The Golden Calf: From What Are We Distracting Ourselves?

Dear Friends,

This past week at our Shabbat morning Torah discussion, which falls midway through the service for about half an hour each week at approximately 10:30 am, we discussed that it was Shabbat Parah—the special Shabbat in advance of Pesach (Passover), which, in ancient times, reminded Israelites getting ready for their annual pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem for Passover that they would need to engage in a process of ritual purification to prepare themselves to encounter the Temple at celebrate the holiday in the proper spirit.

The special Shabbat is called Shabbat Parah because the particular process used for that ritual purification involves the use of a parah, Hebrew for a cow—specifically (and famously) a parah adumah, a red cow, often known as a red heifer. In particular the ashes of such a cow are mixed with other ingredients to purify anyone over the course of the year who had come into contact with, as a matter of fact, death. Coming into contact with death, specifically with the bodies of the deceased, was seen as an encounter from which one required ritual purification.

As it happens, this year the special shabbat of Shabbat Parah fell on the same week that congregations around the world read Ki Tissah, the portion in the Book of Shemot (Exodus) when the Israelites lose patience with Moses’ absence while he is on Mount Sinai, and construct a golden calf as a god to take the place of the one whose absence they are feeling.

In our discussion we wondered aloud at the connection between these two symbols—the golden calf and the red cow—and studied Rabbi Shefa Gold’s teaching as follows:

“The great blessing of [these traditions] is the knowledge that whatever our defilement and whatever our mistakes, we can always return to our essential purity.

Whenever I seek to learn from mistakes I have made, I look for a pattern and then try to understand the source of that pattern…

The Golden Calf is built when we lose faith in an invisible, unnameable God… We are tempted to build a life around this Golden Calf, thereby placing something other than God-the-essential-mystery at the center of our attention. That life built around the worship of security or happiness or wealth or fame obscures the root fear of Death that has unconsciously driven us.”

In other words, Rabbi Gold is saying, it is telling that death was seen as a source of ritual impurity because our unconscious concern for death is often what drives us to create, and worship, our respective “Golden Calves.” Whether it is security or wealth or fame, we create something shiny to worship and distract us from a relationship to death we often bury deep within us.

She continues, “When we are ready to identify our Golden Calf, then we must trace its roots to find the Red Heifer (cow), the impetus for our own idolatry, the clue to our own pattern of sin. Then, we are able to offer up the ashes of the Red Heifer, the insight into the nature of our root fear. When death touches our lives, we can be protected from our own tendency towards fear, by the blessing of this insight. Having faced our fear, we need not live in its shadow.”

In other words, sometimes when we encounter death, in our lives or in the lives of those around us, tragic and heartbreaking as those encounters can be, they can wake us up to our relationship to life and death, to the way our unconscious relationship to it may be driving perverse patterns, and allow us to course-correct—to find our true center.

It is one of many ways Judaism can suggest a pathway forward.