Coming down from Sinai with the carved tablets from God, we can understand Moses’s anguish at witnessing the Israelites worship the golden calf. Still, it is hard to understand why Moses then takes the tablets and smashes them on the ground.
One explanation among many offered is that it was pure rage. Once he saw the Israelites dancing about an idol, Moses could no longer contain himself.
But this seems inadequate. Would Moses really allow anger alone to lead him to destroy the work of God, the most valuable single item in the history of the world? Was he that incapable of self-control? Better to have marched back up the mountain to deposit the tablets somewhere safe.
Arnold Ehrlich, author of Mikra Kipshuto, has a provocative and interesting answer. He notes that the Rabbis relate that God said to Moses: “Yishar kohacha (i.e. good for you!) that you broke them!” (Shabbat 87a). God apparently approved of Moses’s action. This signals that more than anger was at stake.
Ehrlich believes that Moses saw the calf and thought: If the Israelites worship this calf, which they created with their own hands, what will they do when they see the tablets carved by God? Surely, they will turn these tablets, which are so much more precious than the calf, into an idol! If I don’t destroy the tablets, they will commit the ultimate desecration.
By smashing the tablets, Moses was making a declaration to all of Israel: Even the handiwork of God, which you might think of as inviolable, is nonetheless just another material object. It is not a God – it is a physical artifact. I am destroying it to return you to the greater truth, which is that you were not delivered from Egypt by a thing, but by an intangible, unfathomable God, no more embodied in the tablets than in the calf.
We live in a world that venerates the accumulation of things. Idolatry is a persistent temptation – to worship at the shrine of stuff. Moses is reminding us that the ultimate reality, the greatest reality, is not material. Even in God’s world that which we most value – goodness, justice, love – are intangibles. We feel them, we enact them, but they are not material. Like the tablets of the covenant, long after the item has crumbled to dust, the meaning, and the Creator, endure.
