Among the more controversial stories pertaining to the exodus from Egypt is the one about the Golden Calf. So contentious have these discussions gotten that on at least four occasions (though by some accounts the number is closer to eleven hundred), the Jewish National Guard had to be called in to break up the squabbling rabbis.1
First, let’s start with what the rabbis do agree upon—that Moses, the recently freed slaves’ liberator, took leave of them and went up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments and that because he was up there for forty days and forty nights, the Israelites started getting antsy. “Hey, what’s he doing up there?” they said in unison. “How long does it take to get a few measly commandments?”
So the Israelites, fearing that Moses would not return, began losing faith and demanded that Moses’s older brother, Aaron, make them a new god. So Aaron gathered up their golden earrings and ornaments and constructed an idol for them to pray to and exalt for bringing them out of the land of Egypt.
It is at this juncture that the controversy as to exactly what the icon that Aaron constructed looked like begins.
“Golden Calf,” claimed Rabbi Leslie “Cool Jew” Lewis, whose yarmulke sits atop an unusually wavy head of hair. “It was a Golden Coif.”
“Utter nonsense,” said Rabbi Chaim Tuchman, whose obsession with physical fitness is manifested in a bumper sticker that reads Keep the Flex in Genuflects. It was his contention that thanks to the exceedingly long trek across the desert, the slaves’ legs became highly muscular and thus Aaron cobbled an idol of his own right calf.
“Wrong!” exclaimed Rabbi Bernard “Redundant” Bernard, whose assertion that the calf was of the offspring-of-a-cow variety is the widely held belief.
Whatever the graven image was, when Moses came down from the mountain and saw it, he got angry and threw the two stone tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were chiseled at the calf, thus setting it on fire.
“I leave you in charge and this is what you do?” yelled Moses.
“What did I do?” asked Aaron, blushing like older biblical brothers tended to do when they were playing dumb.
“You built an idol, which pretty much negates what Judaism is all about!”
“You mad at me, Mo?”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m mad. He’s the one you have to worry about,” said Moses, pointing back toward the top of the mountain. “He’s the one who parted the Red Sea. My guess is that it would be a lot easier for him to part you.”
Moses gave one last look at the smashed stone tablets, the smoldering ashes of the Golden Calf, and the hungover Israelites sleeping on top of each other in various states of undress after a debauched night of blasphemous partying, then shook his head and headed back up the mountain to ask G-d for a new set of commandments.
Aaron, feeling guilty and ashamed, made a final plea to his younger brother. “Moses, can you get me off the hook? For old times’ sake?”
Still another fact that all the rabbis agree upon is that this line of dialogue was infinitely more effective when Abe ViG-da’s character said it in The G-dfather.