A molten god? Really?

I hope you enjoyed Purim as much as I did. It was such a great pleasure to see our team of Rabbis and Rebbetzins, along with our staff and many volunteers, bring the joy and the Mitzvot of this great happy day to so many hundreds of people.

Now it’s time to prepare for Pesach. If you need hand baked Shmurah Matzah (the fresh stuff) or a Haggadah or a Seder we are here for you.

Let’s talk about a Golden Calf. The story really sounds strange. The Jewish people had just had a revelation from Hashem Himself, seen great wonders and miracles and heard His voice saying the Ten Commandments, and they thought an animal made out of gold could be a god?  The whole thing doesn’t make sense that smart people in that situation would go for a molten god.

Now we are taught that there were idol worshippers among them that still held onto their old ways. These were Egyptians who had joined the Jews when they left Egypt, known as the mixed-multitude. They were the ones who started the whole thing. We know this from the Biblical text because when the calf came out of the furnace they said: “This is your god, Israel,” not “this is our god.” But that still doesn’t answer how the rest of the nation went along with it.

Here’s a perspective. Hashem is hidden. Spirituality is not visible to the physical eye. It’s hard to inspire ourselves to connect to something that is not clearly tangible. While certainly we can see it with our mind’s eye if we open ourselves to it, it is not intuitive to our physical experience.

The people had seen Hashem’s revelation and wanted to keep the inspiration going. They knew that Moshe provided that inspiration but now, as far as they knew, he was gone. So how to keep up the inspiration?  They felt that none of the other leaders came close to Moshe’s holiness.

They knew that Hashem had ordered the Keruvim, golden images of children, to be placed in the Holy of Holies. They knew that Hashem’s Divine spark is found in all physical things. So they figured they would have a golden image that would represent holiness and inspiration, a physical reminder of Hashem’s presence on earth. (There are Kabbalistic explanations of why a calf, but not for now.)

Once the calf was made, the Egyptians turned into a god and some of the Jews worshiped it. The slippery slide of doing something that Hashem had not commanded, in effect creating an image of G-d from their own imagination, led to the most serious sin of idolatry.

Yes, everything was created by Hashem and there is a Divine spark in everything. But we may not attribute Divine qualities to any item or person. This is an important thing to remember today, when there are many movements, including some meditations, yoga and Mindfulness movements, that do this.

We have a beautiful Torah with the most uplifting and spiritually inspiring teachings. We don’t need to look for inferior teachings elsewhere.