It’s easy to dismiss the famous story in this week’s Torah portion of the Israelites making and worshipping the Golden Calf. I mean, do you or anyone you know really struggle with the temptation of bowing down to a statue? This story may have been relevant thousands of years ago, when people worshipped idols, but not today.
But this story isn’t only about literal idols, and interpreting it that way allows us to avoid confronting the more metaphorical idols that we do worship.
As David Foster Wallace shared in his “This is Water” graduation speech: “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.”
We are immersed in a capitalist culture, symbolized by none other than a golden bull smack in the middle of Wall Street. Yes, it’s important to have drive and ambition. But like David Foster Wallace suggests, I worry that we have substituted God with money and things.
In that way, the story of the Golden Calf is more relevant today than ever before. To be clear, God can be made into an idol, too. The lesson for me is less about what to worship and more about what not to worship. There is nothing wrong with enjoying money and things, but when we elevate them to a sacred status – making it the focus of our life, believing it will make us happy, etc. – we are no different than the Israelites bowing down to the Golden Calf.
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