The Golden Calf, like so many cult movies (the other kind)
Hi and welcome back from a Purim of joy, of baked goods, of stomping just a second too long for the Megilla reader's liking. Hope you enjoyed the various forms of costumery and didn't see any provocative getups. (But if you did please send photos.)
The calendar says a build-up to Exodus is on our minds, what with Passover barely three weeks away. The portion, however, says the Israelites have already left Egypt and gotten up to no good. If you want to read up on Exodus, you know where to find some solid TGH-ing on the subject. But what's this about mischief, of the gilded bovine kind? The oddest muscle in human anatomy is the calf. So let's stretch it, shall we?
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They're some of the most portentous lines in Biblical history.
"And the nation saw that Moses was tarrying from coming down the mountain, so they converged on Aaron and said 'get up and make us a god that will go in front of us.'"
The start of Chapter 32 in our portion of Ki Tisa documents a restive Israelite population, wondering where a heaven-ascended Moses has gone. Within hours, of course, matters would go from simply impatient to epically tragic — Aaron suggesting earrings be rounded up, a Golden Calf is fashioned, a party is thrown and God is ready to wipe Israelites off the map before cartography was even invented.
Moses, not yet down a couple tablets, then successfully lobbies to save the Israelites from the "I Am Legend"-level destruction.
Much commentary ink has been spilled on the entire episode of the “eigel masecha” — who did what and who could be forgiven for said doing and wanting.
But one question that deserves as much if not more attention than any of the others is what exactly the Israelites were hoping to achieve with this Calf — what truly bothered them that led to its creation. Because it's surprisingly mysterious in the text.
Our kneejerk reaction is to say it was a loss of faith in God. After all, the people noted the need for a new "elohim" to go in front of them, and what they created was itself a God-like creature they worshipped and celebrated, in the process neglecting the actual God.
This idea — that they had created a God replacement — is what lingers in us from elementary school, from "The Ten Commandments" and, maybe most of all, from common sense. They lost faith in God, and they needed somewhere new to put that faith.
And so thus Rashi says, noting the Israelites' words to "make up a god that will go before us," pre-calf in 32:1, and "these are your gods," postcalf in 32:4. Rashi throws in a (mis)calculation of the 40 days to explain why they believed he was even late (Moses thought they'd start counting the first full day after he left instead of including that day) and calls it a commentary. Lost faith in God ----> attempt to replace Him with a Golden Calf. Done and done.
Or is it (or is it?)
Because there's one small problem: the text never says they lost faith in God.
The Israelites' main concern — indeed, their apparent only concern — is that they no longer have Moses to lead them. Remember the sequence: Moses appeared to be delayed coming down from the mountain. The Israelites come to Aaron and say, "This man Moses who has brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what happened to him." (32:1). And then, when the calf is built, note that this calf is "who brought us up from the land of Egypt" (32:4), citing the same language as they did about Moses' disappearance. This seems as clear as a Sinai sky: they missed Moses, and they needed a new (human) leader. God has nothing to do with it.
Indeed, this is the position of Nachmanides who, damn what Mrs. Harris taught us in fifth grade, says this was not about God and all about Moses, "They said 'someone to go before us, not a God who gives life and death,’" he writes, citing and criticizing Rashi. "They wanted an alternative to Moses." To Nachmanideswhat the people are worried about is a leader. They basically said "God still did miracles; no argument there. And we'll serve Him; that's never in question. But clearly this man who has been our main interlocutor is gone, and we need a new one."
As proof Nachmanides doesn't note, but easily could, that Aaron in the midst of the Calf preparation enthusiastically proclaims "chag la'Hashem machar" (38:5), "a festival for God tomorrow." Well, that seems like a pretty big non-sequitur if the Calf is all about an alternative to God. What's more, the people don't object — which you'd kind of expect them to do if they were intending said alternative. Point Nachmanides.
For his part, Rashi could answer (he lived more than a century before Nachmanides, kind of a disadvantage) that it doesn't say "someone" to go in front of the people — it says "elohim," a god. Also, all this ritual dancing and idolatry — well, it doesn't really seem like something you’d do as a replacement for Moses. You want to appoint a leader, surely there are other humans who might be eager to step in — we'll see that soon enough with Korah and Datan and Abiram. You don't need to start crafting bejeweled calves. Advantage Rashi.
So which is it — were the Israelites crafting a replacement for God or a replacement for Moses? Not an idle question, this question about an idol. In fact, the stakes are pretty huge. Was it a loss of spiritual faith? Or a crisis of confidence in leadership? As the text frustratingly shows, no one explanation satisfies all the evidence, like trying to find a single theory to explain a David Lynch movie.
But one potential solution comes to mind in the form of the cult movie. I don't mean, like, a movie a few people admire intensely. I mean movies about actual cults, particularly two — "The Master," Paul Thomas Anderson's 2012 elliptical character study, and Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin's 2011 Sundance hit about a woman who escapes from a cult.
In "The Master," Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, a charismatic, enigmatic leader of a movement called The Cause. (It may or may not be Scientology.) Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, an adrift war veteran who gravitates to him. Dodd has unusual methods to get at what he says is more truthful living, such as a form of questioning that borders on harassment which he calls “The Process.” (The movie generally has a beautiful/frustrating ambiguity.) Quell is seeking family and connection. and he has found it, in a way, in the embrace of Lancaster and his family/followers.
But it soon becomes clear what cost this comes at. When a follower asks even a just slightly critical question about Lancaster’s methods, Freddie responds by violently assaulting him. And so one of the highly ambiguous movie’s messages comes into focus: when you revere the person vocalizing a mission above the mission itself — when you confuse the ideal with the man — pretty bad consequences can happen. Because as a result of Freddie worshipping not just the ideals but Lancaster, he will now violently attack anyone who mildly questions him.
A similar dynamic plays out in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” in which Elizabeth Olsen, playing a character named Martha, has just escaped a cult of young women in an upstate NY community run by a charismatic man named Patrick (John Hawkes). But she has been traumatized by the experience, and we soon learn one reason why: she and the others have unquestioningly aided in the drugging and sexual assault of women by Patrick. They have become so in thrall to the commune he built, the ideals he created, that it blinds them to what the man himself is doing. As a result of this conflation, they speak of him as a God, and carry out his orders unquestioningly. Again, a toxic conflation of man and ideal that leads to something truly horrible.
And again, the message: leadership is good. But never take the leader as an embodiment of the message, just an emissary for it.
Clearly Moses is engaging in righteousness and isn’t part of a cult-leader dynamic in any way, shape or form. But can the same be said of the Israelites? After all, when they say “who brought us out of Egypt” they don’t note God, and they don’t distinguish between God’s and Moses’ respective roles in the Exodus process —God as its instigator and Moses as its executor. Their savior is now simply one entity, the now seemingly disappeared Moses. He has become God-like. Lancaster-like. Patrick-like.
And perhaps even forgivably so. The Israelites have just seen Moses go up the mountain and speak to the divine and dwell among the Heavenly thunder and lightning of Matan Torah. Perhaps conflation is understandable, even inevitable.
[One further proof btw that the Israelites may be conflating Moses with God: they note “ki zeh Moshe ha’ish asher he’elanu mei’eretz Mitzraim (32:1), “because this man Moses who brought us up from Egypt.” One of the only other times this strange formulation of “this man Moses” is used is back in Chapter 11, before the Plague of the Firstborn, when the text says “Ha’ish Moshe gadol m’od b’eretz Mitzraim,” “the man Moses is very great in Egypt,” and then suggests a cult-like status among Pharaoh and the whole nation of Egypt. “This Man Moses” has a connotation of outsized titanic greatness, almost like it’s meant to convey “THE Man.” And one can’t help feeling like our text, by deliberately using the same very odd and specific formulation as it did when saying the Egyptians excessively lionized Moses, is saying the Israelites are doing the same thing.]
As it turns out, this idea that the Israelites were conflating God and Moses reconciles Rashi and Nachmannides perfectly. Were the people with this Golden Calf trying to replace God or Moses? Well, they were trying to do both! Because they saw God and Moses as one and the same. That’s why they said they need a new elohim but also why they only cite Moses taking them out of Egypt — Moses and God had become interchangeable. That’s even why a delay of a few hours was so confidence-shattering. A person is late for an event, you worry a little and shrug. A God-like figure is not where He says He will be at the moment He says He will be there? You panic and wonder if all your faith has been misplaced.
This explanation of Moses being built up by the nation into something he wasn’t clicks into place a whole other section of the eigel episode for me. It’s always been a little hard to understand why Moses pleaded so passionately for the Israelites lives, was on the side of calm-restorer, when talking to God up the mountain. Yet when he returned to the ground and saw what was happening he erupted explosively, so explosively he literally shattered the word of God. What prompted such a shift in reaction?
You could just say he was incensed upon seeing what he had already heard about — that sight is always worse than testimony. But in our context a whole other explanation makes sense. Moses knew all about the idolatry, that wasn’t what prompted the burst of tablet-breaking. What he didn’t realize until he got down (because God’s words didn’t elucidate it) is that they were trying to replace him, who they viewed as a God. When Moses actually saw all the details and absorbed the implications — when he realized how personal their mistake was and how it undercut everything he had been trying to convey about who he was and wasn’t — that’s when he grew truly angry.
Because the sin of the eigel was about the calf and a turn to idolatry in a panicked moment, yes. But according to this analysis it was also something deeper, a pathology that had been percolating long before the first earring was collected — a replacement of the beauty of monotheism with a cult of man.
It was a misunderstanding of both God and Moses and the distinction between them; it was an inability to grasp that the leader carrying out the ideal is not the same as the ideal itself. It was a dangerous ignorance to the fact that the person they had been following was not the Master of the Universe but, in the end, simply The Master.
Thank you, as ever, for reading.