The Golden Calf, part 2

Oh That Golden Calf, part 2


Yesterday, we talked a bit about the story of the golden calf, and how it reminds us that our brokenness lives right there next to our wholeness, our pain with our joy, our grief and disappointment with our greatest hopes and dreams. Today, I’d like to dig a bit deeper in our story of the golden calf.

I’ll admit it. I've had a challenging time trying to understand how this people just came through the exodus and landed on the other side of a sea, having walked through it on dry land (a metaphor, for sure), and now assembled safely in the wilderness await for the return of Moses who is allegedly communing with G!d on the mountaintop and has put them on standby until he returns from his tea and crumpets with The Holy.

When I have read the story in the past, I confess to wanting to scream at these people, “What were you thinking? Didn’t you just experience first hand all these miraculous events, and yet, you couldn’t patiently wait out forty days for Moses to return? And even if you were so impatient, why a golden calf? Why not invent baseball, or organize dancing contests? Why collect jewelry, smelt it down, and worship a golden calf you yourselves created?” Obviously, I could not find a way to relate to the story in a deeply personal way. That is, until recently.

A randomly selected book, which I opened at random as well, landed my eyes on a paragraph referring to the golden calf episode. This sentence jumped out at me: “True, again and again––as is so typical of human relationships––the people failed to live up to what they had come to know and had pledged themselves to obey.” (A Touch of the Sacred by Rabbi Dr. Eugene Horowitz & Frances Schwartz, p. 203).

My moment of personal revelation about the golden calf incident came in that sentence. Suddenly, I understood. I, too, have at least one thing that I have over and over again pledged myself to change, and yet, every single day, I fail and flail. Almost every day. Nearly every night I go to bed demoralized and shattered and broken that I have failed yet again to do one simple thing I am trying to change. Throughout the night I awaken and feel the pains of failure again. And every morning I awaken and sweep up yesterday’s failings like crumbs of brokenness scattered across the floor, and desperately utter a prayer that today will bring success.

And yet, every night is the same: a sense of failure, despair, broken pledges. Of all the things I have accomplished over the years through sheer determination, there is one thing that feels so Herculean, so insurmountable. Every day I try, and mostly every day, I fail.

Surely, this is the very thing the story of the golden calf teaches us? No matter who we are or how far we’ve come, no matter the miraculous events behind us, at some point, we all must face our golden calf of failing and despair. Maybe for some people it is a vice like smoking, or anger. For others, perhaps impatience or the tendency to be snarky. Others constantly spread gossip or sharing things about other people they should hold in confidence, while others are continually whining and complaining and never expressing the goodness and positive. And for others, the struggle is deeper and darker, like addictions to alcohol, or drugs, or even food.

Whatever “it” is, every single one of us has at least one golden calf where we find ourselves, despite our best intentions and promises and pledges, once again worshiping at its feet. We find ourselves bereft of the hope that Moses will come down from the mountain with a good word, and find ourselves yet again in the grips of a vice we can’t seem to shake. What will it take? How much longer will we feel shattered and broken, controlled by this vice?

I, too, have at least one golden calf. I am of these people who fell at the feet of an idol of their own making. Again and again, I fail to live up to what I have pledged myself daily to do. And it is this golden calf which makes me feel unworthy, sometimes unworthy to even keep trying to change. Every night I see Moses come down from the mountain and shatter the tablets, the tablets of my struggles and attempts, of my pledges and vows and hopes that each day would be different.

I can’t say that relating at this deeper level of the story of the golden calf will now be my “golden ticket” to redemption, but I can say that this new level of relating has opened the tiniest crack which reminds me of yesterday’s talk: that our brokenness lives right there next to our wholeness, our pain with our joy, our grief and disappointment with our greatest hopes and dreams. It also reminds me I am only human. If we are honest, every one of us will find within ourselves at least one golden calf.

The other morning, for the first time, I had a glimmer of hope that my failing, my vice, my golden calf, does not bar me from moving forward. Rather, it binds me to being a failing, flailing human, part of a tribe who sometimes struggles together, and often celebrates together, and that right next to our deepest human failings sits the most glorious and grand parts of who we are and who we we are aspiring to be. That is being human.

As I shared yesterday, we must be gentle with the times we are most whole, because this is not the entire story. The second set of whole tablets only came after the shattering. And we must be gentle with the times we are fragmented and broken and have failed yet again, for it is also not the entire story. After the shattering came the wholeness.

Finally, I understand the story of the golden calf, and why it is so important that it appears twice our Torah, and furthermore, that we remind ourselves of this story thirteen times every year: We must never forget that we are holy vessels carrying within us the holy spark of Divinity, and we must also never forget that we are human and broken and that our failings can bring us to our knees. While we are on our knees, that is when we can be closer to the Holy.

We sit low on our darkest days: sitting shiva, grieving over Tisha B’Av. The Psalmist speaks of being brought low. So maybe the throne of the Holy is not in the sky, as we often imagine it, but on the ground. Interestingly, many of our prayers and blessings begin with the Hebrew word, baruch, which is commonly translated as “blessed”. Yet this translation does not make sense. What does it mean to say someone is ‘blessed’, especially if that “someone” is G!d?

If we look at the Hebrew, a better translation of baruch can be deciphered by relating this word to other which are derived from the same Hebrew word root. This is how Hebrew works, unlike English. So let’s go clue hunting in the Hebrew...

When Eliezer, the servant of Abraham, brought his camels to the well where he met Rebecca, he caused his camels to bend their knees. The word used there is, “Vi’yavrach” (a derivative of “baruch”) which means to make the camels kneel down. (Genesis 24:11) The word baruch is also related to the word berach, which means “knee.” We also find “L’havrich” which refers to taking a vine and putting part of the growing branch in the ground so it can take root.

By looking at the root of the word baruch and comparing the derivatives, what we see in all these forms is that baruch has to do with a downward motion: the lowering of the camels, bending down and planting the vine, and the word knee. All of these forms of the very same root word have in common a downward motion. So when we pray baruch ata Adonai or bruchah at Yah, the masculine and feminine forms of the phrase “blessed are You, G!d” we are recognizing two things: we are asking that G!d come down to meet us, and we are making ourselves low.

When we see it this way, those things which bring us low actually put us in the exact right place to receive. What we think we know, how we strive to keep changing something, all eventually bring us to the lowest points where we recognize at last that we are humans who fail and flail at every turn. And in our lowliness, in our bending downward, we can find the strength again to rise to a new day. Like the pliè in dance, we must go down towards the ground before we can again rise and push upwards.

Our failings, our golden calf moments, can bring us to our knees. And while we are on our knees, that is when we can be closer to the Holy, if we invite the Holy to come down and meet us there.