As we count down
towards the holiday of Shavuot, the festival that commemorates the giving of
the Torah at Sinai, our minds become flooded with spectacular imagery of the
scene that evolved as G-d reached out to His beloved nation. We see the
lightning and the smoke, the flower-bedecked mountain and the awestruck faces
of three million Jews. The image we tend to ignore is the one that came forty
days later—the image of those same individuals who turned their gaze from the peak
of the mountain to the valley below, where a graven image had been created. A
mere forty days after hearing the voice of G-d and experiencing all the
miraculous splendor that went along with it, the Jews had done a complete
one-eighty, turning away from worshipping G-d and focusing instead on the
Golden Calf they had created. How could they have fallen so far and so fast?
The
Torah tells us that Golden Calf was produced in response to the perceived delay
in Moses’ return from Sinai. Due to an error in calculation, the Jews had
believed that the day for Moses’ return to the camp had arrived, and yet he had
still not descended from the mountain. Fearing the worst—that Moses’ encounter
with G-d had proved too much to handle even for him, and that he had perished
atop the mountain—the Jews set out to find a replacement. Interestingly, though
the Golden Calf was certainly an idolatrous image, its purpose was not to
replace G-d, but to replace Moses.
The
Jews could not imagine a world without Moses. If Moses was gone, who would
serve as the intermediary between themselves and G-d? Who would approach G-d on
their behalf? Who would pray for them? Who would see to it that the
relationship between them and the Almighty would endure? These were the issues
that compelled them to create the Golden Calf—the item that would serve as a
bridge between themselves and the Divine. Therein lay their error. Even had
their miscalculation been correct, even if Moses would in fact never return to
serve as their leader, the Jewish people would have been more than capable to
connect to G-d on their own. The sin of the Golden Calf was the sin of
underestimating their own ability to achieve personal connections to G-d
without any intermediary. Each and every Jewish soul is fully capable of
developing a relationship directly with G-d. The Jews thought of religion as a
relationship by proxy—the masses connect to the leader, the leader connects to
G-d. While there would always be a place for especially holy people to serve at
the helm of the nation, it is incumbent upon each Jew to realize his own
potential in achieving a unique closeness to his Creator.
This
is part and parcel of the message of Shavuot. The aftermath of the Sinai
experience—the construction of the Calf and the Divine wrath that it
incurred—is a reminder that it is not enough to have faith in G-d, we must have
faith in ourselves. G-d considers every Jewish soul fully capable of a direct
relationship with him. We need not feel compelled to outsource our ties to G-d
to individuals who are holier and more pious than we are. Every Jew can connect
directly to G-d through prayer, study, and the observance of his mitzvot. As we
count down towards Shavuot, let us be reminded not only that G-d has reached
out to us, but that we are capable of reaching out to Him.
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