An interesting question occurred to me this year, rereading this perennially fascinating parsha. The main body of the narrative here deals with the sin of the Golden Calf. There is something strange about this: off hand, one thinks of it in terms of idolatry: the people turn to a calf instead of the God who took them out of Egypt and who revealed Himself at Sinai. Yet the immediate cause of their act is the absence of Moses:

“for this man Moses, who took us up out of Egypt, we do not know what happened to him”

Exodus 32:1

The calf would thus seem to be a substitute, not for God, but for Moses. Somehow, the people do not a living, speaking man, a teacher and leader who interact with them, who guides them and judges their disputes—and at times also scolds them. Instead, they make an inanimate object of metal, around whom they can invent a cult of their own devising.
Later on in the parsha, we read an interesting dialogue between Moses and God. Moses asks God to “show me your glory” (Exod 33:18). God refuses this request. It is as if God has placed a certain limit upon man’s knowledge of Him. As if the quest for mystical knowledge, to see the face of God, is somehow illegitimate. “For no man can see me and live” (ibid., v. 20) Note: it is not that God has no face or form, that He is incorporeal, bereft of physical appearance. Rather, He is too awesome, too holy, “wholly other,” for a mortal human being to see Him and yet remain a denizen of this world.
The question that occurred to me is: what, if anything, do these two scenes have in common? My answer goes something like this: the people wish to substitute the living God, the God who gives them a teaching, a path by which to live, taught by a living man, with a fetish, a molten image of “a bull who eats grass” Moses, too, was most concerned with the “appearance” of God. He, surely, is no idolator, no fetishist. But he wishes to see the Divine image. God refuses him, but instead tells him that he will make His “ways” known to him. Thus, after placing him “in the cleft of the rock,” God reveals to him His “ways” His way of conducting the world. But what this means, in particular, is His forgiveness, His long sufferingness, His “attributes of mercy”—which means, essentially, His tolerance for the foibles and limitations of human beings. God is at the outset very stern and strict, very demanding in His moral and ethical and behavioral expectations of human beings. But after the fact, when they fail, He does not destroy, but is ever willing to lift them up anew, to give them another chance.

This is an important ethical lesson.
What have these two scenes in common? It seems to me that the fetishist, on his primitive, gross, corporeal level, and Moses, in his refined, spiritual, mystical, much more abstract level, both make the same error. Both are preoccupied with God’s essence, His being, with what He is. These questions are surely important—indeed, perhaps they are the most profound philosophical questions that can be asked. But there something else even more essential, in terms of actually living human life in light of God: to “know” the living God by living a godly life, a life dedicated to realizing the vision of God’s holiness in the world through acts of goodness, justice and kindness to one’s fellow man.
It is interesting that, Maimonides, who is usually thought of as an elite philosopher somewhat removed from the concerns of ordinary folk, concludes his Guide for the Perplexed with words very much to this effect. After discussing the profoundest subjects of theology, and expounding the ”knowledge of God” and how it may be attained, he ends the entire work (Guide III.54) by stating that true knowledge of God lies, not in intellectual or mystical apprehension of the Godhead, but in imitating God’s ways in the ethical sense. (Jeremiah 9:23).

“For let him who glories take glory in this: that he comprehends and knows Me, that I am the Lord, who performs love, justice and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I take delight, says the Lord.”

Recent Articles by Rabbi Jonathan Chipman

• Re'e: Human Rights and Spiritual Revival from Within. - August 28th, 2008
• Vayhi: The End was Hidden from Him - December 21st, 2007
• Ki Tisa: Love, Justice and Righteousness - March 9th, 2007
• Mishpatim: Jury and Beit Din - February 16th, 2007
• Chanukah: Protecting and restoring religious values - December 22nd, 2006
• Noah: The Nature of Evil - October 27th, 2006

Categories: Ki-Tissa, parashat hashavua
Tags: Bo, human rights, judge, palestinians, rest, righteousness, settlers