Disagreeing About Disagreement
On the Golden Calf, Pluralism, and Rabbinic Dispute
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 who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him. Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” And all the people took off the gold rings that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. This he took from them and cast in a mold, and made it into a molten calf. And they exclaimed, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Exodus 32:1-3)
So the king [Rehoboam] took counsel and made two golden calves. He said to the people, “You have been going up to Jerusalem long enough. This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!” (1 Kings 12:28)
Beit Shammai struck a sword in the study hall, and they said: One who wants to enter may enter, but one may not leave. That day Hillel was bowed and was sitting before Shammai like one of the students. And the day was as difficult for Israel as the day the [Golden] Calf was made. (Bavli Shabbat 17a)
That day was as difficult for Israel as the day which the [golden] calf was made.... It was taught in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua Oniya: The students of Beit Shammai stood below them and they began to slaughter the students of Beit Hillel. It was taught: Six of them ascended and the others stood over them with swords and lances. (Yerushalmi Shabbat 1:4)
A heavenly voice said: “These and these are the words of the living God. And the law is like the house of Hillel.” (Eruvin 13b)
The Torah offers not one, but two stories of golden calf-worship. One appears in our week’s Torah reading, Ki Tissa (Ex. 30:11-34:35), while the other appears in the Book of Kings. In the more famous, Exodus version, the calf worship is as an act of betrayal, a low-point in Jewish history. Moses shatters the tablets in reaction to the sight he beholds and God threatens to destroy the people. In the Kings version, God keep silent and punishment is delayed: a prophet or “man of God” arrives to condemn King Rehoboam’s setting up of shrines outside Jerusalem, but makes no mention of the golden calves themselves.
If we only had the Book of Kings, we would think the problem with King Rehoboam’s religion is not the worship of graven images, but the worship of God outside Jerusalem (and without Levites as priests.)
The Torah, it seems, has two different opinions or attitudes on golden calf worship. We are most familiar with the one that sees it as obviously out of bounds. But perhaps this is anachronistic on our part. Perhaps Aaron and the people made an incorrect, if reasonable, assumption that a golden calf might be a form of legitimate piety. Their story can be understood as a case of error rather than sedition. Even though Aaron appears narratively before King Rehoboam, it’s possible to glean from the Kings text a bit more about the cultural context in which he might have been operating.
Why does it matter that the Torah does not have one unified view on golden calves? The answer is simple, yet counter-intuitive: If we only had one tale, we’d think it’s a story about theology and spirituality, about proper and improper worship, about true and false understandings of God. But we have two—and this means—the stories taken together are about pluralism, about what it means to belong to a people, a community, that has differing conceptions about how to worship and how to understand.
The emphasis of the paired stories is not only on truth, but on co-existence; it’s about tolerance and its limits. In one story, the misguided worship is not tolerated; in the other, it seems more acceptable. In Exodus, the sin of the golden calf recapitulates the Fall from Eden, besmirching the Israelite liberation. In Kings, it seems to be but one episode in a volatile Israelite history—barely a headline.
Just as there are two stories of the golden calf, there are two Talmuds, a Jerusalem Talmud and a Babylonian Talmud. While the Babylonian Talmud is the more famous and canonical, the Jerusalem Talmud is likely older. Our two Talmuds offer us two versions of the same origin story about the sages responsible for transmitting the Oral Torah—a rabbinic conflict between the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. In the Jerusalemite version, Shammai’s students slay Hillel’s. In the Babylonian version, they merely threaten violence. In both cases, Shammai wins the halachic (legal) battle of the day by means that are coercive. In both stories, the narrator tells us that the day Shammai won was as difficult/wretched for Israel as the day of the golden calf. But in one, Shammai behaves towards Hillel the way God behaves towards the idolaters in Exodus; in the other, Shammai treats Hillel as a political threat, but accepts his fellowship (much like the golden calf story in Kings).
Shammai’s win does and should unsettle us: swords in the House of Study? So much for civil discourse?! And this is between people who presumably agree on so much. Of course, we know that the “narcissism of small differences” can be the greatest wedge.
But what makes the day of Shammai’s victory wretched? To what exactly is the golden calf being compared, and which golden calf is it that’s being compared? There’s plenty of ambiguity in the narrative conclusion that the day is a difficult one. Is it difficult because Shammai behaved shamefully? Is it difficult for an unstated reason and Shammai was justified? Is it difficult because Hillel should have been the winner, and his loss entails a political-legal outcome that is burdensome for the people? Is the day difficult because the two camps came to (the precipice of) violence? Or is the steadfast clinging to one’s own opinions and convictions itself a kind of sin, on par with golden calf worship? Is the day difficult because, as Yeats put it, “The best (Hillel) lack all conviction while the worst (Shammai) are full of passionate intensity?”
Note that Hillel’s worldview—roughly speaking—tends to be more lenient, open, and boundary-fluid. Shammai’s tends to be more firm, strict. Speaking archetypally, we might think of Hillel as the successor to Aaron the priest in his desire to accommodate everyday people, and Shammai as a successor to Moses the prophet in his concern for the correct transmission of divine truth. (As I wrote last last week, priests are associated with peace; prophets often channel divine violence.) Thus, the rabbinic texts are potentially a “subversive sequel” (to use Judy Klitsner’s phrase) to Exodus. In Exodus, Moses is the victor; Aaron the “loser.” But in the Talmud, Hillel (corresponding to Aaron) is generally the victor and Shammai (corresponding to Moses) is generally the loser.
I can’t resolve or fully explicate all the rich and dialectical layers of these deep texts (if one could, we wouldn’t need them), but I’ll highlight some patterns I find salient:
First, we should note that though Shammai wins on this particular day, he is, more generally, the practical loser in disputes with Hillel. Moreover, one reason Beit Hillel is credited as winning debates with Beit Shammai is its humility—Hillel put Shammai’s words/arguments first (Eruvin 13b). There’s an irony to both accounts, suggesting that Shammai needed violence as a last resort against Hillel, as he knew he would lose otherwise—or else, that he was punished for his violent outburst and subsequently all or most ties broke in favor of Hillel, due to his more temperate character.
I see at least four (which are actually, eight) possibilities in the intertextual connection between the Two Talmudic accounts and the two Biblical ones:
1) Shammai is substantively right and procedurally right.
2) Shammai is substantively wrong and procedurally right.
3) Shammai is substantively right and procedurally wrong.
4) Shammai is substantively wrong and procedurally wrong.
“Substantively right” means he had the correct view; “procedurally right” means he had a legitimate method for enacting it.
Regardless of which option you pick, the story tells us it was a difficult, tragic day.
But just as the golden calf episode in Exodus can be atoned for, the war or near-war between Hillel and Shammai can also be repaired. Just as the Israelites carry the broken tablets and whole tablets together in the ark, the Talmud gives us a story that challenges our faith in rabbinic character and authority to take with us as we study the very text that confirms our faith in rabbinic character and authority!
Jews (and all people) have long disagreed with each other about what we ought to do, what the good life entails, what is fundamentally true. And not only have they disagreed, but they’ve also disagreed about how to disagree, and about what kinds of disagreement are worthy of settling through violence or coercion and what kinds are best left to compromising and deal-making. Even liberal societies go to war—and when a superpower decides not to intervene in geopolitics, this, too, is an action. Recoil all we want at Shammai’s behavior, the Talmudic text is refreshingly honest that law is meaningless if unenforced. Law is, as Robert Cover says, “jurispathic”—world limiting.
Neither the Torah nor the Talmud offer a single, clear, consistent account of the most fundamental questions. Despite Leo Strauss’s suggestion that “Revelation” provides a thick framework that skeptical Reason is incapable of attaining on its own, he apparently over-estimates what we can gain from Revelation. Hillel and Shammai may have shared a belief in Revelation, but they had no choice but to argue for their respective interpretations of it using reasons neither side found persuasive. Neither reason nor revelation could bring them to agreement. All the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men couldn’t put the shattered tablets back together again.
Even something as seemingly fundamental as the sin of the golden calf is ambiguous. It’s debate all the way down, and we shouldn’t romanticize this fact. It’s hard to disagree with others about that which we are passionate and easy to disagree when we are lukewarm and/or the stakes don’t impact us. The downside of living in a society that prides itself on tolerance is a disassociation from passion. That we disagree with those we love is a source of deep division. But it is also evidence of our dignity and status as beings created in the divine image. To cover over our differences in favor of getting along risks the kind of vapid homogeneity that God condemns when destroying the Tower of Babel. A world in which Hillel and Shammai agree on everything is worse than one in which they (occasionally) come to blows.
Traumatized by Shammai’s and Moses’s sword, the tolerant err towards an “anything goes mentality.” Angered by what they perceive as Aaron’s and Hillel’s laxity, the convicted strong-arm their way to winning at all costs, throwing procedural norms and principles of interpersonal decency to the winds. One says, “Let me be and I’ll let you be.” The other says, “Letting you be is already a concession.”
Is there such a thing as a Jewish community? Was there one in the past? What are the limits at which “the” community ends? The latter question was one of the fundamental questions on which Hillel and Shammai debated and it is also a core question raised by the story of the golden calf: at what point is a practice conducted by Jews no longer Judaism? We can’t and shouldn’t avoid asking these questions and answering them in ways that are decisive for our lives. But just as important, and difficult, is how we engage with those whose answers diverge from our own.
Is the living tradition of Torah liberal or illiberal, pluralistic or hegemonic? Even these questions are part of the living tradition of Torah. We pray that we need not draw, let alone threaten, the sword. We are naive, however, if, reading our texts, we don’t see a sword—real or imagined—hanging over every page.
The life of Torah is a life of inhabiting both the absolute and relative planes in the singular way that only we can.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
If you appreciate this work and feel moved to support it, you can make a tax deductible donation here.
You may also enjoy my daily question newsletter, What is Called Thinking?