Ki Tisa

Exodus 30:11−34:35

D'var Torah By: Rabbi Peter S. Knobel; Reprinted from ReformJudaism.org

When Moses Is with God for 40 Days and 40 Nights, It’s Back to the Idols

Parashat Ki Tisa recounts the incident of the Golden Calf in a multilayered narrative about faith and leadership. In Exodus, chapter 32, we read that Moses remained on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights. In his absence, the Israelites demanded that Aaron fashion an idol so God would be present with them. Aaron created a Golden Calf, probably modeling it on statues of the Canaanite god El1, who is depicted in the form of a bull.

The irony of this incident is that the people already had experienced the invisible God who led them out of Egypt. When the Golden Calf story takes place, they are waiting for Moses to return from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, which explicitly prohibit depicting God in a physical form. One might argue this story is out of place because the Ten Commandments were given in a prior text, in Exodus, Chapter 20. Or we can resort to the Rabbinic interpretive dictum, ein mukdam um'uchar batorah, "there is no earlier or later in the Torah" (see Rashi on Exodus 31:18). While this teaching solves the chronology problem, it tells us little about the meaning of the story.

For a better understanding, let's take a closer look at the text. When the people insist that Aaron make a god who will go before them, they give this reason: "for that man Moses, who brought us out from the land of Egypt – we do not know what happened to him" (Exodus 32:1). Why are Moses's whereabouts so important to them? Why are they so dependent upon Moses?

Perhaps the people depend heavily on Moses because it is just recently that they have been freed from slavery and they still feel a need for the kind of dictatorial rule they had experienced under Pharaoh. Since Pharaoh was considered a god in Egypt, perhaps they considered Moses a god. When Moses is not available they feel God is absent: they become frightened and disoriented, and need a physical representation of a deity. As we know, Moses was not good at delegating, so he may have encouraged the people's dependency. Leaders often are tempted to make their organizations overly dependent upon them. For Moses, it took the wisdom of his father-in-law Yitro to help him delegate and develop a governing structure (see Exodus 18:13-26).

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