The Worship of Gold
Words of Wisdom with Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar
This Dvar Torah was edited from one written for The Mussar Institute by Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz, an accomplished author, speaker, and educator serving as the President and Dean of Valley Beit Midrash.
Photo by MUILLU on Unsplash
Parshat Ki Tisa picks up with Moshe still meeting with HaShem on Har Sinai.
God instills Moshe with instructions for taking censuses, anointing priests, and keeping Shabbat. After doing all this, HaShem gives him the tablets with the Ten Commandments. [1]
Down on the ground, though, a jarringly different sequence of events takes place (Shemot 32:1-4).
We know this as the sin of the eigel hazahav, or the golden calf.
Moshe famously comes down and smashes the tablets, after which HaShem commands him to carve new ones.
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.” [2]
And when HaShem 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 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.
Keeping Shabbat is itself one of our ancient Jewish tools that serves as a protest against money worship.
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.
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 medieval 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.
… 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. [3]
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. [4]
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 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.
There are four primary middot in the Mussar tradition that can help us shift a little bit from gashmiut (physicality) toward ruchniyut (spirituality):
- Bitachon (Trusting God) – having a sense that we’ll be okay without more wealth and breaking the illusion that our ultimate security comes from wealth.
- Gratitude (Hakarat Ha’Tov)– Learning to live with the concept of sameach b’chelko (being content with what we have).
- Spiritual Equanimity (Menuchat HaNefesh) – Ensuring that the external pressures and anxieties don’t penetrate into our inner place of calm and focus.
- Humility (Anavah) – Seeing ourselves as less of the priority of our lives.
These are incredibly difficult soul-traits to cultivate but this parasha is urging us to have conversations as families and communities about how we can strengthen these middot and achieve lofty spiritual goals.
[1] Exodus 31:18.
[2] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, (1995), p. 29.
[3] Sefer HaYashar, Genesis, Noach 14.
[4] Vayikra Rabbah 27:1.
