In this Shabbat’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa, we read about the incident of the Golden Calf.  Our tradition has taught us that the making of the Golden Calf was the great sin of the Jewish people in the wilderness.  In fact, there have been some rabbinic commentators who considered this sin to be the Jewish equivalent of Christianity’s “original sin,” with one significant difference; while original sin is carried by the individ­ual, the sin of the Golden Calf is carried by the Jewish people as a whole.

Personally, I have problems with that equation.  I feel that it was produced by rabbis who were too strongly influenced by their Christian neighbors.  It violates the concept of individual responsibility, which is central to Judaism.  I prefer a Judaism which proclaims that no sins mark our souls other than the sins we personally commit.  However, wherever one stands in the debate over the nature of the sin of the Golden Calf, all do agree that this sin was a horrible one; one that almost destroyed our people.

Yet for some time now I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with how our tradition approaches the Golden Calf story.  According to the tradition, the great sin of the Israelites was that they created a physi­cal object to represent the presence of God in their midst.  Yet if that was such a great sin, isn’t it strange that this story is sandwiched between God’s instructing Moses on the details for the building of the  Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle and the actual building of them?  When you think about it, what are the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle?  Are they not also physical objects representing the pres­ence of God in the midst of the Israelites?  Why then is the Golden Calf so wrong and the Ark of the Cov­enant so right?  Why is the Golden Calf such an abomination while the Ark of the Covenant is such a sanctification?

The best answer that I can come up with is that while the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle were designed by God, for Godly purposes, the Golden Calf was designed by human beings, supposedly for Godly purposes, but not necessarily.  There is an important distinction to be found here.  The Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle were conceived by God and came from God.  When the Israelites took up those plans and executed them, they were in fact receiving God into their lives.  Hearing God’s instruc­tions and following them was a physical form of dialogue with God.  On the other hand, the Golden Calf was purely a human invention.  It was humanly conceived and humanly created.  God had no say in the matter.  There was no dialogue there.  The human creation of the Golden Calf was nothing less than a human attempt to create God.  The designers of the Golden Calf created the god that they wished to see; the god that met their needs.  The god of the Golden Calf was meant to serve the people rather than the people serving God.  In creating a god that serves the people, the Israelites transformed the worship of God into the worship of self; prayer to God into the gratification of their wants and desires.                                        

In GENESIS we are told that we human beings are created in the image of God.  Yet all too often we tend to fall into the same trap as did the Israelites in the wilderness.  Rather than live our lives in such a manner as to render due honor and respect to that Divine image within us, we tend to redefine our God to meet our needs.