Parshah Commentary

In 1994, three years before his death, Allen Ginsberg sold his papers to Stanford for a million bucks. The New York Times ran a smug article implying he had sold out, a letter suggesting he ought to have donated them, and a hippie-punching op-ed arguing that the aging Beat poet had “made friends with Uncle Sam,” having “known all along” that “the real American mantra . . . was the dollar sign.” Corporate media, of course, delights in the supposedly subtle paradox that critics of capitalism must also live under it. This necessity reassures liberals that anyone who claims to be more radical than they are is really a hypocrite. (Did you know that Bernie Sanders owns three houses?) In this case, the Times was sneering not just at the left, but specifically at the prophetic pretensions of a poet who had once denounced “Moloch whose blood is running money!”

Intriguingly, it seems our greatest prophet, Moses, also sold his working drafts. In the reading for the Shabbat that falls amid Passover, God commands Moses, who smashed the first tablets of the law at the sight of Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf, “Carve [p’sol lekha] two tablets of stone like the first.” Rashi quotes a midrash that God showed Moses a “sapphire quarry in his tent” and declared, “The chips [p’solet] will be yours,” playing on the Hebrew verb and an untranslatable ethical dative, which the King James Version hyper-literally renders “Hew thee”. Thus Moses, the midrash explains, “became so rich” from the new tablets’ excess byproduct. Moses’s wealth may seem even more suspect than Ginsberg’s, because the ancient leader prospers through a reconstruction necessitated by his own iconoclastic destruction. (He thus disturbingly anticipates Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalists,” who engineer and then profit from crises.) Even as Moses enriches himself, the Israelites are enduring austerity, “stripped of their finery” in the wake of the Calf episode. No wonder that a midrash reports Israelites grumbling as they see Moses leaving their camp to his tent: “Look at his shins, look at his knees, look at his flesh! He eats from the Jews, he drinks from the Jews, all that he has is from the Jews!”

I find such cynicism hard to avoid these days, thinking about the entanglement between American Jews’ religious leaders and Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime patron, Les Wexner, as well as the lengths they go to avoid thinking about such matters. And yet the reading is textually unsupportable. For God commands Moses to carve the tablets, and thus to enrich himself, only after the Israelites gaze at him (and, in the midrash, kvetch). Logically, the divine sapphire cannot be the object of their carping. If anything, God is responding to their concern that he is living large at their expense, providing the tablets’ byproduct as an alternate, non-exploitative source of wealth that makes clear Moses’s riches do not come from the Israelites. Mining for sapphire in a desert tent—arduously chiseling away at the stone—Moses resembles not a capitalist but an intellectual sentenced to grueling labor in a laojiao re-education camp. Moses is newly toiling, just as the Hebrew slaves did in Egypt. Perhaps he, and God, are starting to grapple with the tension between elite leadership and a mass, subaltern movement.

The cynical, New York Times reading tempts us because it accurately captures, but misleadingly personalizes, a historical decline. Anti-war activist Jerry Rubin selling hot tubs is depressing regardless of whether one morally judges, or even cares about, Jerry Rubin, because of what it exemplifies: youthful radicalism evaporating, consumerism absorbing its critics, counter-culture yielding to counter-revolution. In the Torah, God and Moses are desperately scrambling to respond to the Golden Calf, that ultimate reactionary backlash. In that context, Moses’s enrichment seems less a personal failing than one symptom among many: the movement splintering into murderous sects, God departing from the Israelite camp, and the construction of the opulent tabernacle—essentially, a divinely sanctioned Golden Calf. Moses in our reading is at his lowest, as close as Jews get to Jesus in Gethsemane, complaining, “You say to me, ‘Lead this people forward,’ but You have not made known to me whom You will send with me,” begging (without success) to see God’s face, flailing in needy anxiety.

Strictly speaking, we read this portion on Shabbat Chol Hamoed because it contains a festival calendar mentioning both Shabbat and Passover. Yet perhaps the reading has the additional purpose of soberly qualifying the optimism of the seder’s liberation narrative. Not only does backlash follow Exodus, but in a sense, the Calf worshippers won: Even the aging iconoclast now must pay his respects to molten gods by cashing out. A sour thought perhaps, but it carries a hopeful corollary. Since the Book of Exodus was compiled long after the disastrous backslide, we must imagine a revolution far more radical than the one we read about—perhaps one as joyously utopian and communistic as a younger Allen Ginsberg, who only half-jokingly asked, “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?”

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, is out now.