Parshah Commentary
Reading Deuteronomy, I often think of the climate activists who throw mashed potatoes at a Monet or tomato soup at a Van Gogh, because the book contains many directives to destroy art. Throughout the text, Moses seems preoccupied with the prohibition on idolatry, returning to it over and over. Our parshah, Eikev, is bookended by such orders: In last week’s reading, Moses tells the Israelites that, when they conquer Canaan, they must “tear down [the Canaanites’] altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred posts, and consign their images to the fire.” Several chapters later, in next week’s parshah, he repeats these instructions nearly verbatim. So why the obsession?
Perhaps our parshah contains a hint. In this reading, Moses recounts the story of the Golden Calf, the paradigmatic idol, which we first encountered in Exodus. He frames his narrative by admonishing the Israelites that it is “not for any virtue of yours that your God is giving you this good land to possess; for you are a stiffnecked people.” But an odd moment in Maimonides’s medieval law code recasts the familiar tale of Israelite stubbornness—and helped me see that Moses’s iconoclasm has even more in common with those painting-defacing climate protesters than I’d initially realized.
Maimonides, in discussing the biblical commandment to cover the blood of a bird or wild animal one has killed for food with earth (‘afar), notes that one may not use “coarse sand, flour, bran, grain fiber, or filings from metal utensils.” Strangely, though, one may use gold filings, since in two verses in the Bible, gold is called “‘afar.” One of these instances appears in Moses’s recounting of the story of the Calf, when he says, “I broke it to bits and ground it thoroughly until it was fine as dust [le‘afar],” while the other comes from the sublime 28th chapter of Job, which mentions the “gold dust [‘afrot]” hidden in the earth. This chapter begins by describing mining for metals as a supreme act of human exploration (“An end man has set to darkness / and each limit has he probed / the stone of deep gloom and death’s shadow”) but soon shifts to a meditation on the limits of resource extraction. “Wisdom, where is it found, / and where is the place of discernment?” the text asks, then answers: “the Deep has said, ‘it is not in me . . . it cannot be got for fine gold / nor can silver be paid as its price.” Wisdom names the place where both technological discovery and the market’s valuation fail.
Maimonides gets the citation from Job 28—and the ruling about blood burial that arises from it—from the Talmud, but he himself adds the verse from our parshah; the pairing suggests that an environmentalist theme is relevant here too. Indeed, when Moses destroys the Calf, he reverses not only its manufacture, but also the process by which it was prospected, quarried, and refined: “I threw its dust [‘afaro] into the brook that comes down from the mountain,” he declares. Where everyone else gathers and hoards gold, Moses disperses it; he is thus warning the community of the idolatry specific to extraction. If the Israelites, who are about to enter Canaan, where they will acquire “great and flourishing cities that [they] did not build, houses full of all good things that [they] did not fill,” anticipate moderns, who stumble upon a world unfathomably rich in exploitable oil, Moses is showing both them and us how and why one must sometimes, so to speak, blow up a pipeline.
Fittingly, the commandment that occasions Maimonides’s citation of these two verses is also concerned with ecological consciousness. According to Leviticus, one covers the animal’s blood, understood to be its life force, as an act of deference; God prohibits eating blood to limit the human domination of the animal world, teaching us to regard nature with humility. The dust with which we perform this rite reminds us of our own humble origins: “dust [‘afar] you are, and to dust you shall return.” In symbolically burying the animal’s soul with our own flesh, we are attempting to dispel the illusion of human separateness and recognize our implication in a web of biophysical relations.
The command to cover the blood, in other words, guards against the idolatry of discrete consumables, stripped of their messy and contentious histories—the social and environmental relationships that capitalist economists dismissively term “externalities.” Similarly, Moses is warning the soon-to-be-affluent Israelites about resources and commodities that seem to present themselves magically and inexhaustibly, as if without cost or consequence. In destroying the Calf, he is smashing not just an idol but also an ideology; he is directing our attention away from the polished craft object, toward the hidden reciprocalities between human beings, and between us and our earth.
Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.
