Parshat Ki Tisa, or “When you take,”  ¹ picks up with Moses still meeting with God on Mount Sinai. God instills Moshe with instructions for taking censuses, anointing priests, and keeping the Sabbath. After doing all this, God gives him the tablets with the Ten Commandments, “stone tablets inscribed with the finger of God.” ²

Down on the ground, though, a jarringly different sequence of events takes place. Exodus 32 begins: 

When the people saw that Moses was delayed in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god ³ who shall go before us, for that man Moses who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.”

Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”

And all the people took off the gold rings that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.

He took [it] from them and cast it in a mold, and made it into a molten calf. And they exclaimed “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” ⁴

 We of course know this as the sin of the eigel hazahav, or the golden calf. 

In response, God threatens to destroy the Israelites—until Moses, in the spirit of Abraham’s actions from the Book of Genesis, persuades God to forgo their immediate total annihilation. Moses famously comes down and smashes the tablets, after which God commands him to write new ones.

Apart from the commandments and the promise of eventual restoration, it’s mostly not a pleasant parshah. One way to make sense of this off-putting episode is to see the golden calf incident as an instance of the worship of gold, the worship of money. Idolatry can be more broadly understood as making anything finite infinite, turning anything concrete absolute. When one makes wealth the primary pursuit of their life, it can be akin to idolatry. For this reason, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel went as far as calling money “the world’s chief idol.” ⁵

And when God disappears from our view, money tends to take God’s place.

On the one hand, what the Israelites did here is quite understandable. We can empathize with them. They were worried because they couldn’t see Moses—he was up on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights. And by their count, his return date had passed, and they therefore assumed that he would not be returning. We can see how, without their leader, they were desperate for security and assurance. In the absence of their teacher and of their God, they were left in want of something else. So they gave in to the inclination and desire to find that assurance within gold.

We can also clearly see the parallels between this disaster and our current culture. Today, though we wouldn’t like to talk about it this way, we have essentially made gold our god. What do we allocate our time and passion to? In many cases, more than we’d like to admit, it is to the accumulation of wealth. At worst, money then becomes the end for us in our life’s purpose, rather than a tool for establishing goodness in the world. 

So what can we do? Part of the spiritual work, for those caught in finding purpose and security in wealth, is to deepen one’s own inner life toward an internal sense of security rather than external security. 

Rabbi David Wolpe recently wrote on social media: 

To keep kosher is to protest against being entirely a creature of appetite. To keep [S]habbes is to protest against being entirely a creature of commerce. To be a Jew is to protest against the idea that a human being is entirely a creature. ⁶

To be sure, Judaism is not anti-wealth, and not anti-work, nor anti-security; wealth can be extraordinarily impactful when leveraged by philanthropists, governments, or non-profits.  

Our opposition is to giving one’s soul over to this pursuit. In the 21st century, so much progress toward advancing human dignity and freedom is held up by the extremely wealthy, who will do anything to preserve every penny. Whether it has to do with forced labor in the Uyghur genocide, opposition toward moving a minimum wage to a living wage, or fiercely resisting fair taxation, the making of money into our highest value has done lasting damage to the dignity of human beings. 

This idea is illustrated uncannily in a work of midrash entitled Sefer HaYashar. Expanding on the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, Sefer HaYashar says that, during the building of the tower, a brick was treated as having greater value than a person. It reads: 

And they had been engaged in building for a very long time, so that they had already built the ‎city, and the tower therein reached an enormous height. And by reason of the very great ‎height, it took a full year to carry upwards the stones and the bricks to reach the builders. And ‎thus it was done all the time, some going up and others coming down, and so difficult was the ‎ascension and descension that when a brick would happen to fall down and break, all would ‎lament and weep over the great loss. But when a man would fall down and be killed, no one ‎would take the least notice of his death. ⁷ 

Midrash Vayikra Rabbah makes a nearly identical accusation against the Romans. It attributes the following anecdote to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi:

When I went to Rome, there I saw pillars of marble that were covered with blankets so they would not crack from the heat or freeze from the cold. I also saw there a poor person with only a thin reed mat below him and a thin reed mat above him. ⁸

The real world, however, sadly makes these stories seem almost unnecessary. When Amazon employees working during a tornado die in a collapsed warehouse, and our neighbors experiencing homelessness sleep this winter without proper blankets, let alone a bed and shelter, the call to do better than the gold-worshipping Israelites, the productivity-worshipping tower-builders, and the property-worshipping Romans, isn’t one we can easily ignore. 

The Torah tasks us with staying true to our values despite circumstances that tell us to give in and look for security in simple solutions. The message of the tragic story of the eigel hazahav is to not give in to these impulses. We needn’t replace the godliness in our lives with gold. 

Sources

1. The words “ki tisa,” while in this context refer to taking a headcount, literally mean “when you lift.” Implicit in this choice of words is the beautiful idea that when someone is counted, they feel lifted. They feel as if they “count” for something. 
2. Exodus 31:18
3. The term used in the Torah text here is “Elohim.” While usually a name for God, this is not always the case. See Exodus 22:7, for example, where “elohim” refers to judges. (The word literally means “power” or “powerful ones.”) For this reason, the translation of the word in our verse here, and hence the Israelites’ request, is debated. One opinion suggests that they indeed asked Aaron to make for them a new God. The other opinion is that they asked him to make for them a new leader to replace Moshe.
4. Exodus 32:1-4
5. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, (1995), p. 29
6. Rabbi David Wolpe,  https://www.facebook.com/RabbiWolpe/posts/459023965594761 
7. Sefer HaYashar, Genesis, Noach 14
8. Vayikra Rabbah 27:1