Shabbat Ki Tisa: God Appears
The dominant theme of the Torah this Shabbat is the episode of the Golden Calf.
Moshe was up on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights. Nobody knew what had happened to him. The people down below started to panic. The two people that were left in charge in Moshe’s absence were Aaron and Chur (according to the Midrash, he was the son of Miriam and Caleb). The people said they wanted an idol to replace Moshe, and Aaron reluctantly agreed to make the Golden Calf.
For the Children of Israel, an abstraction was just not enough. Still, what was the purpose of this idol? They said it was the same God that took them out of Egypt. But they could see that they had just made it themselves. They needed some sort of image.
Was this why paganism, with its images, has remained so pervasive? Or is it why the anthropomorphosis of God as some kind of super-powerful human-like being, remains so popular?
After these events, God’s initial reaction was to give up on the Children of Israel and start again with Moshe. Moshe interceded and appealed to God. God agreed, but implied that there would not be the same relationship as before. Moses sensed this and sought reassurance by asking God to show him His glory.
God replies in Exodus 33:20, “you cannot see my face, no human being can see…”
Both scientists and theologians have argued for thousands of years about what we understand as God. Is it a concept or an experience?
We ascribe to God human words, like speak, listen, anger, sadness, and regret. This gives rise to the idea that God is some sort of all-powerful superman controlling the world. Yet at the same time, the Torah keeps on saying that God is beyond the comprehension of human beings. We cannot know God. Indeed, according to the great Maimonides, we can only say what God is not!
What we can derive from what the Torah tells us about God, is what God approves of and what God does not approve of — how we are supposed to behave and how not to.
Since God is not physical, I take all these examples of seeing God and experiencing God, not as something that we would understand scientifically, but as something that has to be sensed intuitively. How do you describe intuition? How do you describe emotion?
Every time I read this episode, I think of the Biblical Books of Kings. After the death of Solomon, his kingdom split and Yeravam (otherwise known as Jeroboam) led the 10 Northern tribes into secession as the Kingdom of Israel. He immediately set up two temples in the North, and placed golden calves in both — obviously to assert his independence of Jerusalem and its temple.
For the rest of his troubled kingdom, it was completely pagan (and so too were several rulers of Judea). What was it about Golden Calves that so attracted the Israelites? It was popular then, and there are plenty of Golden Calves around today.
The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.