Shabbat Ki Tisah
While Moshe was absent up on Mount Sinai, the people feared he was dead and turned to Aaron and demanded that he craft an idol, the golden calf. Even to the extent of that the people actually said, when he displayed it “These are your gods, Israel, who took you out of Egypt”. Despite just having seen it being made. Such is the power and delusion of idolatry, of the human capacity for self-delusion and superstition.
Moshe came down the mountain, saw the idol, destroyed it, dissolved the ashes in water, and made the people drink it. Who? How many? We are not told. Nothing could show the pathetic futility of such a supposedly super-human symbol, as humans drinking it and then expelling it through their bodies. But Moshe saw that the people were out of control, wild (Shemot 32:25). They had partied all night and probably were drunk too.
According to one Mishna the people responsible were the Eyrev Rav, the collection of other people, political refugees, adventurers or discontented, who joined the children of Israel when they left Egypt (Shemot 12:38). But the Torah repeatedly referred to “the people” in general. And when Moshe then commanded the Levites to kill the perpetrators. He used the words “move amongst the people and kill brothers and neighbours (Shemot 32:27). No mention of any outsiders.
If this sounds harsh to us, we should remember that the death penalty for treason still exists to this day in parts of our so-called modern world. And this was reason against God and Moshe as the leader. But what has always struck me is that the figure of those condemned for initiating and participating in the whole event numbered 3,000. As someone who opposes all capital punishment, even one is unacceptable. But 3,000 is a very small minority of the people who were according to the text 600,000 males of fighting age. So why is it that “the people,” as a whole, were attacked by Moshe for the sin of the idol? And after the first round of punishments there was a plague that affected the people in general?
One answer is that, as The Talmud says that if someone witnesses a crime and does nothing to stop it, that person shares in the guilt. In one way we are all guilty if we allow our society to become corrupt. And in the words of the Irishman Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” He gave Psalms 94 as his source although I can’t make out which words he was referring to. Maybe the 3,000 were the ones who took the initiative and were the prime movers. But if so, it appears that most of the others just stood by and let the crazies run the asylum.
This is a situation that we see all around us in the world today as small groups of extremists in countries, parties, institutions, and organizations, manage to impose their dogmatic views on the majority, who are apathetic or weak or easily led and just give up.
The greatest threat to the survival of the Children of Israel then, after they escaped from Egypt was the way in which the people were misled into abandoning for a while, everything they stood for and aspired to. As today from without and sadly from within, whether Neturei Karta from the extreme Charedi World or the woke Jewish leftists in the press, the media and Hollywood, we as a people, are being attacked, and undermined. It is a national problem. We have always been divided, yet managed to pull through.
This was why it was also decreed that the men took off and abandoned wearing gold jewellery after the Golden Calf, precisely because it represented the very alien values that led them astray.
(Shemot 33: 6).
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.
