Was the Golden Calf really a horror-movie satire?
Letting out a different kind of scream
Has anyone else found their mind constantly replaying ""It's far, it's too far, It's faaah" from that Super Bowl commercial this week? Larry David, once he gets in, he can't get out.
Hello! Welcome back to another fizzy, dizzy episode of Torah Goes Hollywood. If you're new here, what have you been waiting for? Sign up now. We've got The Incredibles teaching us about the Tabernacle, Mr. Miyagi preparing us to receive the Torah and Moses channeling the spirit of Jimmy Stewart. And, of course, TGH at the Olympics.
But you can go back and look at some of The Eagles greatest hits a little later. At the moment, we've got another animal to contend with.
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Small confession: I've always been a little confused by the sin of the golden calf, the chait ha'egel. It's not like I don't sense something was wrong; I just struggle with what it is. This week's portion lays out the incident in all its soap-operatic detail — infidelity, fits of near-murderous rage, jewelry — and it leaves me perplexed. What's the actual sin?
On the surface, sure, the Isrealites dancing around a calf while Moses is on the mountain after all these monotheistic miracles they’ve been shown...isn't a great look. But flip the camera around for a second. The Israelites have been thrust into a highly unfamiliar situation, sent fleeing from their homes, into an unknown desert, for an unspecified amount of time, wandering to an unknown destination. They've only recently been told where their next meal is coming from. They just pledged allegiance to a set of laws they have yet to see or fully understand.
And on top of all that, they have just watched Moses disappear skyward in a literal puff of smoke, not knowing where is he is going and when he will return — and, just as important, where they'll be going now that their role model is gone, gone.
A few days might seem like a reasonable time to keep a cap on the panic. A week, maybe. But a second week? A third? A fourth?? After a month, it's pretty human to wonder what the heck is going on. After all, this is a desert, with marauders and famine and drought and coyotes. (Were there coyotes? It seems like there might have been coyotes.)
And throw this atop the pile: These were slaves we're talking about. They were accustomed to every detail of their lives planned out for them, every need seen to. Theirs was an indentured mentality. And now the person to whom they felt indebted was gone — possibly forever.
To all this, a reasonable person might reasonably say "we need another God or leader, because the one we had seems to have disappeared."
Which, as it happens, is exactly what the Israelites do say, in the first verse of Exodus 32 that kicks all this off. ("Kum aseih lanu elohim, asher yeilchu le'fanenu, ki zeh Moshe ha'ish asher he'elanu mai'eretz mitzraim, lo yadanu meh hayah lo," for the Hebraically inclined.)
From there the snowball rolls downhill. Aaron asks them to retrieve gold from their family's jewelry, the precious metal is tossed into the fire, a calf springs out of the fire, the Israelites throw a party...you know the grim tale.
I am not alone in wondering if the Israelites had a basis for their reaction. The Talmud in Tractate Sabbath, seemingly struck by the same concern, doubles down with a Midrashic interpretation that says the Israelites were shown an apparition by the Devil of a dead Moses being carried off. The message seems clear: in their mind's eye they thought Moses was dead. And they needed a Plan B.
So what exactly was the sin? Because God is clearly very upset, threatening, as He does, to wipe out the entire people, until Moses intervenes.
A fascinating debate plays out between three Medieval commentators — Rashi, Nachmanides and the Ibn Ezra — over a slightly different question that can cast some insight on the one we have.
The three scholars wonder specifically what the Israelites were asking for in that aforementioned verse of "Kum aseih lanu elohim."
Rashi says they wanted a god, zeroing in on the 'elohim.'
Nachmanides says they wanted a human leader, zeroing in on the "lo yadanu meh hayah lo"— we don't know what happened to Moses (and thus we need a new leader to step in).
The Ibn Ezra offers a third possibility. The 12th-century Spanish scholar, sharp in language and logic, offers a long passage grappling with various problems this text raises, not least how Aaron seems to be enabling this sin and yet does not seem obviously punished for it. The Ibn Ezra comes to a striking conclusion: they didn't want a new God or a new leader. What they wanted was a way to connect with God. In other words, he says, the panicked Israelites were looking for a way to reach God now that their normal conduit, Moses, was gone. They just looked in the wrong place.
This explains why Aaron is not punished -- he was helping them get closer to God in Moses' absence.
And, I think, it does a nifty job of addressing my question of what they did so wrong: they took the wrong conduit to God.
Why was this so horrendous? you ask. At least the wrong conduit still has the right intent behind it, still has the right larger theological framework. There was no abandonment of God. So why was this so awful as to merit a national wipeout?
But consider the context. The Israelites had just been given reams and reams of information about exactly what the right conduit was. For long chunks of text prior, they had been told how to build a Tabernacle to get closer to the divine if it seemed too hard to access down here. They were told this over seven full chapters — a volume of basically Taylor Swift All Too Well lengths. There were the exact dimensions of the Tabernacle, the materials it should be made from, the people who can enter, the ceremonies performed, the garments worn during said performing. They were told all of that.
And then they went and did the opposite. They went and did something involving a calf and a bonfire and a party. They panicked, and they ignored the entire blueprint they had just been shown.
Check out the text, which is signaling this to us throughout. The verses practically jump up and down in this Golden Calf incident of Chapter 32 to call back to the Tabernacle instructions that preceded all of this beginning in Chapter 25.
--The first thing the Israelites are told to take for the building of the Tabernacle in that chapter? "Zahav," gold.
The first thing they take here is "Zahav," gold.
--The way they are told to procure these items for the Tabernacle is by collecting something from every person.
The way Aaron procures items for the calf is by asking everyone to contribute jewelry.
--A root word that appears multiple times in the instructions for the Tabernacle in Chapter 31: "zevach," sacrifice.
God's chastisement at the sin of the Golden Calf? It's for "Vayizb'chu." Sacrifice.
Once you start running down the parallels, they multiply like an elementary-school math student. The Israelites are pointedly ignoring every single instruction they had just been given. In fact when God expresses his anger at the Israelites' sin, in verse 8 of chapter 32, He says 'saru mahen min haderech asher tzivitam.” They have deviated from the path that I just commanded them -- that is, the seven previous chapters in which I told them how to find an earthly repository for their divine-leadership needs.
The name of the previous portion, btw? "Titzaveh." "Command them."
The sin now comes into focus. God had given the Israelites the tools to handle just this sort of crisis. He told them exactly what to do in such a situation of potential panic. And thy took it all in and still went their own way. They had a fear that was entirely legitimate. And a reaction that was totally illegitimate.
The wrong reaction to fear is the engine of one of the most popular Hollywood genres around — the horror movie. You may have seen that Geico commercial in which a group of young attractive people on the run decide to forgo an obvious escape car to hide behind the chainsaws because "if you're in a horror movie, you make poor decisions, it's what you do." (Check it out. Still funny. Not as funny as Larry David. But funny.)
Horror movies' basic thematic concern is what we do when we're scared — how fear clouds judgement. It's such a basic common thematic concern that one of the great genre satires of our time, Wes Craven-Kevin Williamson's Scream from back in 1996, makes a full artistic living playing off it.
In the film, which came out in what future historians will know as Before the Twitter and TikTok Era, the characters in a small town face an unknown "Ghostface Killer" who's terrorizing residents and goading oblivious teens and adults to their unfortunate end.
The creative innovation — what makes the movie so enjoyable — is that Williamson's script operates on a meta level. Many of the characters have actually seen a version of the horror movie they’re currently in. One of the protagonists, Randy, even walks around quoting the stuff.
And yet despite all this they can't seem to figure out the killer. In fact in one scene Randy is watching a horror movie on TV as a character has a killer sneaking in front of them. He's disbelieving the person could be so naive, even as at that very moment the killer is doing the very same thing to him.
Only Sidney Prescott, the Neve Campbell character, begins putting it all together, piecing together the clues with help from the other movies.
This is all of course played for some good meta-laughs (the best kind). But it's also making a subtler point. We can know the blueprint. Shoot, we can read the blueprint, in all seven chapters of Tabernacle instruction or all 17 installments of the “Friday the 13th” franchise. And yet when fear kicks in, it's hard to remember what we read. It's easy to panic and make the wrong decision. It’s what we do.
And the Golden Calf incident comes along to remind us not to do that. Jump in the car, it says; don't hide behind the chainsaws. Panic is understandable. But knowing the blueprint makes things redeemable.
Thank you for reading.