Shabbat Ki Tisah
What does God look like?
The dominant theme of the Torah this Shabbat is the episode of the Golden Calf.
Moshe was up the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights. Nobody knew what had happened to him. The people down below start to panic. The two people that were left in charge in Moshe’s absence were Aaron and Chur (according to Midrash he was the son of Miriam and Caleb). Chur is not heard of afterwards. This is why tradition says that when the people said they wanted an idol to replace Moshe he tried to stop them and was killed. This maybe, is why Aaron reluctantly agreed to make the Golden Calf.
For the Children of Israel, an abstraction was just not enough. Aaron then called for a celebration the following day which turned into a pagan orgy. Moshe came down the mountain, he saw what was going on, and smashed the two tablets of stone, ground the idol down, mixed the ashes in water, and made the offenders drink it. What better way to get them to realise the futility of the physical? Here it is symbolic of the idea that God has been betrayed by the children of Israel.
What was the purpose of this idol? They said it was the same God that took them out of Egypt. But they could see that they had just made it themselves. They needed some sort of image. Was this why paganism with its images has remained so pervasive to this day? Or was it why the anthropomorphosis of God as some kind of super-powerful human-like being, remains so popular?
After these events, God’s initial reaction was to give up on the Children of Israel and start again with Moshe. Moshe interceded and appealed to God. Who agreed (another seemingly human response) and gave the Children of Israel a second chance and continued taking them towards the Promised Land. But implied that there would not be the same relationship as before. Moses sensed this and sought reassurance by asking God to show him His glory.
God replies in Exodus 33:20 “you cannot see my face, no human being can see, no living human being can see my face …but I will find a place amongst the rocks… I will cover you I pass by, but you will only see an afterimage not my face.” And then Moshe went back up the mountain to receive the 10 commandments a second time.
Both scientists and theologians have argued for thousands of years about what we understand as God. Is it a concept or and an experience? We ascribe to God human words, like speak, listen, anger, sadness, and regret. This gives rise to the idea that God is some sort of all-powerful Superman controlling the world. Yet at the same time, the Torah keeps on saying that God is beyond the comprehension of human beings. We cannot know God. Indeed, according to the great Maimonides, we can only say what God is not! What we can derive from what the Torah tells us about God, is what God approves of and what God does not approve of. How we are supposed to behave and how not. God, Torah, is the ultimate authority.
Since God is not physical, I take all these examples of seeing God, experiencing God, not as something that we would understand scientifically but as something that has to be sensed intuitively. How do you describe intuition? How do you describe emotion?
The Torah comprises. One way is to give God different names that reflect the variety of aspects of the spiritual. Each one of us experiences God in a personal way; when we feel happy, sad, guilty, or worried. And then there is the lawgiver, and we don’t need to see a lawgiver to know what the law is. We just need to feel that there is something beyond us that represents what we might call the mystical or the spiritual world, something to aspire to, beyond the mundane. By describing the afterimage of God as in this episode, one avoids the idea of God in a physical sense and yet retains the idea.
Every time I read this episode I think of the Biblical Books of Kings. After the death of Solomon, his kingdom split, and Jeroboam led the Ten Northern tribes into secession as the Kingdom of Israel. He immediately set up two temples in the North, Bethel and Dan and placed golden calves in both. Obviously, to assert his independence of Jerusalem and its temple. For the rest of his troubled kingdom, it was completely pagan (and so too were several rulers of Judea). What was it about Golden Calves that so attracted the Israelites? Unless, of course, it represented the attractions of paganism, sexual libertinism, crass materialism and superstition. Popular then, and there are plenty of Golden Calves around today.
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.
