This week we revisit a tragedy that happened a very long time ago: the sin of the golden calf. It’s an ancient sin, but Rashi (Shemot 32:34) reminds us that it’s an event that reverberates into our lives today. Every punishment we currently experience includes a bit of the punishment of the sin of the calf. Rav Shapiro draws the logical conclusion from this. Punishment is tied to sin. If there is no punishment without a measure of the punishment of the sin of the calf, then there is also no sin that does not include a bit of the sin of the calf. In other words, ever since we were camped at the base of Har Sinai, at least part of the root of all our sins is the sin of the golden calf. It seems, therefore, a relevant topic to delve into.

It is also somewhat confusing. Why is this sin  so relevant to us, when according to many commentators, it wasn’t even really our sin. When Hashem tells Moshe (Shemot 32:7), “Go descend, because your nation that you brought out of Egypt have acted corruptly,” Rashi tells us that the implication was that the actual sinners were not the Jewish nation as a whole. Instead, the sin was instigated by the group of converts that Moshe brought out of Egypt, who we call the eirev rav. These troublemakers of the desert seem far removed from us—at least until we delve a little more deeply into their roots.

The Gra tells us that the roots of the eirav rav go back to the time before time. There is a fascinating Gemara in Chagigah (13b) which describes a river of fire in gehenom which flows onto the heads of certain wicked people. These wicked people are the 974 generations that are described in Iyov 22:16 as “ordained before their time and whose foundation was swept away by a river.” The Gemara explains that these brazen-faced people were set to be created before the formation of the world, but then they were not created. Instead, their souls exist in gehenom, and Hashem plants them into every generation. The Gra equates these souls with the eirav rav. It’s important to note at this point that even though we don’t talk about the eiruv rav much after our time in the desert, this is not because they disappeared. The Gra tells us that the eiruv rav succeeded in influencing us to such an extent that they became an intrinsic part of our nation. In a very real way, the description of these souls describes us as well.

What does it mean to be from the time before the world was created, when the world was just a thought before Hashem? Rashi on the very first pasuk in the Torah actually describes this time period. At first, it arose in Hashem’s thoughts to create the world with the middah of Din, Justice. However, when He saw that the world could not exist this way, He partnered Din with Rachamim, mercy. The world of thought was a place of din, where neither the world itself, nor these 974 souls establish their existence.

There is something very deep here, and it is more than the idea that we aren’t perfect enough to survive under a strict set of rules. The middah of din is fundamental to our existence. Chazal describe this middah as the middah that says “dai, enough” to the world. It is the middah that mandates the exact form that creation takes. It defines our strengths and our limitations, including our distance from Hashem, so that we can feel our own individuality, and our own sense of self. By defining space, it creates for a space we can exist within.

In this truth lies the paradox of din. On the one hand, in order to live, we need to feel that we are independent creations. We experience ourselves as if we are a necessary existence, which has always existed and always will. On the other hand, the only truly necessary existence in the world is Hashem. We live because He gifts us with life. The moment we cut ourselves off from Him, the moment we feel ourselves begin to exist on our own, is the moment we decree our own death. This is why the 974 generations that existed in a reality of pure din are described as having a “foundation that was swept away.” Din can create worlds, but it can not sustain them. The only way to continue forward, to continue to exist, is to recognize that we are loving creations of Hashem, and reattach ourselves to Hashem’s continuous outpouring of love and life-force. The middah of the outpouring of Hashem’s love and connection to us is the middah we call chesed, or rachamim. From the beginning of time, din could not exist alone.  The world is a balance, a partnership, between the middah of din and the middah of rachamim. This is what mandates our continued existence.

The eiruv rav were souls that were caught up in the middah of din, and we can see the mark of this on every part of their creation of the golden calf. The calf was a part of the vision of the Merkavah, which all of Klal Yisrael had seen both at the Yam Suf and at Har Sinai, and which is also described in the first perek of Yechezkel. In the language of the Midrash (Shemot Rabbah 42:5) Hashem describes the actions of the eiruv rav as “slipping out one of my four beasts of transport.” Hashem’s guidance of the world was described by Yechezkel as being expressed through four different middot, each symbolized by a different animal. But the eirav rav was interested in only one, the one on the left side, which corresponds to the middah of din: the ox.

The eirav rav acted in the evening, the time of din, when the light of the sun that symbolizes Hashem’s endless outpouring of chesed into the world, begins to be constrained. They chose gold, whose bright and reflective color mimics fire, the element of din. They chose the form of ox that is called eigel, calf, related to the word ma’agal, a circle, which is a space that is enclosed into itself, and its own complete existence. This was self-expression in service of G-d, taken to an extreme. They wanted to replace Moshe with an image of their own choosing. They used their own tools, to form the image they desired. And like all sins, this sin was created when they breathed their own life force into it. What arose from all their efforts, the Midrash tells us, was a distorted image of man: a moving, speaking calf. It was their version of the face of the ox, the yetzer hara that says, in the words of Rav Shapiro, “Once I exist, I am the one who determines my existence, and I will do what I decide (p.579).” It is the famous last words, “Let us run this on our own.”

These are words that we all know well. We are, after all, in the generation before moshiach, the generation of the chutzpadik. We are racing toward a time of self-perfection, and that project requires no small amount of self-expression. Chutzpa is part of the air we breathe. So it’s good for us to pay attention to the response of Hashem to this sin, which is the root of all of our sins.

Hashem tells Moshe, “Lech reid, go descend.” The word reid has only two letters, reish and dalet, and they both happen to appear oversized in the Torah. The oversize reish occurs in our parsha, Shemot 34:14, in the word acher, as in “Do not bow down to a foreign god, el acher.” The oversize dalet is in Devarim 6:4, in the word echad in the shema, as in “Hashem echad.” These two letters look very similar. In fact, chassidus teaches that the only difference between them is a yud. If you affix a yud to the upper right corner of the reish, it becomes a dalet.” But they symbolize the exact opposite concepts. The dalet is the letter of humility, that announces, “d’leit leh m’garmei klum,” he has nothing of his own. The reish is the letter of haughtiness, of ram, raised spirits, and of the rosh, the head that is lifted high. Hashem was telling Moshe that the distinction between the letters dalet and reish has been erased.

The path to emunah and the path to kefirah begin in very similar ways. They both begin by examining the wonders of creation. The difference between them lies only in whether those wonders are connected back to their original creator. The difference between humility and haughtiness is similarly small. As Rav Kelemen teaches, haughtiness is the simple statement, “I am great.” To turn that haughtiness into humility we need only add, “I am great, Baruch Hashem!” Self-expression is a vital part of how we were created. But the key is that our continued existence lies recognizing that everything we have and everything we are is an expression of Hashem. With that in mind, we can stay connected, not only to ourselves, but also to the source of everything we have, the rachamim that is the expression of Hashem’s loving expansiveness in our world.