In recent months I have been haunted by the image of Aharon without his crowns.
The Gemara in Shabbat (88a) teaches that when the Jewish people chanted “Na’aseh v’Nishmah” at Har Sinai, committing to perform all of the mitzvot before we had even been told what they entail, six hundred thousand angels descended and presented each Israelite with two crowns, one corresponding to “na’aseh” “we shall do” and one corresponding to “v’nishmah” “and we shall listen.” When Israel sinned (and worshipped the golden calf) 1.2 million angels of destruction descended and removed the crowns from our heads.
דָּרַשׁ רַבִּי סִימַאי: בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁהִקְדִּימוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל ״נַעֲשֶׂה״ לְ״נִשְׁמָע״ בָּאוּ שִׁשִּׁים רִיבּוֹא שֶׁל מַלְאֲכֵי הַשָּׁרֵת, לְכׇל אֶחָד וְאֶחָד מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל קָשְׁרוּ לוֹ שְׁנֵי כְתָרִים, אֶחָד כְּנֶגֶד ״נַעֲשֶׂה״ וְאֶחָד כְּנֶגֶד ״נִשְׁמָע״. וְכֵיוָן שֶׁחָטְאוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל, יָרְדוּ מֵאָה וְעֶשְׂרִים רִיבּוֹא מַלְאֲכֵי חַבָּלָה וּפֵירְקוּם
I imagine Aharon, in particular, standing there when the crowns are all gone, in the middle of the Israelite camp, in the aftermath of the calamity, amidst the shattered fragments of the tablets and thousands lying dead in the camp..
Every surviving Israelite had reason to feel forlorn and mournful and ashamed after participating in the creation and worship of the golden calf, but I keep thinking about Aharon for two reasons. (1) He is the one who supervised and oversaw the actual fashioning of the calf and (2) Aharon certainly knew better.
Rabbi Elazar, quoted by the Talmud in Sanhedrin (7a), and also quoted in Rashi’s commentary to these verses in Exodus, depicts the internal mental deliberation that Aharon undertook before deciding to make the calf. He had just seen, the Talmud explains, his own nephew Hur, murdered by the mob for resisting the demand to construct and worship the calf. Ahaorn feared that if he too were murdered the guilt that the Israelite population would incur would be beyond repair. Better, he thought, to agree to their demands. Perhaps a stalling tactic could buy enough time for Moshe to return. Perhaps the need to actually hand over gold jewelry to make the calf would have a chilling effect on the entire illbegotten project.
It is not clear to me if Rabbi Elazar or Rashi are endorsing Aharon’s decision and I don’t think it matters. The important point is that Aharon was clearly not seduced by worship of the calf.
Aharon preferred that the sin be attributed to him rather than allow the mob to incur the guilt of another murder. Aharon was willing to become the villain of the story, not because he was tempted by the calf, but because he made a choice to protect his people through his own complicity in their worst sin.
The Sifra, an early midrashic collection, makes the audacious claim that the calf that Aharon would present as an offering in the mishkan, as described later in the Torah, is an atonement for having built the calf יבא עגל ויכפר על מעשה עגל.
This seems to be a vindication of Aharon’s leadership. In the end, he remains responsible for the priesthood which continues, and the Divine Presence rests upon Israel. But he never receives any kind of clear or explicit vindication, and so I continue to wonder.
Moshe makes a very different, but equally dramatic and decisive leadership choice. When God threatens to destroy all of the Jewish people in an angry response to the golden calf, Moshe, heroically and with what can only be characterized as great chutzpah, responds:
וְעַתָּ֖ה אִם־תִּשָּׂ֣א חַטָּאתָ֑ם וְאִם־אַ֕יִן מְחֵ֣נִי נָ֔א מִֽסִּפְרְךָ֖ אֲשֶׁ֥ר כָּתָֽבְתָּ׃
Now, if You will forgive their sin [well and good]; but if not, erase me from your book which You have written!
When Aharon gives up his virtue and his moral authority in a failed attempt to avert the worst, Moshe is willing to put his legacy on the line to save his students.
Aharon, the kohen tzedek, the righteous priest, chooses complicity in the worst sin out of loyalty to his people. Moshe Rabbeinu, our Torah teacher par excellence, was willing to be erased from that very same Torah rather than survive the annihilation of his people alone.
What did Aharon feel as he stood in the aftermath of catastrophe without a crown on his head? I can’t presume to know, but I do know that being a rabbi in the United States three and five and ten years ago felt like I had a crown on my head.
As an inheritor and interpreter and teacher of an ancient tradition of morality and ethics and holiness, I felt that my perspectives and my voice were relevant to a broad conversation among citizens and neighbors of every religious background and I felt my voice and perspective were welcomed and embraced by citizens and neighbors of every background searching for guidance on contemporary issues of moral valence.
And, more recently, I feel quite often that those crowns have been removed.
We have been stripped of our crowns by fools and knaves eager to cast aside what Nietzsche once called the Jewish moral revolution. Nietzsche believed that the Jews transformed Western morality by teaching that the weak and humble matter more than the powerful. Today, ironically, some critics accuse Jews of the opposite; we represent entrenched and hegemonic power. The accusation has flipped, but the eagerness to take away our crowns remains the same.
But even more acutely, I feel the absence of my crowns as the result of painful choices I have made in communal leadership.
As I hope you all know, I tried to consistently express and encourage unwavering solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel from the nightmare of the Shimini Atzeret massacre of 5783, throughout the war, and until today. I believe that the Torah demands no less, and that basic universal morality would also encourage each and every human being to cultivate solidarity with their own family, tribe, and nation – עַם וָעָם כִּלְשׁוֹנוֹ – in the language of the megillah. The world is a lonely place without the knowledge that someone has your back.
But I also organized the community, in discrete ways, around the political support of the war even though I had little trust in the political leadership of Israel and, in my own personal opinion, there were moral failures in the war which were both predictable and predicted.
And, even more hard for me to acknowledge is the recognition that I would quite probably make the same choices again. I prioritized demonstrating love for our Israeli brothers and sisters over an objective moral evaluation of the war’s tactics and strategy and that prioritization may be a necessary and inescapable responsibility of my position.
Sometimes acts of solidarity risk moral compromise.
Did Aharon regret his role in building the golden calf? We never know. And we cannot know.
Aharon loved God and loved the Torah and its mitzvot, but it seemed that, like Moshe, he loved the Jewish people a little bit more.
Aharon’s role as kohen gadol was solidified in the aftermath of the golden calf. Most of us never receive any sort of Divine vindication for the hardest choices we make in life. But, in the spheres where each one of us exercises leadership, we can also emulate Moshe and Aharon who loved God, loved the Torah and its mitzvot, and who loved the Jewish people a little bit more.
The Torah does not end with our crowns removed. The covenant endures. Jews without crowns, each one of us a flawed and frightened human being, are left to uphold the Torah as best we can, without guarantees that we will always choose correctly, but with a commitment to keep trying, and to keep trying, and to keep trying.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 