Moses strides into camp, sees the Children of Israel dancing around the golden calf, takes in the mounds of sacrifices the people have offered to the calf god, and then throws the tablets from his hand, and smashes them beneath the mountain, and takes the calf that they had made and burns it with fire, grinds it up until it is thin powder, strews it on the surface of the water, and makes the Children of Israel drink it.

When Moses asks Aaron how the people could have gotten so out of control, Aaron placates Moses: Let not my lord's anger flare up (what might Moses do now, he has already smashed the tablets, and made the people drink the powdered gold). Aaron defends himself further: You yourself know this people, how set on evil it is. They said to me: Make us a god who will go before us, for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him! So I said to them: Who has gold? Didn't they all have gold? They had stripped Egypt, going to their neighbors and requesting permission to borrow their finery, an offer the Egyptians could not refuse. Aaron continues his explanation to Moses, probably backing away bowing: They broke it off and gave it to me.

And here is what I think is one of the most human of verses in Torah. Aaron whines: I threw it on the fire, and out came this calf!

So picture this. Moses knows his people have angered God, have been afraid, have built themselves a golden calf to worship, but Moses has the tablets of stone, Moses must descend the mountain, Moses has promised the people. God has made Moses quite an offer, one we might have trouble refusing, knowing as we do the story of Passover, how the Children of Israel are a stiff-necked people, how they are never satisfied, how they came from slavery and complained all the way, "all we have is manna, it was better back in Egypt," and "Did you bring us here because there were not enough graves in Egypt?" Might Moses not have been tempted when God offered to annihilate the Children of Israel and offer a new covenant and a new beginning starting with Moses' own heirs? But Moses does not succumb, he is a noncompromiser, an intercessor, free to argue with God for the Children of Israel, for those who are already there. Moses does not hesitate to refuse God despite the tempting offer, one we might have fantasized about ourselves, to start a new nation, to forget about our pasts, to never have to deal with our forbears, we, ourselves at the head of a brand new family.

I can see Moses trudging down the mountain, meeting his henchman Joshua along the way, listening to Joshua's painful rationalization of the Children of Israel's behavior, that they are celebrating a war victory, "What does Joshua think," Moses might say, "that I would confuse the triumphant victory song of the sea with Carnivale?" and wearily Moses re-acknowledges the humanness of his people whom he already knows too well, who never stop their whining, their rationalizations, their idols, their wicked revelry. Moses continues to plod down Mt. Sinai, ruminating over Joshua's feeble attempt at justification, despairing of his own brother's weakness and perfidy in responding so readily to the Children of Israel's remonstrations against Moses. Moses has a mission, now it is his to do himself. God has guided Moses all the way to this point, but the golden calf episode has seemingly exhausted God's store of patience - God wished to wash His hands of the Children of Israel and to start again, a new creation, as He had done before, as He did with Noah and the flood, as He tried to do with Abraham, a new creation with his servant Moses as the new Adam. But Moses does not accept the offer, he girds himself to confront the people, summoning up all his strength, striding into the camp, shocked again at what he already knows is there, taking in this grievous transgression on the part of his people, growing incensed, hurling the sacred tablets to the ground where they break into a million pieces, and intimidating younger brother Aaron such that Aaron gives a child's wheedling answer to a an adult's harsh question - this calf just appeared, thinking a child's thoughts, does my brother Moses have eyes in the back of his head?

Moses has had some time to think of a punishment for his people as he slogged down the mountain trail gathering energy to do what he must, destroy the tablets, and he comes up with a brilliant solution, make the Children of Israel drink the golden calf so that it will forever be a part of the Jews. Perhaps this punishment, the drinking of the powdered golden calf - Moses has strewn it on the water and thus, he himself has to drink it too - as much as Moses' taking on the burden of the future of his people, perhaps these actions are what has made us and kept us a nation. We too at the site of three most dramatic and powerful religious experiences, the covenant with God, the descent into degradation, and Moses' plea to God forgo another creation, perhaps we too have ingested along with this bitter water, this powdered calf, the reality of our fearfulness, the reality of our desire for concreteness in our beliefs, the difficulty we have, especially in times of uncertainty, of relating to an unseen, unknowable God. A midrash says that all that has happened to the Jews since is in part traceable to the golden calf. Maybe all of us have a little gold in our bones - maybe this is the origin of the "pintele Yid," the collective unconscious memory of having stood at the bottom of Mt. Sinai receiving Torah!

Now, here is the second story.

I was down in Florida a couple of months ago, and I was having dinner with some of the old folks in my family, my father, who is 82, his next younger sister, my Aunt Mary, my father's Aunt Hannah, who is 89, and her husband - these old folks and my sister and I were having dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Sarasota on Christmas eve.

Aunt Hannah, who in her youth was known as Aunt Fanny to my father, a name he has never stopped using, was asking about my sister and me and my brother and our children, and what we all did. My father proudly announced that not only did I have a grandson, making him a grosse-zaydie, but that I also studied kaballah. Now you might think that my father knows something about kaballah, and indeed he does. He knows it's part of a mystical strain of Judaism, and that a lot of people are "into" it today. Those around that table in that Chinese restaurant in Sarasota looked impressed, or skeptical, or bemused, according to each one's nature, but not too interested. I did venture one more remark, to say that my studies in kaballah were based on my deepest interest, that is, the study of Torah, and that one had to be fully grounded in Torah before kaballah could be properly understood. And again, they all were suitably impressed, or skeptical, or bemused, but no one asked me any further about my studies. These oldsters are a generation or two removed from most of you in this congregation. They tell stories about their parents who came here from the old country, and how it was in the first few years here, and depending upon who tells the stories, they are proud (my father), sentimental (Aunt Fanny), comical (my Aunt Mary). These are rational Jews. Supremely rational. My father is an engineer.

Although this older generation of Jews, my relatives, aren't very interested in Judaism, they are highly connected to their Jewishness. The subject was quickly changed, and I, I am grateful, was let off the hook. What has happened here? These Jews, these old ones in their zeal to become Americans and to forget the heartbreak of the old country are not like the Children of Israel, spending 40 years in the desert, bemoaning their wonderful times in Minsk or Pinsk, their generation has become nearly assimilated, completely rational, tries to forget their past, has chosen to do what Moses did not, to become part of a new nation, and in so doing, has abandoned a portion of their Judaism - they are bagel and lox Jews. Pastrami. Kugel. Mooshu pork and kung pao shrimp Jews.

The fourth generation was represented in Florida too, my lovely niece and her boyfriend. She brought with her a massive album of pictures from her recent trip to Machu Picchu.

She had gone Machu Picchu, up in the high mountains of Peru, for a shamanistic learning experience. She and her group of fellow seekers of various religious convictions were there for a week. There was yoga, and vegan meals, and drumming, and meditation, and prayer. The new generation of Jews - reaching out for all the world has to offer, to other ancient traditions. Incorporating them into their very now Judaism.

Now, you may think this is all very interesting, but wonder what this has to do with the rich, powerful, and complex parsha for this week, Ki Tisa.

And I think it has everything to do with it. I think the common thread is that rationality squeezes the juice from our religious practices.

My father and his generation in some part abandoned the Judaism of their fathers, especially the superstitions that passed for wisdom, as soon as they could. Although my father learned prayerbook Hebrew from his own grandfather and has been part of a minyan for many years, and despite the fact that he is Jewish to his marrow, he has very little knowledge of Judaism and has never studied Jewishly beyond his bar mitzvah. The ruah, the soul, the spirit, the breath of Judaism I think is embarrassing to him. Kaballah is from some other world than the one he lives in, from some esoteric place "out there," still, he is proud that I study. He can read Hebrew, but cannot translate it. Even so, I believe my family has inherited a great gift, because my father's family had scholars in their past, they were from Satanov, a center of Hasidism and Kaballah study.

On my mother's side, we have a rich tradition of Jewish food and whole baskets full of old wive's tales, prejudices, and conventionality, this side of the family came from the ghetto in Riga, not long removed from subsistence farming. Speaking Yiddish did not prepare the daughters of the Latvian countryside to pass learning down, and much of my mother's Jewishness consisted of preparing the holiday meals, prejudices against nonJews, and an outlook characterized by her familiar litmus test "Is it good for the Jews?" Women of her age were simply not taught they had any part in Jewish culture, tradition, or learning outside their home. Although my mother vehemently denies it, as children, my sister and I hung red felt stockings on the mantelpiece on Christmas eve, and I remember being delighted by a tiny bottle of Jergan's lotion and tickled by the silliness of an orange as stocking stuffer when we lived in California. How easy assimilation would have been, we were far away from our family back East, and we practiced the secular traditions of our neighbors, not that we are unique among Jews, or nonJews for that matter, in choosing those particular observances.

It seems that none of the joy, the awe, the depth, of the Torah of Judaism was available to us, and except for a fluke of distance, I would have followed in their footsteps, a vaguely "ethnic Jew," a bagel and lox Jew, a mooshu pork and kung pao shrimp Jew. From the age of my confirmation at 14 to my coming of age at age 40, I had abandoned all but two Jewish practice; taking my children to my parent's home for the Passover seder and living with a sense of nagging guilt every Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that was not strong enough, however, to press me to attend services. My children were growing up, and I was divorced. I began to know somehow that our vague "let them choose their own religion" might not be the healthiest or most loving nurturance for my children, and that, however distorted or meaningless it might have seemed to me, they did have a heritage and I could introduce them to it. So I brought my girls, then aged 13, 10, and 5 to Oak Park Temple, where Rabbi Gerson had just arrived. I had searched out all the congregations in the western suburbs, and found that my girls' lack of religious training and non-Jewish dad would not be a handicap here. And since we lived too far away for me to just drop them off, I began to attend the Sunday morning activities here, including Rabbi Gerson's Torah study classes.

I expressed my desire to explore this way: "Judaism has lasted 3000 years. There must be more to it than a Passover seder." And, thanks to fortuitous geography, I began to learn. Ironically, part of what I learned is that there is not more to it than a Passover seder.

My daughters and niece are fairly typical of many young Jews today, searching for connections everywhere, from Machu Picchu, to drum circles in the Glaciers, to Rainbow gatherings in the deepest woods. And they might even have encountered kaballah. But they too, miss out: they do not study Torah.

We have been like the Children of Israel, always forgetting the miracles that happened just yesterday, grumbling, grumbling, what have you done for us lately, unable to fathom a unseen God, making rationality our golden calf.

And yet, and yet. We have drunk of the bitter water. We have not, as Moses did not, entirely cut off our past. We may not know exactly what we are looking for, but Ki Tisa tells us clearly, veshamru, the Israelite people shall keep the Shabbat. Part of that Shabbat for us must include study.

To use a phrase that would be familiar to my children, the golden calf is on the cusp between the literal and the mystical, the place where prayer is, the root of worship, the connection with the real and the imagined, wherein we can fashion a new creation for ourselves.

Judaism does not sculpt a calf-god we can see in the world. Judaism brings God into the world, by worship, by observing Shabbat, by study. The worship of the calf is about what we can see. The study of Torah is about who we can become, who we are, what our relationship to God, and thus to each other is, who God is in our lives.

And the story of the golden calf is a story of creation with a twist. It tells us that it isn't only God who creates a new relationship with life for us. Like Moses, we can take what we already have, and turn it into what we long for. And we have a truly life-affirming and creative way to do it, that has nothing to do with the rational. The study of Torah is rich, juicy, and fascinating. We can live our lives according to its teachings if we study. As our morning prayer says, "These are the obligations without measure, whose reward too is without measure: to honor our father and mother, to perform acts of loving kindness, to attend the house of study daily, to welcome the stranger, to visit the sick, to rejoice with the bride and groom, to console the bereaved, to pray with sincerity, to make peace when there is strife; and the study of Torah is equal to it all, because the study of Torah leads to it all."

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