Shabbos Parashas Ki Sisa - 5778

Shabbos Parashas Ki Sisa - 5778

Rabbi Hal Miller

He took it from their hands and bound it up in a scarf, and fashioned it into a

molten calf. [Shemos 32:4]

What was Aharon thinking? His brother Moshe was gone over a month, the people

were getting antsy and asking for some replacement. He tells them to bring the

gold jewelry of all the people. So far, so good. But then comes our verse. Aharon

made an idol! How could Aharon, of all people, do such a thing?

Rashi implies that Aharon had no idea that things would progress as far as they did.

He expected Moshe to return on time, and knew that the people had miscalculated

the time frame. Rashi says, "Aharon said to himself, the women and children are

protective of their jewelry, perhaps that will cause delay." This might explain the

beginning of things where he asks for gold, but what about our verse? Rashi responds

that Aharon did not fashion the calf, rather he threw the gold into the fire, and the

sorcerers of the erev rav, the non-Jews who accompanied Israel out of Egypt, caused

this formation. These were the people who led the congregation of Israel astray in the

events that followed.

Ramban disagrees. Nobody believed Moshe was a god, rather a Divinely-backed man, so

they would not ask for a new god to replace him. They wanted someone with Divine

backing who would lead them after the apparent loss of Moshe. At no time did the people

tell Aharon they wanted a calf. That was Aharon's choice. Ramban explains Aharon's

thought process in the context of the faces of the Chariot (see Yechezkel 1:10), where

the face of the ox was in the position of ruling the desert, where the people were at the time.

Rav Hirsch tells us that obviously, Aharon was under tremendous pressure from the people

to do something that was wrong, and he knew it. He could see that the people did not

actually want a new god, but a replacement for their lost leader, who could interface between

themselves and the one God. Aharon reasoned that just about any choice he could make

would somehow reflect back to one of the multitude of Egyptian gods, so he chose an item

that would appear the weakest, which was the cow. Further, he chose the weakest possible

cow, a calf. Believing this approach to be reminiscent of Moshe's humility, Aharon was

merely trying to give the people what they wanted in a way that seemed least damaging.

Kuzari explains, "Aharon acceded to their demands in order to discover who the real

rebels were and who were the innocent dupes. Nevertheless, God blamed him for

helping the latent rebelliousness materialize."

Ibn Ezra says that Aharon did not sin. He saw that the people wished to serve God, but

without Moshe leading them, the only way they knew how was 'concretely'. Aharon in a few

more verses says to them that they are to have a feast to God, thus the spiritual status

had not changed, only the concession to concreteness. The problem was that the erev

rav saw it as idol worship, and joined in in strength.

Where Aharon went wrong was in violating one law in order to fulfill another. While we

do this from time to time even today, such as pushing off the laws of Shabbos in order to

save a life, what Aharon did not understand is that the only time we can do this is by explicit

direction of the Torah.