The Sin of Worshipping Moses

Considering the biblical story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai to find the Israelites worshipping an idol, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes:

On the top of the mountain, God informs Moses what has just happened at its base: “Go on down, for your people, whom you have brought out from the land of Egypt, have acted basely” (Exodus 32:7). God’s words . . . bring Moses a dreadful revelation: in his people’s eyes, he has become an idol, his charisma symbolizing nothing other than itself. The people have known all too well exactly what they needed. He has failed to represent the infinite, to stir their imagination. . . . They have inflated him and at the same time vulgarized him.

In his absence, he has been replaced by the even more vulgar fascination of a golden calf: “They have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them. They have made themselves a molten calf and bowed low to it and sacrificed to it, saying: ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt’” (Exodus 32:8). Using the same formula again, God ironically points up the essential problem. Beyond all the rites of idolatry—the actual making of the calf, the worship, and the sacrifices—there is what the people are saying, what they are thinking: the calf is the new object of adoration, filling the vacuum left by Moses himself. . . .

In endowing him with too much power, they have surrendered to their desire for fetish objects. The immediacy with which they replace him with the calf seems to indicate that it serves the same psychic purpose. Unhesitatingly, they substitute for the man Moses a hackneyed object of adoration.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Hebrew Bible, Idolatry, Moses, Religion & Holidays

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF