No, You Can’t Have My Earrings!

One of my favorite midrashim is rooted in the story of the Golden Calf:

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”  So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”  So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.  And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.”  And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. – Exodus 32: 1-6

Of course, we know how the story ends: building the calf was a huge mistake. The tablets that Moses brought down the mountain specify that the people are not to make any images of their God. Moses is angry, and God is angry, and Aaron and the people are in big, big trouble.

However, midrash offers an interesting wrinkle on the story: according to a story that appears both in Numbers Rabbah and in Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer. Not everyone contributed to make the calf. When the men approach their wives and daughters, they refuse to participate. Rashi tells us in a comment on Megillah 22b that their reward for this is the women’s holiday of Rosh Chodesh, the first of every month, when women are exempt from work.

Some writers, including the redactor of Numbers Rabbah, have suggested that this is evidence of women’s moral superiority. Sometimes when I tell this story, people have said that it was because the women were vain, and they just loved their jewelry and didn’t want to give it up – in other words, that women are morally inferior to men!

But this is not a story about gender superiority or inferiority. It’s yet another story about Jews disagreeing as to the best way to worship. Often our tradition has given men greater authority on such things. The ancient midrash points to the fact that gender doesn’t magically confer the right answers.

One of the things I love about studying rabbinic texts is that just when I decide that the rabbis were all patriarchal old so-and-so’s, they surprise me. These texts are greater than any of us, then or now.