The Opposite of the Golden Calf
We Crave the Illusion of Control
I know I’m not the only one who celebrated Purim this year feeling a strange dislocation from my own body. My heart and mind were over the skies of Tehran and in the streets of Jerusalem, while I was in New York celebrating Purim, feeling dizzy and a bit drunk on history.
The emotional whiplash is real. On one hand, euphoria. We read about the downfall of Haman while watching the fall of the Ayatollah unfold in real time.
On the other hand, anxiety. Will the brave people of Iran gain their freedom? Will my family in Israel—my literal family, including two siblings and their families, and my extended family of millions of Israelis—be okay? Six American military service members have already died in this conflict, may their memories be a blessing. What happens next will shape American lives too.
On Monday, the eve of Purim, I woke up feeling pretty terrible. At this late stage of pregnancy that’s not unusual. But as I dragged myself through the morning, I kept thinking about what pregnancy must feel like in Israel right now, planning for labor and delivery during a war.
I’ve been checking in with friends and relatives there. The euphoria is real. But so is the exhaustion of running to the safe room with small children, of living with the thousand ordinary burdens that don’t stop just because history is unfolding.
And yet something striking comes through almost every conversation: a kind of sober clarity. I keep hearing the same sentence again and again from my Israeli friends: We are safer today than we were last week.
No one knows exactly how this will end. But people keep repeating: if getting through this gives us the chance to make life here more secure, then it is worth it.
Some of this is the famous Israeli resilience. The videos circulating on X show Israelis dancing, singing, even getting married or celebrating bar mitzvahs underground while sirens sound.
But something deeper is happening. Israelis realize that security and freedom sometimes require sacrifice without guarantees. You act because it is necessary, not because you know how the story will end.
I think this week’s Torah portion helps explain why.
Parashat Ki Tissa centers on the sin of the Golden Calf—and it might be less about theology than psychology.
At its core, idolatry is the human fantasy that if we perform the right rituals, history will behave. That if we appease the right gods, if we organize reality just right, the future will finally become predictable.
But reality does not offer that kind of certainty.
We might think idolatry belongs to the ancient world—statues of wood and stone, sacrifices to strange gods. But the instinct is still alive. We chase control wherever we can find it. In money. In technology. In the illusion that with enough optimization we can outmaneuver illness, aging, or tragedy.
And sometimes this impulse appears in religious form. I have seen sincere people, terrified by a loved one’s illness, rush to mystics and miracle-workers—buy blessed honey, wear enchanted necklaces, repeat mystical incantations—anything that might create the feeling that the future can be controlled.
Which is why the story of the Golden Calf suddenly feels less alien. The older I get, the more I understand the Jews who made it.
They had left a world of rigid certainty. Egyptian slavery may have been brutal, but it was predictable. Now they stood in a desert, following a leader who had vanished into a cloud, bound to a God they could not see and a future no one could predict.
The uncertainty was unbearable—so they chose something they could control.
The Golden Calf was not just a false god. It was the illusion of control.
Which makes it striking that the Jewish calendar places this story next to Purim.
Purim unfolds under conditions of radical uncertainty. God’s name never appears in the Megillah. The Jews of Shushan receive no prophecy, no miracle, no voice from heaven. They act anyway. Esther risks her life. Mordechai organizes the community. The Jews fast, plan, improvise, and hope—all with no guarantees.
In that sense, Purim and the Golden Calf represent two opposite responses to the same human condition: divine hiddenness.
When certainty disappears, you can panic and build a golden calf. Or you can act anyway. Like the Israelis I’ve been speaking with this week.
When I look at my friends in Israel, I see people who have lived through October 7th. They have buried friends, sent family members repeatedly to reserve duty, and taught their children how fast to run when the sirens start.
Their children know the word “hostages” before they can find most countries on a map. Earlier this week they watched a missile strike a shelter in Beit Shemesh that killed nine civilians, may their memories be a blessing.
They do not have the illusion of control.
And yet they continue to fight, to build, to celebrate weddings, to raise children, to plan for the future.
What I see in the best of Israel today is a refusal to worship the Golden Calf.
This posture is not uniquely Israeli or Jewish. Winston Churchill did not know whether Britain would defeat Hitler. The odds were terrifying. When he addressed the British people in 1940, preparing them to fight the Nazis nearly alone, he did not promise safety or certainty.
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” he said. What he offered instead was the dignity of knowing which values were worth risking everything for.
Esther stood in that same place of uncertainty. She did not know whether she would defeat Haman. She acted anyway.
For those of us in the United States, living far from the sirens, the temptation to build our own golden calves is still potent. We want to know how the story will end before deciding what we are willing to risk—how deeply to invest in Jewish life, in Jewish peoplehood, in America or in Israel.
But Ki Tissa—and the moment we are living through—reminds us that the opposite of idolatry is responsibility: the willingness to risk for the future even when the ending of the story is hidden.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
On our Wondering Jews podcast, Noam and I had the pleasure of speaking with my friend Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh, who lives in Los Angeles. For years, Tarlan has been deeply involved in supporting Iranian human rights—especially women’s rights. She shared moving memories from her family’s life in Iran, and we talked about the striking disconnect between many Iranians’ lived experiences and the way many progressive human rights organizations are interpreting this moment.
I’d love for you to check out this episode on the podcast 🎧 or watch our conversation on YouTube 📺.
As always, insightful, novel, and so interwoven with our lives and world events.
Love the way you bring the parasha into today’s events