Parshah Commentary

Parshat Devarim

Devarim, the first parshah of the final book of the Torah, begins with Moses recounting the Israelites’ itinerary on their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land: “Through the wilderness, in the Arabah near Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, and Di-zahav, it is eleven days from Horeb to Kadesh-barnea by the Mount Seir route.” While this line may seem to be an innocuous travelogue, the medieval commentator Rashi sees it as a reproachful reminder of each location where the Israelites had sinned. In this reading, every name Moses mentions is both a place and an allusion to a particular transgression committed there. For example, Rashi interprets “Di-zahav” to mean “too much gold”—a fusion of the Hebrew words “dai” (“sufficient”) and “zahav” (“gold”)—and takes it as a reference to the sin of the Golden Calf, which, he suggests, the Israelites built out of the surplus gold they carried with them on their flight from Egypt.

While Rashi was not the first to interpret “Di-zahav” as an allusion to the Golden Calf, some of his predecessors understood Moses’s intentions quite differently. In a daring midrash, a group of Talmudic sages imagines him blaming not the people who crafted and worshiped the Golden Calf, but rather God: “Moses said the following before the Holy One: ‘Master of the Universe, it was the gold and silver that you lavished upon Israel until they said ʻenoughʼ [‘dai’] that caused Israel to make the Golden Calf.’” In this rabbinic retelling, it was not the Israelites’ sinfulness that caused them to make the idol, but rather the gold and silver that they had amassed, the overabundance of material wealth with which God had inundated them. In a society overwhelmed by excessive affluence, the rabbis suggest, people will inevitably worship the false god of their own treasure; the fault for this lies not with the idol worshippers, who in different conditions could have been pious, but with whoever provided that treasure to them. Ultimately, the implication of the rabbis’ reading is that the economic context in which a person lives shapes their choices profoundly. The guilt for their crimes is thus, at least in part, the responsibility of the system itself and of those who uphold it.

Perhaps surprisingly, in the rabbis’ telling, God, rather than becoming defensive or insisting on the Israelites’ guilt, recognizes the truth of Moses’s condemnation. The Talmud cites a passage in Hosea, “I lavished silver on her and gold—which they used for Baal,” as God’s admission of culpability for the Golden Calf. In this, the Talmud upends the fatalism that its economic determinism might seem to imply. If Moses’s outspoken moral clarity can convince God to accept responsibility, perhaps the kind of courageous dissent he models can help chart a way out of this entire system, however impossible it may seem.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.