Last week's Torah portion, כי תשא (Ex. 30:11 - 34:35), includes the infamous incident with the Golden Calf.
Robert Alter, in his translation of the Torah, asks why the people say "these are your gods" (Ex. 32:4) even though the calf is singular. He answers: "The gods are plural while the calf is singular because ancient Near Eastern people were polytheists, not fetishists: the golden icon was conceived as the terrestrial throne or platform for the deity (singular or plural), having precisely the same function as the cherubim over the Ark," upon which the Divine Presence was to rest. "The Golden Calf," Alter reasons, "is thus a kind of anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark, meant for the same end of making the divine dwell among the people but doing it in a prohibited fashion." (The episode in which the people give their gold jewelry to make the golden calf may thus be seen as a sort of negative parallel to the subsequent moment in which the nation’s women contribute their mirrors for the building of the Mishkan [Ex. 38:8].)
Alter's reading is similar to the interpretation of the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi. In his book The Kuzari, Halevi suggests that the Golden Calf was not an idol but simply a material symbol that the people constructed to facilitate their worship of G-d. For Halevi, the only difference between the creation of the Golden Calf and the creation of the cherubim is that G-d did not command the calf. "They themselves had no right to determine the mode of worship and make an altar and sacrifices in accordance with it." In other words, it was not the fashioning of material symbols that was problematic--after all, what were the Ark and the throne of the cherubim if not material symbols?--but the fact that the Golden Calf was not made in accordance with G-d's wish. In support of this view, Halevi notes that G-d says "they have quickly turned from the way I commanded them" (Ex. 32:8), not "they have turned aside from Me."
Alter and Halevi thus raise an interesting question: Was the Golden Calf a fetish? While they both answer negatively, the conventional view--that the Golden Calf was an instance of idolatry--suggests the possibility of an affirmative answer.
To determine whether the Golden Calf was a fetish, we have to answer a more fundamental question: What is a fetish? I always ask this question to the students in my social theory class when we turn to Karl Marx's famous discussion of the "fetishism of commodities." My students are typically uncertain, but when pressed for an answer they can usually articulate (with a considerable amount of giggling) some version of the Freudian conception which has entered into popular culture. This provides a good teaching opportunity as we compare how Marx and Freud used the notion of a fetish.
A fetish, in its original religious meaning, is an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is thought to be animated or inhabited by a spirit. Freud and Marx built on this original meaning and extended it in creative and insightful ways.
For Freud, a fetish is an object that a person endows with sexual significance and without which he or she is incapable of sexual excitement. The Freudian fetish is unconsciously associated with a person without being one, and it appears to have power over you because it gives you the (sexual) potency you otherwise lack. The Golden Calf fits this Freudian conception in interesting ways. The Torah indicates that after making sacrifices to the calf, the people "rose up to play," "sport," "make merry," or "revel" (Ex. 32:6). The Hebrew verb used here (לצחק) has sexual connotations, as many commentators have pointed out, which are usually lost in the various English translations. Furthermore, as many commentators have noted, when Moses burns the calf, grinds it into dust, scatters it over water, and makes the people drink it (Ex. 32:20), his actions parallel the ritual procedure for a woman suspected of adultery (Numbers 5:11-31). In addition, the language that G-d uses later in the portion is clearly sexual: the people are warned not to whore after other gods (Ex. 34:15-16). As Robert Alter suggests, "the God who has chosen Israel implicitly represents Himself as Israel's husband and lover (a metaphor that both Hosea and Jeremiah will make explicit)." Lastly, it's interesting to note that the calf is associated with a person; namely, it is a substitute for Moses (Ex. 32:1), which may be why G-d pointedly tells Moses that Israel is "your people," not "My people." (Ex. 32:7). (Interestingly, it should be recalled that Moses was instructed to be "like a god" for Pharaoh [Ex.4:16, 7:1], not for the Jewish people.) In sum, the covenant at Sinai is akin to a wedding, but the bride (Israel) is incapable of excitement without an object (the calf) which is associated not with her Husband (like the Ark) but with His rivals ("other gods") or her tutor (Moses).
For Marx, the fetishism of commodities refers to an inversion of the normal relationship between subject and object. The product of labor, "as soon as it assumes the form of commodities," appears to have an intrinsic value, independent of human beings and their activities, when in fact its value derives from human labor. As a result, social relations (the exchange of labor among producers) are disguised as relations between things (products). Just as in the religious world "the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life," "so it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands." While Marx focuses on labor relations rather than sexual relations, his conception of fetishism has much in common with Freud's: both emphasize the apparent domination of human subjects by the objects they produce while insisting that fetishism disguises human agency and interaction by transposing them to a realm of things. Not surprisingly, then, the Golden Calf exemplifies the Marxian conception of fetishism as well as the Freudian conception. The Torah emphasizes the role of human labor: in response to the people’s demand to “make us gods,” Aaron “fashioned” their gold jewelry “in a mold and made it into a molten calf” (Ex. 32:1, 4). (Where did the gold come from? The Torah tells us that the people took it from their Egyptian neighbors on the eve of the Exodus [Ex. 3:22; Ex. 11:2; Ex. 12:35-36]—an act sometimes understood, Robert Alter notes, as “restitution for the unpaid labor exacted from the Hebrew slaves.” So what we have then is an exchange of labor among producers, for the gold which the people give to Aaron, no less than the calf he gives to them, are both in some sense products of Jewish labor.) But if in a normal relationship the product serves the needs of the producer, this relationship is now inverted as the producers bow down before the product of their own hands (Ex. 32:8), which appears to them as an independent being with a life of its own. When Moses asks Aaron why he "brought a great sin" upon the nation, Aaron answers: "I flung [the gold] into the fire, and out came this calf!" (Ex. 32:24). Aaron's language is telling: downplaying his own agency, he suggests that the calf emerged and formed on its own.
When the Golden Calf incident is read via Freud and Marx as an instance of fetishism, the dramatic smashing of the tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai makes more sense. What did Moses hope to achieve by breaking the tablets? In Meshekh Hokhmah, R. Meir Simhah suggests that it had the educative aim of combating idolatry: "He feared they would deify them as they had done the calf. Had he brought them the Tablets intact, they would have substituted them for the calf and not reformed their ways." By smashing them, Moses sought to demystify the fetishism that gripped the people: "Even the Tablets--'the writing of God'--were not intrinsically holy, but only so on account of you. The moment Israel sinned and transgressed what was written thereon, they became mere bric a brac devoid of sanctity." As R. Meir Simhah points out, this also explains why the broken pieces of the Tablets were placed in the Ark: "It was the first Tablets which were the work of God that were broken, not the Tablets hewn by Moses, which remained whole; demonstrating that no holiness resides in anything created other than that invested in it by Israel's observance of the Torah in accordance with the will of the Creator and His holy name." Just as sexual significance and economic value are not inherent in objects but derive from human action, so too for holiness. Smashing the tablets and placing them in the Ark may thus be seen as a means of liberating the people from the fetishism that gripped them, for as Marx put it, "every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself."
