Idolatry as One-Sided Thinking
The Torah's Case for Dialectical Therapy
Decoding God's account of the people’s sin leads in two apparently contradictory directions: inconstancy and rigidity.
- Avivah Zornberg, The Particulars of RaptureWhen 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)
“That fellow Moses” implies that Satan showed them something that looked like Moses being carried on a bier in the air high above in the skies. (Rashi)
They have been quick to turn aside from the way that I enjoined upon them. They have made themselves a molten calf and bowed low to it and sacrificed to it, saying: ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’” The Lord further said to Moses, “I see that this is a stiffnecked people.” (Exodus 32:8-9)
God diagnoses the people’s golden calf-worship with two apparently contradictory judgments: “quick to turn away” and “stiff-necked.” Which is it? Are the people bad at impulse control or are they obdurate? Anyone who has observed human psychology knows that opposite drives can reinforce one another. The ascetic is a sensualist in disguise, the sensualist is a kind of monk, spurred by repression, to worldly excess. Contradiction is not incidental to the story of the golden calf. Once you look for it, you see it everywhere.
The people tell Moses to ascend the mountain on their behalf, then complain that he’s taking too long—they could have avoided this by simply going up with him (see Exodus 20:16). Moses himself shatters the tablets in anger at the people despite asking for mercy on their behalf moments earlier. In his commentary, Ramban teaches that the people sought not a replacement for God, but for Moses. The calf was not intended as an idol, so much as it was intended as an ersatz leader, a transitional object. If Ramban is right, then the people erred even before Moses ascended the mountain, treating him like a calf, expecting both too much of him (do it for us) and too little of him (don’t empower us). According to Rashi (see Deuteronomy 5:24) Moses himself expresses disappointment that the people have disempowered themselves by telling him to get the Torah on their behalf. Ironically, Moses’s hands are weakened by the people’s self-abasement—he can’t lead them if they don’t want t be led, and so he drops the tablets not out of rage, but out of paralysis.
The people’s calf-worship is reflective of their one-sided view of their leader as either all good or all bad. Thus, Moses is either their perfect caretaker or he is abandoning them. There is no middle-ground. These extreme views reinforce each other. If Moses is seen as perfect how can he not but fail? Idolatry is a symptom of one-sided thinking, an inability to live in ambiguity, to accept complexity, to see oneself and others as both strong and weak, flawed and capable of transformation. When Moses shatters the tablets it’s because he momentarily loses all hope in the people, seeing them in static terms as unsaveable sinners. When God offers Moses an opportunity to destroy the people and start over, God likewise commits a kind of idolatry, the inverse of the people’s. Moses’s task is to hold all this complexity without getting swayed by it. God’s analysis of the people and the people’s self-analysis mirror each other: both see them as disempowered. Moses must see this and also believe they can change.
Ironically, according to Rashi, the people think Moses has died because they got the time wrong: Moses said he’d be down after 40 days, but the people thought he meant on the fortieth day. But the deeper point is not that the sin was caused by a scheduling error, but by an erroneous view of time—Moses is operating on heavenly time, the people on earthly time. Moses is in the ivory tower studying timeless truth, the people want their ROI, their KPIs, their quantified, short term needs met. How does Torah study help us now? The view that heaven has nothing to offer earth, that wisdom has nothing practical to offer is an error that the people and the prophet are both capable of making. I imagine Moses descending the mountain “late” not as a temporal faux-pas but as a gap in understanding. To the materialist-pragmatist, the philosopher-humanist is always late. But Moses, the philosopher, who is both all-knowing and aloof, is also a construct of such a worldview that takes no ownership for bridging heaven and earth. The people have put Moses high up so that they can complain about him and then construct their calf, sparkling with gold (the currency of the times) and devoid of life. The Marxist analysis is not wrong here: the people have constructed an object whose value is aestheticized money. Unfortunately for them, money can’t buy wisdom. The Torah is given to Moses not as a good for sale, but as a gift. It is definitionally non-commercial.
Idols are formally static, signifying a worldview that is static. The people’s rigidity is the result of static. But so is their quick willingness to discard Moses in favor of a sculpture—for all that Moses was to them was a sculpture in the first place. A stiff-necked person doesn’t move, doesn’t look up or to the side, but sits transfixed, focused. That focus leads to over-generalizing and the kind of binary-thinking that leads to a weak sense of agency.
Moses is late, but he’s not dead. He’s not abandoning the people. In fact, he only left them because they put him up to it. The people need dialectical therapy to counter their distorted thoughts. By saving the people, however, Moses shows that there’s another way. Noah left humanity behind to flee in an ark. Moses, by contrast, tells God to erase him from the story if it’s going to be one in which there are only good guys and bad guys. The only story worth participating in, and the only people worth leading, is one that can embrace both its light and its shadow. Ironically, that self-awareness and self-ownership is the antidote needed to worship God in a non-idolatrous mode. Only self-awareness and embrace of our complexity can allow us to side-step the common attempt to use religion as a cover for and justification of psychological distortion.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins