From Spectacle to Inner Quiet
Purim as a Response to the Sin of the Golden Calf
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 fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.” (Exodus 32:1)
With reference to the first tablets, it is written: And it came to pass on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunders and lightning (ibid. 19:16). But with regard to the second tablets, it is said: Neither let any man be seen (ibid. 34:3). Because the first tablets were given openly, the evil inclination prevailed over them, and (for that reason) they were broken. But in this instance (the second tablets) the Holy One, blessed be He, said: There is nothing more desirable than humility, as it is said: And what doth the Lord require of thee: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with the God (Mic. 6:8). (Midrash Tanchuma, Ki Tisa 31)
Rabbi Yehuda differs and says: Hadassah was her real name. Why then was she called Esther? Because she concealed [masteret] the truth about herself, as it is stated: “Esther had not yet made known her kindred nor her people” (Esther 2:20). (Megilla 13a)Now, if You will forgive their sin [well and good]; but if not, erase me from the record which You have written!” (Exodus 32:32)
The people are accustomed to spectacle. They watched their pursuant enemies drown in the sea as they walked through it, singing and dancing. They witnessed Egyptian civilization collapse under the double weight of both supernatural plague and cognitive dissonance. And they received a Divine Revelation at Sinai with bombast. The mountain quaked, the people saw voices. The experience was synesthetic, and, as Yehuda Halevi argues, it was distinguished from other revelations by the magnitude of its collective energy: an estimated 1.2 million people all shared in the same event. And yet, as Moses ascends the mountain, the people grow impatient. While Midrashic sources suggest that the people may have estimated Moses’s expected arrival time incorrectly, we should read their impatience ontologically. They were primed from the moment left them to feel uneasy. The people got a thrill from public spectacle, from a constant drip of prophetic content, but were unable to sit by themselves in the quietude and solitude of their own thoughts. They had become miracle junkies.
The turn to the construction of golden calf demonstrates a need for material presence and adornment, glitz, excitement. While the Mishkan will also be beautiful, we have a warning in the story of the golden calf: one must not conflate thrill seeking and aesthetic reverie with mature religion. Faithful life requires patience and contemplative stillness; theater and fanfare provide religious kindling but are not sustainable. The Jewish people lasts centuries not by putting on a good show, but by cultivating a still small voice through epochs of austerity, oppression, and doubt. Moses atop Sinai is a test and a parable: can the people maintain their clarity and conviction when the music stops, when being Jewish is no longer fun or popular, when the opportunistic winds point to assimilation rather than a sense of peoplehood.
The people fail this test, but their failure is forgiven on account of Moses’s pleading. Moses tells God to erase him from the Torah if He does not forgive the people. His willingness to excise his own name contrasts with the people’s attachment to presence and its simulacra. Moses is willing to vanish. He accepts his non-being. While the people cannot live without him, he can live without his own name, so to speak. He is in touch with what Christopher Alexander calls “the quality without a name.”
The second time Moses receives the tablets, the Midrash teaches, the Revelation is no longer a spectacle, but a conversation, less a rock-concert and more an I-Thou dynamic. Our sages teach that the public spectacle was not only ineffective pedagogically—it failed to prevent the sin of the golden calf, and may even have abetted it—but it was self-undermining. The power of the event was effectively coercive, giving the recipients no choice or agency or intrinsic motivation in their response to it.
“Moses led the people out of the camp toward God, and they took their places at the foot of the mountain.” (Exodus 19:17)
“Rabbi Avdimi bar Ḥama bar Ḥasa said: the Jewish people actually stood beneath the mountain, and the verse teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, overturned the mountain above the Jews like a tub, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, excellent, and if not, there will be your burial. Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here there is a substantial caveat to the obligation to fulfill the Torah. The Jewish people can claim that they were coerced into accepting the Torah, and it is therefore not binding. Rava said: Even so, they again accepted it willingly in the time of Ahasuerus, as it is written: “The Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them” (Esther 9:27), and he taught: The Jews ordained what they had already taken upon themselves through coercion at Sinai.” (Shabbat 88a)
According to Rabbi Aha bar Ya’akov, the covenant only became binding during the time of Esther, when the people took upon themselves the obligation to mark their salvation as a religious holiday. Fittingly, Purim was a time when God’s presence was felt more obliquely; the book of Esther features no divine actor, and Esther’s own name means “hidden.” Esther hides her Jewish identity, God hides his divine identity, and Moses hides up in the heavens (and offers to remove his name from the Torah). The ability to wait, and to hope for a return, without rushing for false substitutes is the spiritual marshmallow test. Sometimes, one must wait a lifetime. Sometimes, one must wait epochs. “Though the messiah will tarry, I will wait for him.” In the time of this waiting, which skeptics calls secular time, the Jew finds ultimate religious meaning. The ability to be religious in a secular regime may be more profound than the ability to be religious in a time of open miracles. Our ancestors faced a choice between commitment to the Lord and the pursuit of idols; we face a choice between commitment to the Lord and apathy to metaphysics. Yet the two regimes are closer than we might think. The enthusiasm of sports events, music concerts, and political rallies points to the human need to feel “the oceanic feeling,” even when detached from fundamentals.
Achashverosh through great parties, but he, too, was an impatient and volatile man. His biggest trigger was hearing “no.” He wants Vashti to appear and strip on demand, and in public, an excessive and grotesque exemplification of the person who wants God to appear in human terms immediately, who wants miracles on demand, who wants a worldview that makes obvious and absolute sense, the certainty addict.
Jewish life accepts that we must live with uncertainty and absence, cultivate conviction from small and subtle miracles, and not outsource our inner confidence to the volume of the crowd. If 1 million people mass hallucinate that doesn’t make the hallucination true. Halevi argues in the Kuzari that the Revelation must have happened because it’s impossible to organize a mass conspiracy without some leak. If it didn’t happen, someone would have said so. But this misses the point. The historicity of the Revelation is not enough to keep the flame alive. It couldn’t even keep it alive for the generation that participated in it. That collective event needed to happen so that all could feel apart of it, regardless of literacy or class. But Jewish life is about being able to endure the apparent hiddenness of God, the apparent departure of Moses, to live “under the sun.” That kind of strength—which enables one to know oneself without having to be histrionic about it—leads to an existential modesty. It is the modesty of Esther, which draws on the modesty of God.
Purim marks not just the moment when we accepted the Torah anew, but the moment when we repaired the psychological wound that led us to bow before a golden calf. As we adorn ourselves we now know that we don’t need our adornments. We see through our costumes and are thus able to wear them from a place of creative freedom.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins