Friday, February 18, 2011

Must we talk about The Golden Calf?

There’s some sort of awful stomach plague going around the city; all the preschools are emptied out, and the doctors’ offices are swamped. My daughter has been laid low for five days now. I called the doctor this morning, finally, and asked for intel on how long this thing is going to last, and if I ought to bring her in. “One to two weeks,” said the nurse, “and no, as you suspected, there’s nothing we can do for her here. Just keep her hydrated.”

In our family, I’m the grownup who deals with the pukes, because, much as I hate to puke, I’ve always been a puker myself, and my husband thinks that vomiting is akin to dying. So for five days I’ve been holed up in my apartment, sharing my bed with a pitifully ill child, cleaning up explosive diarrhea and mucous-y vomit and offering up a rotating menu of apple juice, ginger ale, seltzer, ice cream, and childrens’ chewable ibuprofen. Oh, and working. I’m a software developer, and I can work from home, and we have a big deadline, so I sit here in bed with my sick daughter and fix bugs, and I am exhausted.

Illness is strange; it takes you out of time. Like death and birth, only not quite so baldly. My daughter and I have been lost in our own world this week, trapped in a still point, as in a glass bubble. Outside, the world goes on. It is 60 degrees out. Here in the bedroom, it is no time. We’re just waiting for time to start up again, for our routines to resume. It’s tiring and miserable but it’s also very intimate. And I’m proud of how well I’m managing to care for my poor sick little girl. I’m glad of how I’m able to be in this bubble of waiting with her -- sorry I cannot make her well, but grateful for the strength to sit with her in her illness.

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My daughter is finally better. She is once again imperious and impish, laughing and telling stories to herself. I’ve had a migraine for a day and a half, my reward for struggling through her illness with her. This morning I drugged it to death and then went to shul with my son. At shul we did not read the golden calf portion of Ki Tissa -- we’re on a triennial cycle and this year we read all about, I think, the census. Under my breath I read the part about the golden calf to my son. We left not long after. I was glad to have gone to shul; it had been a long time since I’d been to shul on a Saturday morning, I don’t know why exactly. I have just fallen out of the habit.

So I was thinking about the golden calf. The story is, Moses goes up onto Mt. Sinai, looking for all the world like he’s climbing up into the crater of an active volcano, and he stays up there for forty days and forty nights. That’s a pretty long time to be up on a mountain, alone. It’s a pretty long time for a recently enslaved rag-tag band of refugees to cool their heels in a tent city down below. People get bored and anxious. They want something to happen. Nothing is happening. They are at a show, and the opening act has been on, and left, and the main act never comes. Occasionally a roadie rushes across the stage, murmuring into their headset. The beer is getting warm, and the people who used to stand around smoking in this kind of venue are thinking longingly of the alley outside. It’s too loud to talk, even, because the club managers have turned up the really awful music to encourage some kind of desultory dancing activity to make up for the failure of the main act to arrive. You start envisioning them, the band, out in their tour bus or ensconced in some gritty yet decadently comfortable green room in the bowels of the club. You bet they’re allowed to smoke in the green room, and on the bus. They are sprawled in their leather pants, snorting coke and making out with groupies. They’re in no hurry. Why should they rush? The fans will wait. Where the hell else are the fans going to go? Back home? And miss the main act? You’re angry out there in the noisy dark, waiting. Who do those people think they are, anyway? What’s so special about them, that they can make us wait like this, for no visible reason?

Well, dammit, someone says finally, let’s make our own fucking music! We don’t need no stinking ‘main act’. The idea spreads, and the general disgruntlement turns to something else -- to revolt. We’ve got people down here in the audience who know how to play that fancy drum set, and look, here’s an electric guitarist, and this fine lady used to sing a cappella. There’s resentment and nastiness, to be sure, in the swelling demands of the audience, but also excitement, and solidarity, and a heady anticipation. The mob of fans could turn violent, but they are not violent, yet. They are unified around this single idea: that out of the ordinary audience members they will form their own band, that they will stop waiting for the main act, which, like Godot, has failed to arrive. They will take matters into their own hands.

The club manager comes out onto the stage, hands raised, conciliatory. He is so very sorry for the delay, he say, but we must trust that the main act will come out soon. He admits he does not understand the hold-up himself. But he’s booked this act dozens of times and they have always come through. He trusts them. If everyone can just calm down --

No one is going to calm down. Some men down at the front, stinking of bud light, make as if to storm the stage. There’s a lot of fancy equipment there, and the club manager does not want it destroyed. Nor, for that matter, does he want his own face smashed in. What can he do but give in, what can he do but attempt to contain the rising energy, to dissipate it safely? Let’s have some love songs, he says. Let all those who can sing come up on the stage, and a drummer, and a guitarist, and a bass player. Can anyone play a fiddle? he asks. What about saxaphone? Let’s hear some music, while we wait, some gentle songs, something light.

It’s not a terrible idea, really. Some light songs, to calm down the crowd, to pass the time, to channel all that energy. Light songs, like a newborn calf, all wet tongue and velvet nose, struggling to its feet for the first time, staggering a bit, drunk on having been born. Some adorable gamboling, under the spring sun, in the grasses. Harmless, innocent, powerless, and benign. What harm could possibly come of such song, of such imagery? What band will be offended at hearing its audience pass the time with such frivolous music? What God could imagine a newborn calf, leggy and still damp, to be any kind of threat? It’s this or a descent into absolute chaos, thinks the manager of the club. A nice innocent calf, thinks Aaron -- surely God won’t get too exercised about that. Not when the alternative is mayhem.

And so the music starts, smooth and calming, like the stuff they play in the dentist’s office. And so the calf, innocent and powerless, is cast. Everything is under control.

But all that energy hasn’t been dissipated. People are still pissed off, underneath the major key and in the face of the sweetest little velvet nosed calf you ever did see. They are still waiting, dammit. It’s not like any decisions have been made, it’s not like the beer has gotten cold again or the people who want to smoke have had their cigarettes yet and the bathrooms are pretty nasty and they’re all sick of standing, and they still can’t decide if they should stick around waiting (50 bucks, complains someone! To wait in the dark, on this sticky floor! ) or just leave. All those people in the desert, they’re still there in the desert, who knows where, this godforsaken place, who knows why we’re even here or whether we’re just going to die out here or where this Moses guy is taking us or if he’s even coming back, the maniac, he’s probably just dead up there, and the vultures picking his bones.

What the hell are we going to do next?

That kind of fear and anxiety is not dissipated with any old Kumbaya my Lord or any cavorting little baby animals. That kind of fear can turn to chaos, or to the Tea Party, or Hezbollah, or to Fascism. A good leader could turn it to good, maybe, to a strong kind of good leading with a rare kind of love. If you can turn that energy inside out, into a high and loving and miraculous sort of courage -- well, that’s something to be seen. That’s “I have a dream” material, is what that is. But if what you are is a middle manager and a functionary then what you do is paper over it with sentimentality, hoping to buy some time, and when that wears off the sentimentality gets ripped away, like old wall paper, and what’s underneath is pretty dark. That calf is going to the slaughter, after all. Those love songs end in despair, as likely as not. Lovers murder one another, the throat of the calf is slit. All that black energy just gets blacker, and someone’s shirt gets ripped off, and someone gets a bloody nose, and the drums get louder and the singers start howling. It’s a wind whipping through the people, whipping up their fear and their anger and their anxiety, ripping all that innocence and love to shreds.

And by the time the main act comes on stage, their instruments have been smashed to bits. There are puddles of beer, and the air is thick with smoke, and a red-headed girl is passed out on an amp.

By the time Moses comes down from the mountain, that golden calf is all bloodied. The severed head of a real calf is hooked on one of its horns. Several dogs are eating up entrails that are stuck in its tail. The Israelites are all naked, streaked in blood, drunk, hollow-eyed. A baby is whimpering for its mother, who is pinned under some men. Mounds of steaming excrement are piled close to the tents.

Whose fault is this, exactly? Who should we blame? The people, who were left without guidance, after years of hard slavery? Left in the desert, to die -- for all they knew. Abandoned by their leader, the man who had the ear of God, or so he said. It had seemed like he did, it was plausible enough, when Moses was there with them, when he did great things, when all those signs and wonders had happened, when they were led out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. But human memory is short. The Israelites were an anxious lot, and the place they were in -- well, it was an anxious place. The energy of mobs is a fearsome thing.

Should we blame Aaron? Aaron the functionary? Aaron knew about the correct ways to sacrifice things, about the forms and rituals of worship. He did not know how to inspire a people. It was not Aaron who had led them out of Egypt. It was just Aaron, left down below, facing an angry mob, without any guidance from either God or his brother. Left to babysit, no phone number to call in case of emergency. For all Aaron knew, his brother had died up there, and he was stuck with somehow leading these people to somewhere they could settle and call home. The waiting was awful. Perhaps he could stall people, maintain some semblance of order in the camp, while waiting a little bit longer. Give them an innocent project to focus their energies on, something he could leverage later, if he needed to, to assert his own authority to lead. If in the end Moses never came back after all. It was a decent enough plan, for an average-ish managerial type.

Should we blame Moses? Moses went up on the mountain and didn’t come back down for 40 days and 40 nights. Didn’t he worry, any of that time, about what was going on down below? He’d been the only source of stability for those people -- their rock. He was the one who spoke of God to them. He was a wise enough leader -- humble, judicious, and clever. And for over a month, he gave no thought to those down below? Didn’t ask for a furlough to visit his people? Didn’t worry they’d think he was dead? Well, maybe he did think of it, but so what? He was going to ask God, who was dictating to him, and fast, too -- ask God to slow down, to give him a break to go down to his people? Ask God to let him check on his flock, God!? Who surely would know if there were anything wrong down there, at the base of the mountain. Surely God would let him know if he was needed. If God kept him up there, taking dictation, then that must be the right thing to do.

So we’re left with just one party to blame. One character in this story who was in a position to know what was happening, and had the power to stop it. Someone, Someone, who shall remain Nameless.

Are we willing to step forward and blame Hashem for what happened? Are we willing to accuse God? Are we willing, when God gets angry and God’s anger blazes forth, and God says to Moses “I will destroy this stiffnecked people, I will wipe them off the face of the earth and I will give you a new people, a new people who shall be my people, with whom I will make my covenant” -- are we willing to argue with God? Who would be willing to do that?

Moses was, and he did:

Moses pleaded before the Lord, his God, and said: "Why, O Lord, should Your anger be kindled against Your people whom You have brought up from the land of Egypt with great power and with a strong hand? Why should the Egyptians say: 'He brought them out with evil intent to kill them in the mountains and to annihilate them from upon the face of the earth'? Retreat from the heat of Your anger and reconsider the evil intended for Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your very Self, and to whom You said: 'I will multiply your seed like the stars of the heavens, and all this land which I said that I would give to your seed, they shall keep it as their possession forever.' " The Lord then reconsidered the evil He had said He would do to His people. -- Exodus Chapter 32:11 - 14.

The people of the Torah are always arguing with God, and sometimes they win, as Moses did here. “Look,” they say, “you made a promise, you swore an oath, you said you’d guide us, and we screwed up but you’re an honorable God, you should stand by your word.” They remind God of the importance of a good reputation. They ask for more chances and for mercy. Again and again they call God to account. Again and again they turn away God’s wrath, or change God’s mind, or kindle God’s mercy. What sort of God is this, who deigns to argue with humans? Who is swayed not only by sacrifice, but by intellect? Is it any wonder we Jews like to argue, when you look at the models we’re given? Any one of us might be called upon to argue with God!

God did not make the golden calf. But in the end, God had to take responsibility for the world that God made, for the people God saved, for the 40 days and nights they waited down there in the desert, for the calf that they made. There was nothing special about those people, they were no better than anyone else. But God had an idea. God wanted to try an experiment. Could God make an entire people holy? Make a holy society? Not just individuals gifted in holiness, but everyone? Could God make a people to be a light unto the nations, to be a nation of priests? God didn’t know. God figured on giving it a try. God keeps getting mad at the people God’s chosen; they’re not holy at all, they’re just people. Then one or another of the just people will call God to account: You made us, they’ll say, and you bound yourself to us. This is your experiment we’re in, and tell the truth -- it’s not much fun being your lab rats. So give us a break and don’t let us be annihilated. You can’t publish a paper if your data are swallowed up by the earth.

I don’t know, the Golden Calf is supposed to be this big old betrayal. From here it looks sort of inevitable, the way things went down. There’s a Dr. Who episode in which The Doctor, very serious, tells a ragtag bunch of humans that they must be, right now, the very best of the human race. They must be better than they are. Of course they try, and they fail, and The Doctor forgives them. You must do better next time, says The Doctor, for the sake of your children. So throughout our generations forever, we try to do better. And we fail, and God forgives us, and we try, try again.

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