An important part of this parashah is the story of the golden calf. Moses disappears onto Mount Sinai, where he spends 40 days and 40 nights talking face to face with God, and at some point during that time, Bnei Israel approach his brother Aaron and say to him: Come, make us a God. Which he proceeds to do, asking them to bring to him their gold ear-rings. He then melts down the jewellry and sculpts a golden calf for them.
Is this not surprising? Aaron does not say -"Let's wait just a little longer - I'm sure that he'll be here in a minute." Is this not what would be expected of someone in his position: he is the brother, you might say the next of kin - is it not the same as the next in line? In the not very distant past, he spoke on Moses' behalf to Pharaoh, when Moses himself felt he could not do so. We have been told already that he is to be the High Priest - Aaron seems very close to Moses. And yet he complies with this aberrant request without a word of protest.
Rabbi Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg wrote a commentary on the Book of Exodus, entitled The Particulars of Rapture. This book contains 60 pages of writing about this one parashah alone.
One of the things she says about the Golden Calf event is that even though the story is told in the Torah much later on, it actually happens in close juxtaposition to the revelation: at one moment, God is manifest and all is light and clarity, and then just as suddenly, confusion reigns, the Bnei Israel lose their way and turn to idolatry. It is like night and day - good and evil are very close to each other, and it is sometimes hard to see when the transition from the one to the other occurs. It may take only a small shift.
Where is this shift here? Rabbi Zornberg says that it is all in one word "Boshesh". Va yar ha am ki boshesh Moshe laredet min ha har." verse 1 of chapter 32. Boshesh means "delay". "And the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down the mountain."Apparently this is the only time this word is used in the Torah.
Rashi says about this: "When Moses ascended the mountain, he told the people: In 40 days time I'll be back. They thought that the day of his ascent was included in the count, while he meant 40 complete days which began with the night. Since he ascended on the 7th of Sivan, the count began the following night and ended on the 17th of Tamuz. But, says Rashi, on the 16th of Tamuz, Satan came and threw the world into chaos: he showed them an image of darkness and deep fog and chaos, as if to say: "Surely Moses is dead - that is why chaos is come to the world".
In other words, the Bnei Israel suddenly experienced great doubt - we all know how that can happen - we trust someone happily, without question, until one day something goes a little wrong, and the thought occurs to us that maybe we have been blind, that it may be that this person is not what they seem... we experience a sense of abandonment and curse ourselves for not having perceived this earlier, the new scenario looks more and more credible the longer we dwell upon it and we say to ourselves - How could I have been so stupid! We are pervaded by a sense of fear and loneliness, a sense that something that could be trusted, like the earth beneath our feet, is subject to earthquakes and liquefaction, how could we have been so stupid - we experience pain and guilt, maybe even anger at the person - we are now quite sure that we have been deceived, we writhe in anguish.
This is Satan's work, say the Rabbanim. In modern parlance we might talk of paranoia. To the person experiencing it, it is a form of fear: When is it right to mistrust? How do we handle this sort of situation? Maybe what is needed is to examine the past record of that person - in this case Moses has so far never given bnei Israel a reason to doubt him...
There is another interesting fact about this one verse which is the first in chapter 32. The last verse in the chapter just before, which is also in this parashah, tells us that at this moment, Moses is receiving from God the two tables of testimony, written with the finger of God. A most holy moment above, juxtaposed with a moment of evil below. The contrast is very great. How could this happen?
This is where Rabbi Zornberg speaks to my heart. She writes about a sense of abandonment and she quotes modern psychological theory, in particular Winnicott.
Some of you may be familiar with the psychological literature around abandonment. Besides Winnicott, the main writer on this topic was an Englishman named Bowlby. He wrote about attachement. Abandonment is the other side of that particular coin. A child needs to have someone reliable to attach to in order to grow up as a healthy adult. For instance, if we consider Moses' very early life, we may have experienced a sense of relief to realise that when he was rescued from the Nile as an infant in a reed basket by Pharaoh's daughter, the person chosen to be his nurse was his own mother. He was not separated from her for very long.
Bowlby studied babies who were put into day-care during World War II, because their mothers had to work. And he found that the babies did not fare well if the mother was away for a long time, and they fared even worse if the staff changed frequently. Of course, different babies would have different reactions - some were more needy than others, right from the start. The older the child, the better he or she could cope with the separation. There is a lot of theory written about this, about the way a child's mind develops and how long a child can keep an image of a missing mother - it is mostly the mother - in their mind, and what happens when this time is exceeded. Basically at first the child experiences discomfort, then pain and then what is termed trauma.
We have a similar situation here with Bnei Israel. They were only a young people. Moses had lead them to Mt Sinai and all the power and knowledge seemed to be vested in him. Moses himself sometimes promoted this view: he set himself up as sole judge and jury to whom everyone came for justice, and it was his father in law who was not a Hebrew who said to him, Moses, this is too much for any one person, choose among the wise men in your midst and empower them to deal with the easier cases, and keep only the tricky ones for yourself. So Bnei Israel saw Moses as an extremely powerful person - much as a baby sees a parent - and they felt bereft when he was missing. They felt very anxious and needy and they quickly wanted to do something about this feeling, by getting hold of something else to fill the gap. That something else turned out to be the golden calf.
The golden calf is the end product of a psychological process: Rabbi Zornberg quotes from the work Meshech chochmah, by a 19th century Polish Rabbi called Rabbi Simcha HaCohen. For bnei Israel, she says, "Moses had become the source of supernatural power" The beginning of the people's corruption consists in their projecting all power onto Moses, the man who got them out of Egypt. In other words, the idolatry began long before the Golden Calf. The other side of projecting all the power onto another person is that there is no power left for anyone else. Every individual feels weak and in need of protection and salvation. It is an intolerable situation. So the Bnei Israel bow low in front of the calf and say in verse 4 "This is your God O Israel, which brought you out of the land of Egypt". They know this is not the case, and yet this is what they say. And in verse 7 of the same chapter, God who has seen this describes it to Moses "Go down, for your people that you brought out of the land of Egypt have behaved corruptly..." And then he mentions the fact that they are a "stiffnecked people" kshei oref, which would seem to entail just the opposite that they are not easily changed...
Maybe in fact they have not changed, they have remained the way they were in Egypt, idol-worshippers? What is happening could be seen as a resistance to the new way. This is a fairly common reaction when one tries anything new - at first we fail, then we reconsider and try again, and maybe we have to go through this many times, it does not matter in which domain, whether it is learning a new skill or getting rid of a habit, just doing something new is always a bit fraught.
We need to understand this and apply compassion rather than condemnation. The road is hard, the road is long, we stumble and sometimes we fall. The wonder is in how we pick ourselves up and carry on, just like Bnei Israel in the desert, yet again.
Shabbat shalom.
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