Waiting Isn’t Easy

Idolatry as Impatience

And Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: What is the meaning of that which is written: “And the people saw that Moses delayed [boshesh] to come down from the mount” (Exodus 32:1)? Do not read the word in the verse as boshesh; rather,read it as ba’u shesh, six hours have arrived. When Moses ascended on High, he told the Jewish people: In forty days, at the beginning of six hours, I will come. After forty days, Satan came and brought confusion to the world by means of a storm, and it was impossible to ascertain the time. Satan said to the Jews: Where is your teacher Moses? They said to him: He ascended on High. He said to them: Six hours have arrived and he has not yet come. Surely he won’t. And they paid him no attention. Satan said to them: Moses died. And they paid him no attention. Ultimately, he showed them an image of his death-bed and an image of Moses’ corpse in a cloud. And that is what the Jewish people said to Aaron: “For this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what has become of him” (Exodus 32:1). (Shabbat 89a)

This is as it is related about Rav Reḥumi, who would commonly study before Rava in Meḥoza: He was accustomed to come back to his home every year on the eve of Yom Kippur. One day he was particularly engrossed in the halakhahe was studying, and so he remained in the study hall and did not go home. His wife was expecting him that day and continually said to herself: Now he is coming, now he is coming. But in the end, he did not come. She was distressed by this and a tear fell from her eye. At that exact moment, Rav Reḥumi was sitting on the roof. The roof collapsed under him and he died. (Ketubot 62b)

The psychological dynamics of the sin of the golden calf are complex. Yet one of the most obvious reasons the people turn to idolatry is impatience, a troubled relationship to time. In a stunning Midrash, Satan takes advantage of the people’s anxiety by convincing them that Moses is dead; but the wedge that opens up this possible thought is his proposition that Moses has failed to arrive at the appointed time; he failed to come within the 6 hours promised. A 6 hour delay, or perceived delay, becomes the basis for profound doubt, deep feelings of abandonment. The people should have waited, should have sat with the delay, and perhaps should have enjoyed their independence—but like children they turn “he’s not coming on time” into “he’s not coming at all.” Idolatry is less a theological error or conceptual one, in this telling, than a loss of impulse control. The people need security and will do whatever they can to feel secure. Their desperate measures betray deep, if understandable, insecurity.

To believe in God is to have Bitachon, deep existential trust. By demonstrating a lack of trust, the people demonstrate a lack of belief. Of course, they recognize God’s existence, and his historic track record, but none of this means they are any more secure. If the failure of the golden calf is paradigmatic of all collective spiritual errors, then Torah must come to restore and strengthen Bitachon. Bitachon, a kind of spiritual confidence that you are where you need to be and that God run’s the world, can be a decisive factor separating those with grit and resilience from those who despair and give up. People with Bitachon don’t make rash and reckless decisions; they accept the present with clarity and perspective. If they feel doubt, they work through it, in meditation and prayer.

The Talmud offers us another story of a man whose delay was fateful. Rav Rehumi fails to make it home to his wife in time for Yom Kippur. In context, this sage seems to have a broken relationship with his wife. He avoids her year round to learn Torah and then arranges his return for the one day of the year when their intimacy is disallowed and they are obligated to “afflict themselves.” In context, his neglect leads to his downfall. His wife’s tear brings his downfall, serving as a story of measure for measure. But I’d like to read the story differently, in light of the parallel to Moses’s delay. First, is the rabbi’s wife not like the people in her inability to wait. Has she not killed her husband, albeit indirectly and inadvertently, because of her impatience, and her choice to interpret his non-arrival as a bad sign and an ultimatum? Second, and on the flip side, let us appreciate the substance of her tear and what it represents. Her husband has forsaken her to learn Torah, has abandoned her for the academy. Is this not a similar critique the people might have had of Moses? What if he prefers it in heaven and doesn’t want to come back to earth? Could the golden calf not be a kind of surrogate husband, a stand-in for Moses? Perhaps an attempt to mirror his journey to the top of the mountain?

Plato describes the soul in this way:

“Once the soul was perfect and had wings…
Brave. It coul soar into heaven
where only creatures with wings can be.
But the soul lost its wings and fell to Earth.

When we see a beautiful woman, or a man…
the soul remembers the beauty it used to know in heaven.
And wings begin to spout, and that makes the soul want to fly,
but it cannot yet. It is still too weak.
So the man keeps staring up into the sky like a young bird.
He has lost all interest in the world…”

Plato describes aesthetic experience as an event that awakens the soul’s desire for heaven. Moses has flown away, he is the soul that is perfect and has wings. While the people below have lost their wings and fallen to earth. But by erecting an idol of gold perhaps they can sprout to wings and join Moses above.

In the story of Rav Rehumi and his wife, the lesson is clear: don’t abandon your spouse for Torah study. Torah cannot come at the cost of home life; it should support and be integrated in it. But if we think of Moses atop Sinai, we can imagine the people worrying that he might be lured away by Torah and never return. Moses does descend, but the 6 hours are a time of limbo in which we can imagine that he might have been pulled to stay a little longer. The people failed to have Bitachon, but Moses’s sustained absence is in fact a reasonable catalyst for doubt. In the doubt is a question “Will the Torah include me or exclude me?” “Will the Torah be for earth or just for heaven?” The turn to idolatry is a proposition. If Moses fails to return and integrate then we will be forced to make do with materialistic religion. The problem with the proposition is that they pre-empt Moses. They don’t give him a chance. But what if he had come down on the 41st or 42nd day? “Although the messiah will tarry, I shall wait for him,” goes the song. Do we, in fact, know how to wait? Do we know how to wait for heaven and earth to integrate rather than insisting on their duality?

Can we live in the world while retaining a passion for heaven and can we look at heaven and retain our commitment to this world? Can we wait in our condition as birds with wings that only get us slightly off the ground, souls that know enough to seek more but not so much that we know what?

The story of Moses returning to a scene of idolatry parallels the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The moment of seeing is also the moment of losing. Orpheus ascends with Eurydice, but looks back. The people look up at Moses and realize they should never have looked away.

In a banal sense, we find the sin of the golden calf anytime someone dismisses Torah as irrelevant, anytime someone dismisses wisdom as high-faulting, anytime someone dismisses ideas as something for elites. Great books and their teachers want to come down the mountain to meet us, but they take too long, sometimes too long. We’re still waiting after 40 days of lectures for them to get to the point. But if we could be patient, we’d find that they left not to abandon us but to enrich us by their return. Whether we are ascending or descending, the story is for us. Don’t dawdle in heaven, people are waiting impatiently on earth. But also, take your time; they must learn to sit with their own anxiety and boredom and cultivate an inner strength and hope.

On a personal note, I want to recognize that this week marks 5 years since I began writing a weekly essay on the parasha. May we all continue to grow in study and good deeds. The Torah is a tree of life to those who grasp it.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins