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This Shabbat is Shabbat Ki Tisa, Ki Tisa being the parashah, the Torah portion, with one of the most well known, or perhaps I should say notorious, episodes of the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings: the story of the golden calf.
The basics of the story are straightforward:
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, “Come…
...make us a God…
Aseh-lanu Elohim,
,עֲשֵׂה־לָנוּ אֱלֹהִים
… who shall go before us, for that fellow Moses — the man who brought us from the land of Egypt — we do not know what has happened to him” (Exodus 32:1).
And Aaron took the gold that the Israelites brought him “and cast it in a mold, and made it into a molten calf. And they exclaimed,
This is your God, O Israel…
Eloheikha Yisrael
אֱלֹהֶיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל
… who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (32:4).
This is the paradigmatic moment of Jewish idolatry, which is one of the central prohibitions in all of Torah — so much so that it makes up, essentially, the first two of the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is,
“I the ETERNAL am your God…
Anokhi Adonai Eloheikha
אָנֹכִי יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ
… who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage” (20:2); followed up immediately by the second:
“You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image…
Lo-Adonai-lekha elohim aherim al-panai
,לֹא־יי־לְךָ אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים עַל־פָּנָי
… or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth” (20:3-4).
And yet despite the prominent nature of these commandments, over and over again throughout the biblical period when the Israelites trip up, it’s over this central challenge of idolatry.
Thousands of years later, this prohibition seems like it should be among the easiest of the mitzvot to follow. Being Jewish isn’t easy, we moderns might say. The prohibitions around Shabbat can be hard to keep; kashrut, keeping kosher, too; even certain ethical and moral laws call us to really stretch ourselves. But idolatry? Our ancestors couldn’t be bothered to just prevent themselves from worshiping the works of their hands?
And yet, when phrased in this way, we can begin to see why it’s such a slippery slope, and why the story of the golden calf is an eternal cautionary tale, not just an archaic one.
So what is idolatry exactly?
To paraphrase Yeshayahu Leibowitz, it is essentially when we ascribe ultimate value to something or someone or some idea other than God.
“You shall have no other Gods besides me.”
In modern life, there are some obvious examples where we can start to slide this into this definition of idolatry. Material accumulation is an obvious one. Materialism has literal, verbal associations with idolatry, as idols were traditionally thought of as requiring material form.
To be clear, this does not mean that any desire to accumulate the means by which we afford ourselves comfort and safety and nourishment is considered idolatry; it means cherishing it above all else, on an individual or a national level — like the story of the builders of the Tower of Babel who lamented it more when a brick fell off the building’s heights than when a fellow human being did — could fall into the category of idolatry.
But prioritization doesn’t need to be this extreme for it to slip into analogous notions of idolatry.
If idolatry has something to do with worshiping the work of our hands, what does it mean if we ascribe ultimate value to our own successes, our own achievements? How many of us get so consumed by what we are able to do and produce and achieve that that is the thing we consider to be of utmost value in this world? If we think our success is the thing of ultimate value, and not God/the Divine/the Source of holiness, then, at least by traditional Jewish definitions, we may have begun to slip into the realm of idolatry, and need to begin to make t’shuvah, we need to return to what is truly the source of ultimate holiness. I know, as someone for whom my work is a central part of my life, that this is a constant struggle.
Of course, for many of us among the People of Israel, we have a different sort of struggle in relation to this conversation, and that’s our struggle with our own relationship to what we even understand this word, “God,” to mean.
To agree with the definition of idolatry I’ve offered — that is, ascribing ultimate value to something that is not God — we have to agree that it is God that is of ultimate value; whatever we might understand that to mean. And we Jews, we People of Israel, have a name that means “to wrestle with God,” from the time our ancestor, Jacob, wrestled with the mysterious divine figure, earning that sacred name, Yisrael.
So perhaps we struggle with this definition of idolatry as we struggle with our own definitions of God.
In some ways, that’s the point: to recognize the sacredness of the struggle, and to recognize that struggle is in some respects necessary if our relationship to God is not going to be idolatrous.
This first commandment, as we said, is not so much a commandment, but a declaration:
“I the ETERNAL am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage” (20:2).
Ani Adonai Elohekha asher hotzetikha me’eretz Mitzrayim mibeit avadim
אָנֹכִי יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים׃
Scholar Aviva Zornberg cites Rabbi Mordechai Leiner for the recognition that the word “I” in that commandment — I the ETERNAL am your God — is not the usual Hebrew word for “I,” namely אני (ani). Rather, it’s the word for ’I’ with the additional letter, ’khaf’, אנכי (anokhi).
And what does the letter khaf mean? It means “like” or “similar to.” “Not a defined object,” writes Zornberg, “but an approximation.” We can never fully entirely grasp God. We try to, we struggle; we don’t leave our understanding on the shelf. But we don’t assume, either through our belief or our disbelief — as the famous saying goes, I don’t believe in the God that you don’t believe in either — that we have God boxed in.
I the ETERNAL am your God
Ani Adonai Elohekha
אָנֹכִי יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ
Whatever you might understand those words to mean is at best an approximation of God’s true essence. We can grapple with God, we can wrestle with God, we can pray to God to be the source of wisdom in our lives, but we can’t truly know God in God’s fullness. To assume we do, to assume we have God boxed in, is, according to this thinking, idolatry.
The primary word for God in Hebrew signifies all this. Of course, the word is not really a word, it is four letters:
י – ה – ו – ה
whose pronunciation we’ve lost to time; letters which signify something in relationship to being, to existence, to life, but not fully known in what sense.
So the final call to avoid idolatry is not about our worship of the material, or worship of our work, but paradoxically about our relationship to God, to not allow our understanding of God to calcify, to assume we’ve got it all figured out, either through disbelief or belief: neither to allow our certainty of God’s absence to eclipse our willingness to go deeper, to explore, to wrestle; nor to allow our faith in God’s presence, which can be the most powerful source of strength in our lives, to harden into a certitude about God’s essence, to assume we’ve got God figured out.
In a multifaith studies class in rabbinical school, I learned from Muslim scholar Homayra Ziad, who teaches that of course we experience God — we refract God “through the prism of our experience, but to imagine that this one ray of light is the lamp itself;” or conversely to mistake the lamp for the light that illumines it, is to miss God in God’s fullness.
This teaches, on the one hand, our relationship to God must of necessity always be elusive and allusive: elusive in the sense that we can never fully grasp it, and allusive in the sense that our glimpses of God ultimately only allude to something far beyond our mind’s conception.
On the other hand, we recognize that we are yisrael — the people who struggle, who grapple, who wrestle, with God, a wrestling which through another angle is an embrace. Our inability to fully conceive of all of God’s existence is not a permission slip to disengage.
So we don’t leave God on the shelf; nor do we assume that we have it completely figured out. That’s its own version of a golden calf.
Wishing you a Shabbat filled with sacred embrace. Shabbat shalom.
Rabbi K.
