RABBI NORMAN LAMM
Ki Tissa, 5724
THE JEWISH CENTER
Feb. 29, 1964
The episode of the building of the egel ha-zahav, the golden calf, was probably the most
traumatic experience in the life of our nation during its infancy. It left an indelible impression
upon the psyche of the folk. Its echo can be detected throughout the life and the literature, the
dreams and the liturgy, the destiny and the self-image of our people. It is essentially an
inexplicable phenomenon: so soon after the revelation at Mt. Sinai, this same people dances
about a golden calf! From dizzying heights to harrowing depths!
Perhaps most incomprehensible is the conduct of Aaron, the Kohen Gadol or High Priest
of Israel, the brother of Moses. His role has challenged our commentators, stimulated our
exegetes, and perplexed the ordinary reader of the Bible. I would like today not to apologize for
Aaron (although his position can be satisfactorily explained under the circumstances), but to
point to certain insights resulting from the Rabbis’ comments on his role, comments which are
especially relevant to some of the central issues of our times and with which I was especially
confronted during my recent trip overseas.
We read this morning of the pressure brought by the Israelites upon Aaron to help them
build the golden calf, and the stalling and procrastination by Aaron. Then comes the following
significant verse: va-yar Aharon va-yiven mizbeah lafanav va-yikra Aharon va-yomer hag
la-Shem mahar, “and Aaron saw and he built an altar before Him, and Aaron called out and he
said there will be a festival to the Lord tomorrow.” The plain meaning of this verse, according to
Nachmanides, is that Aaron felt that the Israelites were determined to go ahead with their
idolatry, and so he built an altar not to the idol, but lefanav, before Him, meaning God, and
announced: hag la-Shem mahar, tomorrow we will have a celebration not for this idol, but for
the Lord.
The verse is introduced by two words, however, which are quite challenging: va-yar
Aharon, “and Aaron saw.” What, exactly, did he see? The Rabbis, quoted by Rashi, tell us the
following: va-yar Aharon – she’hayah bo ruah hayyim she’ne’emar ke’tavnit shor okhel esev,
Aaron saw that the golden calf became infused with the breath of life, that it took on the
appearance of an ox grazing in the pasture, feeding on the grass!
What did our Rabbis mean by that? They offer, I believe, a profound comment upon the
nature of idolatry. They mean to outline for us three stages in any man’s encounter with
falsehood of any kind, ancient or modern.
The first stage is one of instinctive revulsion. The idol is immediately repulsive, the
falsehood repugnant, the lie revolting. You can see right through the idol: it is illogical and
irrational, as any half intelligent child knows. It is simply evil and stands condemned without any
further thought.
But then there comes a second stage. As you become accustomed to it, as you study it,
you learn that it may work – indeed it does work! You can live with it – and get away with it.
Furthermore, it is not as absurd as you originally thought. They are compelling reasons for the
existence of idolatry or any false doctrine – sociological, psychological, and historical reasons. A
society can be built around it, and survive. There are reasons for idolatry which you must
appreciate and understand.
If you stop at this stage of your development, then insight turns to tolerance, tolerance to
sympathy, and sympathy to consent and acceptance. If you stop at this stage, then you bow the
knee to a statue, you swallow the lie, you swear by falsehood. Then open-mindedness becomes
closed-heartedness. What is required is to make the transition from the second to the third stage.
And the third stage is one of deepest insight: with all the understanding, with all the
appreciation, with all the study and awareness and broadmindedness, you recognize the
perniciousness, all the ugliness and danger of avodah zarah, and you condemn idolatry as evil
throughout.
Va-yar Aharon, “and Aaron saw” – this is the crucial point in the development of Aaron’s
role. In the beginning, at the first stage, he no doubt believed that the whole plan was ridiculous.
It was inconceivable that so soon after Sinai these same Israelites would bow to a mere statue.
Give them their little golden statue, he probably told himself, and before long they will laugh at
their own error and recognize the absurdity of their request.
But then – va-yar Aharon! He saw that the idol became alive: she’hayah bo ruah hayyim
she’ne’emar ke’tavnit shor okhel esev! When he saw that his lifeless statue was becoming a
living thing and that it assumed the attributes of life, he became frightened. He recognized that
idolatry has, for its worshippers, certain clear aesthetic values; it can be beautiful, and
convincing. Paganism possesses a gripping and imaginative mythology. The idol and its worship
respond to man’s inner needs. You can build society and a civilization on such erroneous
foundations. You can explain it – and even justify it!
Quickly, therefore, Aaron passed over to the third stage. Precisely at the point of his
greatest understanding of the nature of the Israelite idolatry, he announced hag la-Shem mahar:
no longer will I humor you or entertain your childish and fallacious but highly dangerous
notions. Tomorrow we return to the worship of the Lord. Va-yar Aharon, the seeing of Aaron, is
the instant of insight, the moment of truth.
Both the first and third stage agree in principle and in conclusion. The difference is, that
the first is an instinctive black-and-white judgment, whereas the third is aware of the
complexities, the subtleties, and the nuances of idolatry, but nevertheless condemns it as evil. In
the third stage you recognize, so much more than you do during the second stage, that the idol
only goes through motions, but does not really move. It appears to eat, but it is only a mirage: it
is only the tavnit of a grazing ox. It is an apparition, not a reality – it contains only the ruah
hayyim, the breath of life, but not hayyim itself. The third stage is greater than the first because it
is the result of a more realistic appraisal; it is mature, and not guilty of oversimplification and
uncomplicated naivete. Hence, it is also more convincing.
This development of insight into evil refers not only to ancient but to modern idolatries as
well. Whether it is scientism or materialism, communism or even godless humanism, the same
three stages are required of man: the first, where you acknowledge immediately its absurdity and
fallacy; the second, where you begin to appreciate the rationale and explanation; and the third,
where, with a great deal more sophistication, you rise nevertheless to the moral heights of
rejection. And the same development must apply to one of the most pernicious and idolatrous
doctrines in the memory of living man, one that has caused untold grief to uncounted millions in
our century: that of race superiority and race inferiority.
My recent trip to South Africa left me overwhelmed by the exhilarating beauty of the
country, its great wealth, and the abundance of its natural resources. And yet I had the feeling
that it is a tortured country, gripped by a tragic agony that dominates all thinking, underlies all
conversations, and pervades all politics in this highly politicized community. The race problem is
a pall that, in this land of magnificent climate and almost endless sunshine, darkens the heart of
the country from one end to the other. The reaction to Apartheid, the doctrine of separate
development of the races based upon the idea that the white race is superior to the non-white,
must also go through these three stages.
The first stage is one that has aroused the conscience of mankind in our day and has
excited the indignation of the great majority of the countries in the United Nations. There is no
question that white supremacy is a foul doctrine and a malignant idolatry. Do we of the twentieth
century even have to discuss it? Can there be any question about it? And so we condemn it no
matter who are its adherents.
But – va-yar Aharon: we must arrive at a second stage far less naïve than the first. We
Americans do no favor to the cause of equality if we close our eyes to some of the profound
complexities and compelling justifications of this initially repugnant doctrine. And there are
certain mitigating facts and factors. The visitor realizes that, despite certain unattractive
restrictions, this is not a police state on the style of a Nazi or Communist or Fascist state. It has a
proud and independent judiciary, and, despite intimidation, a fiercely free press.
The white man is not a colonialist in South Africa. He came to this country at about the
same time the black man did from Central and East Africa – the middle of the 17th century. The
Afrikaner especially regards this country completely as his home and has strong patriotic and
nationalist feelings about it.
There is no obvious persecution of non-whites in this country. The black are better off in
South Africa than in the independent countries in the rest of the continent. Their economic status
here, despite its inferiority to that of the white, is so much more attractive than the rest of Africa,
that there is a tremendous illegal immigration of blacks from outside South Africa into the
country. Proportionately more blacks and other non-whites are literate and own automobiles than
in all the rest of Africa combined. And there never has been a lynching in South Africa.
Furthermore, we cannot compare the situation of the white man in America with that of
the white man in South Africa. There, in South Africa, he is outnumbered by about four to one,
constituting only three out of a population of fifteen million people. The white man in South
Africa, in conversation with an American, will always point to the Congo as an example of what
happens when independence is granted to the black man prematurely.
Finally, the idea of “one man, one vote” is, to tell the truth, ludicrous. Even the black
nationalist privately admits that it is nothing more than a slogan. You cannot grant full votes to
such peoples as are totally illiterate and still living in the most primitive of tribal conditions.
This second stage is one of sophistication and realism, and represents a pragmatic and
open-minded appreciation of the hard facts of political and human realities.
And yet, having considered all this, having gone beyond an impulsive good-and-bad
judgment of simple and naive solutions, there remains the burning moral issue which emerges
from the mass of complexities and subtleties, and demands to be heard and seen and dealt with
courageously. The moral issue is simply this: that a human being is a human being, and must be
judged as such, and not primarily as black or white or colored or Asian!
When a black university professor is disenfranchised, though he is more literate not only
than the white farmer but even than the white millionaire, because he is considered racially
inferior – that is a modern form of avodah zarah.
When people are forcibly kept apart, when they are ghettoized without having been asked
for their opinion – it is an evil which must be exposed.
When by legislation the Bantu or black man is kept to the kind of school system which
cynically ensures permanently inferior academic standards, which makes certain that the African
will never be able to Westernize, and which will keep apart forever not only the white man from
black man, but also tribe from tribe by perpetuating inter-tribal hostilities – that is cruel.
When South Africa today considers a bill in its Parliament according to which its
urbanized Africans will be turned into a portable labor force so that people may be assigned to
jobs merely at the whim of some minor official; when a capricious commissioner will be able to
separate husband from wife and parents from children merely by saying so – that is inhuman!
When a society is so structured that there can never be communication between equals of
different races, so that the only blacks most white people know are their domestic and hired help
– that is rotten.
When a business success by a non-white is rewarded by shipping him off to a primitive
tribal area called a Bantusan – that is pernicious.
When such policies are advanced by Nazis, Crypto-Nazis, and Nazi sympathizers
entrenched in the government – the Minister of “Justice” was interned as a Nazi during the war!
– and when the Government is riddled by people who hold membership in a secret society called
a “Broederband,” a kind of legally tolerated Klu Klux Klan; when the government can detain any
individual in prison for 90 days without giving any reason for its action and can repeat this
90-days detention up to three times without a trial – than all of it is vicious and immoral.
When va-yar Aharon that the evil has taken on a ruah hayyim, that it has the appearance
ke’tavnit shor oknel esev – than we must proclaim an end to this kind of immorality, and insist
that hag la-Shem mahar – that it is time to return to the verities of Torah and Godliness. We Jews
have always proclaimed the existence of one God who created one Adam, teaching thereby that
all the human race is descended from one father, and that hence no one family of colors is
superior to any other.
It is true that we New Yorkers must not rush overzealously to condemn and criticize those
in other states, let alone other lands. For (without in any way favoring or denying the claims of
certain Negro groups which may or may not be justified) we certainly have not been blemishless
ourselves; and our race problem is far less severe and threatening to us than that in South Africa.
Nevertheless, wherever one man oppresses another and shuns him because of the color of his
skin; wherever one man denies another the benefit of his own labor and the right to the bounty of
God’s nature because of race or religion, whether it be in Georgia or Johannesburg, in Corona or
Capetown; it is idolatry, because it denies the fatherhood of God. It is an affront to Torah,
because Torah recognizes only one Apartheid: that between tamei ve’tahor, between pure and
impure, good and evil, gentle and wild, malevolent and benevolent. We Jews who have suffered
so from silence, from the silence of Popes and Presidents and organized populations during the
time we needed help, when our families were slaughtered by the millions, we especially must not
keep silent when an injustice is committed against others in our presence.
He who remains stationary in this second stage, he who becomes reconciled to evil
merely because he understands the reason for its existence, is bound to suffer the consequences
predicted by King David in the Psalms, which we recite during our Hallel. For David said
concerning the worshipers of idols, and we may say it as well about one who abides and tolerates
the existence of evil of idolatry or any other evil, that ke’mohem yiheyu osehem, “as they are so
may be their makers.” Just as the idol is only apparently alive, but not really so; just as he goes
through motions but does not really move; so the idol worshiper and the one who remains silent
in its presence is not really and truly alive in the moral sense.
Peh la-hem ve’lo yedaberu – for a person of this sort, like a mute statue, has a mouth –
but does not speak. He fails to voice protest when conscience challenges him to do so.
Einayim la-hem velo yiru, they have eyes but see not – they see only what they please,
not the squalor and suffering produced by evil.
Aznayim la-hem ve’lo yishma’u, they have ears but they do not hear the cry of the
oppressed.
They have noses but they prefer not to be aware of the stench of slums in which entire
families are condemned to a life of poverty and ignorance. They have hands but do not raise
them to assist a fellow man, and they have feet which refuse to march on to greater happiness for
all humans. Such is not only the worshiper of idols, but also he who sees it and its injustice and
remains silent: lo yehegu bi’geronam, the throat fails to utter protest and is suffocated in syllables
of silence.
Is this third stage in the encounter with evil – whether of godlessness or race prejudice, of
avarice or religious bigotry – to which the Torah wishes to lead us in the story of Aaron’s role in
the making of the egel hazahav. It tells us that in an ultimate sense every man must choose for
himself between right or wrong not in some far-off world, but here and now, in the real,
non-ideal, mundane world.
With Aaron we must rise to the occasion when we can proclaim publicly hag la-Shem
mahar – tomorrow is a festival for the Lord. Or better yet, let us proclaim with Aaron’s brother
Moses, la-tet alekhem ha-yom berakhah – to prepare for everyone a blessing today – today, not
tomorrow.
