The Torah commands us to remember six things – what the rabbis, for understandable reasons, call The Six Remembrances. Three of them are good: The Sabbath, which the great 20th century rabbi, philosopher, mystic and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel called our cathedral in time; the Exodus from Egypt, which we’ll be celebrating soon at Passover seders; and the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, which, as Progressive Jews, we may or may not remember to celebrate while eating cheesecake on Shavuot seven weeks after Passover.
The other three Remembrances are not so good.
One of them is God’s punishment of Miriam for her criticism of Moses marrying a Cushite woman – a deeply troubling story not least because both of Moses’s siblings criticise the marriage, Aaron as well as Miriam, but only Miriam is punished for it. God strikes Miriam so that her skin turns to “snow-white scales.” (Num. 12:10, JPS 2023 translation.) The sequence of events that follows is fascinating: Aaron, perhaps recognising the injustice of Miriam alone being punished for something they both did, apologises to Moses on behalf of both of them, and Moses responds with a spontaneous prayer to God, one of the earliest recorded prayers in Torah: “El na refah na la,” “God, please heal her, please.”
Another Remembrance is the attack by the Amalekite people on the weakest of the Israelites, those who were lagging behind the main body of the people making their way through the desert. This attack is considered so singularly evil that the Torah commands us both to remember it and to blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.
The Sixth Remembrance is from this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa. It is, of course, the Making of the Golden Calf. It’s a story that remains vivid and shocking no matter how many times we retell it: The Israelites, camped at the foot of Mt. Sinai, run out of patience waiting for Moses to come back down and ask Aaron to make a god to go before them. Their language is blunt. It’s reasonable to translate their complaint as: “We don’t know what’s happened to Moses, that guy who brought us out of Egypt.” (Exodus 32:1, my translation.)
Aaron raises no recorded objection, instead asking for their golden earrings and casting them into a Golden Calf, then building an altar to the idol and proclaiming a festival of God on the following day. Meanwhile, up on the mountain, God has just given Moses the original two tablets of stone and is understandably cross about what’s going on down below. God threatens to destroy the people, Moses intervenes and persuades God not to do it, then hurries down the mountain, smashes the tablets, grinds up the idol, sprinkles its remains on water and makes the people drink it. End of story – or nearly so. What happens next is quite bloodthirsty, and we will get back to it in a minute.
First, though, a question: Whose fault is all this? It is arguably the single greatest sin committed by the people of Israel in all their troubled relationship with God in Tanakh. Someone must be to blame.
Of all the characters in the story, Moses seems the most blameless. Yes, he does essentially abandon his post as leader, leaving the Israelites to their own devices with no explanation for 40 days while he was atop Mt. Sinai, but he was doing as God commanded.
Aaron, brother of Moses and future High Priest, often gets much of the blame. As de facto deputy to Moses, he’s in charge and does not put his foot down when the people ask him to make a god for them. And he acts guilty when he’s caught, minimising his role in events by claiming the calf simply “came out” of the fire (Ex. 32:24), when in fact we know he fashioned it himself.
But aren’t Aaron’s actions, at some level, understandable? Could he have stood up to the mixed multitude of Israel and refused their cry for a god they could see and worship? Easy to say with hindsight, perhaps harder to do in the moment.
And there is some rabbinic defense of Aaron, suggesting that his declaration of a festival of worship “tomorrow” was a delaying tactic to give Moses another day to get back. Not only that, but Aaron’s declaration is of a festival to Adonai. He may have surrendered to the multitude’s desire for an idol, but he does still direct their worship to our God, Adonai. The form of worship is wrong, terribly wrong, but it is not worship of the wrong God.
This would seem to leave the people of Israel themselves most at fault, and indeed God does blame the people. (Although when Moses retells the story in Deuteronomy 9:20, Moses says God was angry enough with Aaron to have destroyed him.) They ask for a visible god they can worship, they give their gold to make it, they eat and drink and dance before it. This is a guilty, stiff-necked people.
But I cannot help but feel some sympathy for our ancestors in the desert, because what they want is something to believe in. Indeed, time and time again throughout the Tanakh, the way the Israelites infuriate God is not by turning away from what we now call religion, but by worshipping the wrong gods, the gods of their Canaanite wives or neighbours. This is not a people turning their back on the divine, but a people desperate to believe, desperate to worship something greater than themselves.
God won’t have it, of course – the end of the story of the Golden Calf is that Moses calls on any who are still faithful to Adonai to rally to him, and the tribe of Levi does, and slaughters 3,000 of their fellow Israelites, “sibling, neighbour and kin.” (Exodus 32:27-28, JPS 2023 translation.) It makes for chilling reading coming in the week when we also read the Book of Esther on Purim, which culminates with the Jews rising up and slaughtering 75,000 Persians on the day the evil Haman planned to wipe them out.
We sometimes try to whitewash our history by telling only the nice bits, or at least leaving out the worst bits. But the message of the Six Remembrances is that we remember not only the good things – Shabbat, the Exodus, receiving the Torah. We remember the bad things as well, the injustices done to us, and the injustices we have done to others. Because they are all part of our history, and, in their own ways, they all may teach lessons for the future.
Richard Allen Greene, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.