Dvar Torah on Parshat Ki Tisa

This week's parsha, Ki Tissa, contains the story of the golden calf. Moshe is due to return from the summit of Mt. Sinai, where he has been learning Torah from God. The People of Israel, nervously awaiting his return, believe that the promised forty days and forty nights of Moshe's absence are over, and yet there is no sign of him. It is this delay which, the Torah tells us, precipitated the people's demand for a new leader, a new God, and led to the creation of the golden calf:

"And the people saw that Moshe was late in coming down from the mountain, and the people congregated around Aharon, and said to him 'arise and make for us a God who will walk before us, for this man, Moshe, who took us up from Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him'."

The Rabbis of the Talmud speculated as to the nature of this delay, and the people's hysterical response to it. Basically, the entire episode is seen as a mistake made by the Jewish people, a misunderstanding between them and Moshe about when he was actually meant to return to them. However, the Rabbis add an interesting element to the Jewish people's nervousness about the whereabouts of their late leader. The Talmud, in Tractate Shabbat, (page 89a), says that Satan, when seeing the concern of the Israelites, made it look as if Moshe was, in fact, not just late, but dead. Satan conveyed this dire message in stages. He is described as first bringing darkness, confusion, and disorder into the world. Finally, in Satan's most extreme effort to undermine the confidence and well-being of the Israelites, he shows the people Moshe's corpse, lying on a bier. They believe that he is dead, and, probably worried not only about his death but also about its apparent cause - spending too much time with God - clamor for a new God, the golden calf.

I am going to assume here, as many have before me, that Satan is not a devilish creature but is, rather, some problematic element in our own psyche, our evil inclination, if you will. If this is the way we understand the reference to Satan, then I would hypothesize that the vision the Israelites saw of a dead Moshe was, in fact, an expression of a deep-seated desire on their part for Moshe's death. This idea was taken to its extreme by Freud in his (in)famous work, Moses and Monotheism, in which he theorizes that Jewish guilt is traceable to the fact that the Jewish people, in an Oedipal act, actually killed Moshe, rebelling against the law-giving father figure. It is guilt over this crime that informs Jewish sensibility throughout history.

I would not like to go as far as Freud did. However, there is no doubt that the constant anger, the carping, whining, and complaining that typifies the Jewish people's relationship with Moshe all through the forty years of wandering in the desert would seem to indicate a classic inability to accept the authority of the father figure. This, as Freud and others after him have pointed out, is, in fact, part of the classic Oedipal situation. Every son feels the need to rebel against, to 'kill' the frightening, overbearing father in order to himself become an adult, an autonomous individual. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that the Rabbis, when telling us about this vision of the dead Moshe which the Jewish people saw, were pointing out a real ambivalence that they had towards their leader. On some level they did wish him dead, which would leave them free of the overbearing demands of the restrictive, judgmental, distant, often absent father; a father whose presence is overbearing, and whose absence is unbearable.

The tragedy of the Jewish people, as illustrated by the episode of golden calf, is that, rather than resolve their conflict with Moshe, they succumb to the infantile desire to actually kill him, triggered, interestingly, by his absence, while he is on Mt. Sinai, alone with God. Once they thought that Moshe was dead, which, of course, as in the case of everyone's father, has to happen one day, rather than maturely stepping into the role left empty by his death, they revert, with their demand for a new leader, a calf (significantly, a young bull), to an infantile mode of behavior, demanding not the autonomy or the independence to stand on their own feet before God, but, instead, asking for some sort of pathetic, childish, object; a toy, a doll. Once the calf is created, their behavior continues in this infantile mode: "And they awoke on the morrow [which would indicate that the first thing they did after the calf's creation was go to sleep!] and burned offerings and brought sacrifices, and the people sat down to eat and drink, and they arose to play."

A few verses later, when the very-much alive Moshe descends from the mountain, angrily confronting the revelers, we are told that dancing was also part of the festivities. Poussin's "The Adoration of the Golden Calf" beautifully captures the Edenic, child-like, erotically charged revelry in which the nation was involved around the figure of the calf (which Poussin paints as a too-old cow, in my opinion). In fact, the entire golden calf episode, when understood in light of the fantasy of Moshe's death, feels like a celebration of that death!

The Rabbis, by telling us this story of the vision of Moshe's demise, are explaining the Oedipal dynamic behind the desire for the calf. The people of Israel found it difficult to accept the leadership of Moshe, the parenting of a stern, demanding father, and sought, as we all must, to free themselves of this overbearing parent in order to become mature, autonomous individuals. Tragically, this was done in an infantile, regressive way, with hysterical fantasies of a violent Oedipal solution to the problem - the dramatic death of the 'father' Moshe - followed, in the wake of that Oedipal fantasy, by an infantile celebration of the physical, replete with sleep, playing, dancing, eating, and drinking; an affirmation of the infant self, whose entire world is defined by these bodily activities.

Tragically, the Jewish people fail to resolve their Oedipal conflict as we all must, by somehow balancing an acceptance of the existence of a father, along with his demands and expectations, with the contradictory need to symbolically 'kill' him, that is to say, to become independent individuals, able to act freely, autonomously, and maturely - both identifying with, as well as individuating from, the father whom we must both reject and become. We constantly struggle between the demands of, on the one hand, a stern father - and here I am referring to our biological fathers, and to God, and to the Torah, and to social, cultural, and religious systems which ask much of us, which constrain and restrain us, try to define us, and in many ways threaten to overshadow our individual selves - and, on the other, the desire to express ourselves as independent, individuated beings, to grow up, out of the shadows of these fathers. It is all too easy to succumb, as the Israelites did here, to the tempting Oedipal solution, to emotionally kill, rather than come to terms with, that father - to simply, violently, reject him and the demands he places upon us, and regress to a simpler, less demanding, infantile self, a self in which our physical needs and desires are paramount, and must be instantly gratified. The harder task, and the one at which we must succeed, is to integrate his demands with our needs, to be able to come to terms with both his necessary presence and his equally necessary, and inevitable absence. 

This conflict, if navigated successfully, can lead us to a mature adulthood, in which we successfully balance the conflicting claims of the father and the self by constructing a personality in which they both can live. Resolved unsuccessfully, as in the story of the golden calf, this  conflict can lead to destructive, morbid thoughts, fantasies of death and disorder, and sins of selfish, regressive, infantile revelry.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix