God is omniscient and omnipotent. This is more than
just a concept of the Torah; It is a basic fact, for if God was not All-knowing
and All-Powerful, He would not be God. But God’s omniscience and omnipotence
makes the incident of the Chait Haegel, the Golden Calf, as described in this
week’s parsha, all the more perplexing.
The Chait Haegel is one of the most well-known
narratives of the Torah, and that makes it easy to read without asking our own
questions. This week I was not struck by any particular pasuk but by the
overarching development of the narrative. One thing I have always loved about
studying Tanach is becoming aware of the subtle but significant use of pacing.
The narrative of the Golden Calf is encapsulated in
Chapter 32, which begins with the people assuming that Moshe has missed his
expected time of return. It seems as if their immediate response is to request Aaron
to make them an idol. He hesitates, places barriers around the act, and they
persist until he makes them a molton calf. Once it is built, Aaron proclaims
that “Tomorrow shall be a feast to Hashem” (32:5), which is what occurred.
These are verses 1 through 6. Verse 7 switches to Hashem and Moshe on the
mountain, and it appears that God is only telling Moshe about the incident after
it has occurred. Hashem builds an argument against the people that culminates
in Him seeming to ask permission of Moshe to destroy them and make Moshe into
the founder of a new great nation, which Moshe does not accept.
This was a nice little summary of the narrative, so
you might be wondering what the question is. If God is omniscient and
omnipotent, why did the scenario unfold like this? As soon as they made the
calf, why didn’t God turn His wrath on them. And if He didn’t react immediately,
why did He seem to seek Moshe’s permission to punish them?
In many ways, the same question here is a question
that has existed since the beginning of humanity, or at least the first day. In
the episode of the Golden Calf there is a distinct echo of Adam, Eve, and the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. There, too, we can ask, so why didn’t God
intervene earlier? And why did God ask Adam where he was if He is omniscient?
Reading through the parsha, one could wonder just
how angry God really was. Think of the timeline of Jewish history being reflected
in of childhood development. When we arrived at Sinai, we were like toddlers
learning to be independent. When little people hit that stage of asserting
their independence, they often make mistakes, sometimes big ones. Sometimes
they do things that are terrible, but not really unexpected, and we have to
feign anger in order to let them know that what they did was unrepeatably wrong
– but, inside, we are not nearly that angry because we know that this is a step
they need to experience and learn from in order to grow.
God displays His anger to Moshe, not to the people,
because He wants to see what Moshe will do. The Chait Haegel, while a sin of
the nation, was, in some way, a final Divine test of Moshe’s leadership; and he
passed. God wanted to see that Moshe could love His people the way He loved His
people, that Moshe would go so far as to fight Hashem (verbally) for their
right to survive.
What about Moshe’s anger? After Hashem relents,
Moshe heads down the mountain with the two tablets and meets Yehoshua, who
notes the sound of war coming from the camp. When Moshe sees the calf and the
dancing, he is angered, and he breaks the tablets and etc. The pasukim here are
very interesting: “And when Yehoshua heard the noise of the people as they
shouted, he said to Moshe:
There is a noise of war in the camp.’ And he
[Yehoshua] said: ‘It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither
is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome, but the noise of them that
sing that I hear.’ And it came to pass, as soon as he came near the camp, that
he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moshe’s anger waxed hot, and he cast the
tablets out of his hands, and broke them beneath the mount (32:17-19).
Moshe suspected that the noise was indicative of
their blasphemous activity, but he held out a bit of hope that the people were
opposed to the calf. When he learns that it is all the noise of joy, his anger
comes from disappointment. Perhaps he had hoped that, by the time he returned,
the people would have come to their senses and destroyed the calf -- or at
least stopped worshipping it.
The entire incident of the Chait Haegel moved the
Children of Israel, and Moshe, a step closer to independence. Moshe pleaded
that God not destroy them, but he saw clearly that some form of punishment
would be needed. The punishment, however, came at the point of a sword, an
exceedingly human enacted punishment without any Divine flair to it (unlike
other punishments, such as a plague).
The omniscience and
omnipotence of God during the incident of the Gold Calf is, it seems, not at
all in question. Like many of us experience on a smaller scale as parents
and/or role models, sometimes mistakes, even big ones, need to occur in order
for a person, or a people, to grow. 
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