Our Weekly Bible Portion (parashat hashavua, in Hebrew) is called "Ki Tisa" and deals with the Golden Calf incident. Visualize this: The Hebrews, having left behind Egypt and the pyramid building trade, find themselves leaderless as Moses went to meditate on the mountain and has not returned. What do they do? Wisely, they choose a new leadership which proclaims that Moses was some kind of crazy impostor and they institute a regular religion like the Egyptians. The Hebrews are only too happy to be able to breath free and dance and have some fun. It is obvious that they had a very low opinion of the miracles they just witnessed and they had never "really" believed in Moses's stories and impositions. It may be asked, if the people who actually lived the miracles did not believe in them, how can one who just heard about them from long dead priests (who hold shares in the miracle-business), can take seriously the whole thing?
The only thing standing between the Bible and total disbelief is the fact that the story of the golden calf is even mentioned. Being such a total, first-hand negation of the supposed miracles and divine intervention that Moses said took place, why not to cover the whole affair under the silence of history and forget the whole thing as if never happened? I would have done exactly that. But the story is there and we learn that Moses returned as the Hebrews were celebrating some kind of an orgy around the golden calf. Aaron, the chief priest of God, is revealed as an unprincipled whore, a man equally willing to serve Moses's God and the Golden Calf. Yet Aaron, the Cohen, emerges unharmed from the episode and his descendants are honored in the synagogues. The new leaders that dared to substitute Moses are duely punished and killed and the miserable Hebrew lumpen beaten back to Moses's cult and forced to aknowledge who the real God is and who is his representative on this Earth. Discipline and order is restored, Moses doubles the number of commandments and decretes death for the slightest sign of disrespect.
What do we learn from the Weekly Portion? That a prudent Hebrew will serve the Golden Calf with one eye open and watching the mountain, so that fanatic Moses will not catch him sinning with a liberated Hebrew slave-girl.
9 comments:
The real lesson is that the leadership will always protect its own. Where I live there has just been a controversy that has gained international attention - the local school district gave every high school student a free laptop computer (very nice) but the administration had the secret ability to active the cameras inside the computer remotely at any time and take pictures of the children (not nice). Today it was announced that the district's computer technicians have been "placed on indefinite leave". The techs claim the German soldier defense - they were "just following orders", which in this case is probably true. But this is how it works since time immemorial - find a scapegoat (preferably one without any rank or power), throw him over a cliff and the sins of the higher ups are forgiven.
K
Also illustrated in the Golden Calf story is how the coverup process works, post facto. Why is not Aaron punished? First of all, the rabbis explain, the mob has already killed Chur, so Aaron has no choice but to appear to be on the side of the calf builders - it is taqqiya so they don't kill him too. He only SEEMS to be on their side. He took charge of the calf building project only in order to slow it down - if he hadn't, they would have completed the calf even faster, his enablers (the rabbis) explain. And Aaron proclaims a festival in honor of God, not the calf - the people are the ones who turn it into a calf-festival. And besides, the calf built itself, he tells Moses later - he threw the gold into the fire and this calf just "came out", ( וַיֵּצֵא הָעֵגֶל הַזֶּה ). (even though we know earlier he used a cheret (stylus) in his own hands to make it and is totally lying!) And it works, Aaron is honored but 3,000 of his peon followers take the hit (plus who knows how many more in plague).
K
PS the Rabbis use the Golden Calf story to take a dig at Jesus. According to some, the people think Moses isn't coming back because SATAN has given them a vision of Moses flying up to heaven in his coffin. Get it?
In other versions, the Jews are confused about the time of their appointment (some things never change) - Moses said he is coming back in 40 DAYS but the Jewish day begins at sunset, so really he has one more day and is not late after all when he shows up a day late just in time for the calf orgy.
This is the great thing about Bible stories - they are simple stories but you can riff endlessly on them, for the next 3,000 years.
K
The rabbis extract the most extraordinary spiritual lessons from this story. Intelligent people quote the nonsense learned in the shiur. Ultimately, the subject matter has no importance at all. Kever Benjamin's phone book could serve our rabbis to preach ethics and religion.
As the crow flies, the distance the ancient Hebrews had to cover to reach Canaan could have been traversed in three weeks. Yet it took Moses all of forty years to reach the borders. As the character in the Solzhenitsyn novel put it God was not so much leading Moses as misleading him. Life for the runaways from Egypt was no fun at all, no ass grabbing, just praying all the year round.
God and Moses were crazy like a fox. They knew that the exile generation raised in Egypt could never conquer Canaan - they had the slave mentality. Two whole generations had to be raised in freedom in the harsh desert conditions before they were hardened enough to take on the conquest.
K
K, that is a good one, excellent example of the endless riffing that you pointed out earlier. Everyone wants a piece of the Exodus story, it is a paradigm of loss, exile and redemption.
Go down Moses, down to Egypt land
Go tell Pharaoh, let my people go as the blacks have it.
The other possibility, unexplored by the Rabbis, is that Moses, like any man, stubbornly refused to stop at a gas station and ask directions. Therefore they wandered around for 40 years making wrong turns. If he only had had a nav system on his camel, history would have been different.
K
Another spurious possibility is that the promised country was Canada, at 40 years walking distance. So he walked 40 years and then stopped.
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