By Rabbi Cantor Gershon Silins

How quickly we forget! Just weeks after the revelation at Sinai, as great a revelation as there ever has been in the history of religion, the people respond to the prolonged absence of Moses by demanding of Aaron that he provide them with a god of the sort that they could understand. He asks them to give him their gold jewellery, which he throws into the fire. The gold comes out looking like a calf, which is worshipped in a way that would have seemed familiar to any Egyptian.

“Then they said, This, Israel, is your god, who brought you out of Egypt,’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented peace offerings. Afterwards, they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.” The calf was a god they could know; it came from their jewellery and they had seen it made. The God revealed at Sinai was completely different; something totally other. It is the extreme “otherness” of that God that was — and is — so challenging; what a relief for the people to go back to the sort of god that they had come to know in their centuries of servitude in Egypt, a god you could see. Sometimes something familiar seems better than something actually good.

There is an argument by the commentator Ibn Ezra that Aaron didn’t see the golden calf as a god but rather as a substitute for Moses, an oracle to guide the people. But then the people said, this is your god who brought you out of Egypt, and that was when everything went sour.

There is a clear failure of leadership here, although it isn’t obvious where that failure lies. Could Aaron have done better? Our tradition is ambivalent about his role, and he himself tries to wriggle out of responsibility for what happened. He says, “you know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us a god’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewellery, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” On his account, the calf just appeared by accident after he threw the gold into the fire. But he clearly was more complicit than that; he done more than passively watch the calf emerge from the fire, he had built an altar in front of it and announced a festival. Nonetheless, Aaron was in a tough spot. He didn’t know when or if Moses would return from the mountain, and he had to keep the people together, with or without Moses. Moses (and God, for that matter) might have predicted that the people would become restless and uncontrollable without strong leadership; Moses himself found them almost impossible to control, and they stretched even God’s patience to near the breaking point. Our tradition recognises Aaron as a peacemaker: in Avot, we read, “Be like the disciples of Aaron, loving and pursuing peace.”

Jonathan Sacks writes that where Moses sought truth, Aaron sought peace. Moses sought justice, Aaron sought conflict resolution. Truth is zero-sum. If a statement is true, its opposite is false. If one person is in the right, one who contradicts that person is in the wrong. Conflict resolution, though, is an attempt at a non-zero outcome in which both sides feel that they have been heard. The result doesn’t fully satisfy either side; it is a “better than nothing” outcome. In Exodus 32:25 we read, “Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughing-stock to their enemies.” But at the time, Aaron believed, and probably rightly, that if he opposed the people on behalf of the absent Moses, he would be killed and they would do what they wanted anyway. Better to let the people have the comforting symbol of an idol, than to lose them completely to rebellion and chaos.

The people needed the strong hand of Moses to keep them, not just peaceful, but also loyal to a challenging faith. But they didn’t have that strong leadership while waiting for him to return. Of course, the generations that followed had to learn to trust a revelation that they hadn’t themselves experienced but only heard about. And we who live in a world devoid of divine authority must live with the reality that the truth is not always obvious. Even those who think they are absolutely right in every way must sometimes play Aaron’s role. The difficulty lies in knowing when the pursuit of peace over the pursuit of what’s right comes at too high a price. And that is something that we often don’t know until after the price has been paid.

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