Chapter 1: What is the significance of Moses in the context of idolatry?
Well, folks, we didn't want to leave you hanging during the Christmas break, and so we're going to give you some extra content. So here is an episode of Exodus, the Jordan B. Peterson series. It's a fantastic series. We went through every section of Exodus with a team of people. I was on for a couple of episodes. Here is one of those episodes. I think it's a spectacular discussion.
Give it a listen.
Hello everyone. Welcome to episode 13 of the Exodus Seminars. Yesterday we covered the delineation of the commandments into the description of the details of sacred space, ritual and worship. We're going to bring that to a close at the beginning of this and then move to the story of the golden calf.
And so we'll close with Exodus 29, 43 to 46, the pronouncement of the establishment of God within the tabernacle and the sacred space. So, and there I will meet with the children of Israel. And the tabernacle shall be sanctified by my glory. And I will sanctify the tabernacle of the congregation and the altar. I will sanctify also both Aaron and his sons to minister to me in the priest's office.
And I will dwell among the children of Israel and will be their God." And they shall know that I am the Lord their God, that brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them. I am the Lord their God. And God there reiterates the idea that he's the spirit that has moved the Israelites forth out of tyranny into the desert and henceforth into the promised land.
And so, any concluding comments on this section dealing with sacred space, ritual, and worship?
I mean, I think it's important just to mention the notion of the glory because it's not just a space. There's a sense in which God's presence was there in the tabernacle. And of course, it's described in different ways. Sometimes it's described as light, sometimes as darkness, sometimes as cloud. There are different ways in which it's described, but it really is the presence of God which is there.
And then... we'll see it like when the presence is there, then the tabernacle stays. And when the presence goes up, when the presence leaves, that's when the people will move their tents and will kind of change place. It's a foundation of space is the best way to understand it. It's like the presence of God is the foundation of stable space.
If the presence of God moves, then- Then the church should move too. Then things should move, yeah.
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Chapter 2: How does the concept of sacred space relate to Moses' leadership?
But what's the purpose? The purpose the Lord says is His presence, His glory will be with them at the heart of everything they do. And to me that means a lot today because our Western culture, the lightness of being and when Nietzsche says when God dies, things become weightless. There's no gravity in our culture now. This is a reminder of where it comes from.
One of the things that I suggest to my lecture audiences, I also suggested to my clinical clients, is that when they will be called upon to deal with heavy things in their life, Everyone understands what that metaphor means, and so that would be catastrophe and suffering, encounter with malevolence, things that hurt and move you deeply, that you need to have deep things on your side.
And part of the promise of the eternal verities, let's say, that a humanities education offered was
the instantiation within you of those deep things that would enable you to confront deep catastrophes and prevail and that would be your alliance with truth and with beauty and with justice and with mercy and that if you don't have those things on your side then your lightness of being in the presence of the storms of catastrophe will demolish you, will
No foundation, no house can withstand a storm.
And magnify that to a civilization size.
Right, well, and your point is that God is presenting himself and so this is the spirit that brought the Israelites out of tyranny, the spirit that calls forth the people out of tyranny, and also that balance between darkness in the day and light at night. that's allied into a vision of the same spirit, that's what's the most fundamental.
And, Oz, you pointed out that the word glory itself is rooted in recognition of what's weighty. I didn't know that. I didn't know that, by the way. But there's also a stress here, isn't there, on the personal nature of the deity. I mean, the Greeks...
had their theology and xenophanes uh is critical of anthropomorphism so uh says that the uh if horses and oxen had gods they'd have gods like horses and oxen so thinking of the divine in a in a quasi-human form is criticized from the very earliest Greek philosophical tradition. And in Indic theology, you have this stress upon unchanging being.
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Chapter 3: What role does God's presence play in the lives of the Israelites?
Moses can't see his face, but that's the mystery. It's like on the one hand you can't see his face, but he is... He is the ultimate person, you could say.
I think that also this language, in order to understand what we're about to do with the golden calf, the sense of the romantic and tremendous yearning that God has to be among his people is so clear from this language. He specifically says, it's not just I brought you out into the wilderness to serve me, which is the language of a king to his subject.
It's, I brought you out here to live with you, to dwell among you. And it's repeated twice in this section. I brought you out specifically so that I can dwell among you. He wants the closeness with us. He wants the romance with us. And that's why it's such a tremendous sin against him when the people end up essentially
throwing him out, right, and what they're about to do with the golden calf, in the language that you'll see, God's response is, okay, well, I'm withdrawing from you. Okay, you've thrown me out, I'm now withdrawing from you. To understand the seriousness of what God's about to do to the Israelites, you have to understand how close he actually wants to be to them.
He's laid out this whole format, this whole living arrangement with them.
You can see this as well as an ennobling of the human, of human destiny. You know, in the nihilistic world,
everything is gone in a billion years and what the hell difference does it make what you do now anyways and here's there's an insistence that despite our fragility and limitation that there's something so valuable about proper ordered free striving among free men and women let's say that God himself takes an interest in that and you can be cynical about that but I don't think the cynicism helps much because it's very hard on you in your life if you're cynical and
I think instead you could be open to that as a possibility that people have a real role to play in being, and that the signal of that role is the fact that you can find yourself embedded in some movement forward, let's say, that's deeply meaningful. And we know what deep means, and we have a sense that there are levels of meaning, and so
Is it absolutely impossible to posit that we might have a real place in the order of being and that what we do actually matters? I think that's actually a more frightening concept than the notion that what we do doesn't matter.
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Chapter 4: How does the discussion on idolatry reflect modern society?
You've got to start very intentionally and build habits into your life Or you'll always be at the situation of, you know, on again, off again. Oh, there's a revelation.
It's got to be daily. And again, I think that you see that again. You're about to see that in the narrative when you talk about the big question, which is you guys just received five minutes ago a revelation on this mountain from Moses and God. And you're about to sin in the most egregious way possible within five minutes of seeing that.
And the idea in Judaism has always been that the weakest form of faith is based on seeing miracles. And when you see a miracle, it's easy to rationalize that away. I mean, it's easy to think of any memory in your life and you say, can you recreate the feeling that you had at that moment in your life? And the answer is no.
I mean, it's almost impossible to recreate a moment that happened when you fell in love with your wife for the first time. Can you recreate like right now the feeling that you had just sitting here?" And the answer is, no, you can't do that on command, right? It feels a certain way in the moment, and then it doesn't feel that way 20 years later, how it was exactly in that moment.
It feels something different. It's the rituals of everyday life that make you fall in love with your wife every single day and continue that love going. And the same thing is true of God. It's not the revelation on Sinai that makes you think, okay, well, this is what God is. It's the living with God every day with Him in your midst that allows true romance to actually bloom.
One of the things you do with people in psychotherapy as a behaviorist is you find those things they're afraid of or disgusted by and are avoiding, and then you help them implement a practice of voluntary confrontation, voluntary incremental confrontation. And the practice transforms them.
It makes them into someone who's no longer intimidated and retreating in the face of either disgust or paralyzed, in the face of disgust or of fear. And it is that practice. And I think we've lost that in our modern culture.
Like people say, well, I wish I was more courageous, or I wish I was more trusting, or they don't say this very often, but maybe they wish they were more humble, less prideful. It's as if we think of that as something that's homogenous that could just descend on you en masse instead of something that you practice. Like you practice trust with people.
If you're wise, you practice courageous trust and humility is a practice you have to You have to get better and better at it if you can. It's not like that's an easy thing to do, but you don't get better at it without practicing it in a ritualistic manner. And that's what prayer is, is fundamentally asking what is highest to help you on that journey.
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Chapter 5: What does Moses' anger represent in the context of idolatry?
I think of it as an orgy.
Right.
So that's that descent into the chaos.
Merging downward. That fits in with the fertility element, with the bull representing power, but also... Right, so that's so interesting in relationship to our culture because what that essentially means, it's the rise of the dominance to the highest place of sexuality itself. Of course, that's exactly what's happening in our culture, right?
Because that's even become the hallmark of personal identity and also the object of worship that borders on the mandatory, right?
Interesting, before we get here, God both forgets and repents.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
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Chapter 6: How does the breaking of the tablets symbolize the broken covenant?
It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery. It's not triumphant. Neither is it the cries of those who are being victimized that say, but the noise of them that sing do I hear. It's celebration. And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing.
And Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands and broke them beneath the mountain." Why? Why does he do that? Why does he... Why does he... Is it... It's an image of what's already happening.
This is what's happening. It's like the order that comes from heaven is broken. And so it's like all of it, the image all comes together at the bottom. It says, that's why I think it also says, it's like underneath, almost underneath the mountain, at the bottom of the mountain, things are broken and shattered and fragmented and not together. And so that's what... That's what he does.
Chapter 7: What is the significance of Moses asking God to know Him?
So it's to drive the point home. Well, I don't know. I mean, it's just to show this is what, like you said, the covenant's been broken. That's right.
It has been broken.
Right. It's broken.
Right. So he's making no bones about it in what he's communicating.
I mean, he's a pure messenger of God, right? I mean, he's literally doing exactly what God just did, right? It says that God's anger waxed. Moses' anger waxes. The covenant is broken. Moses takes the tablets that are written, inscribed by the finger of God, the most precious object ever created.
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Chapter 8: How does the narrative conclude with Moses' relationship with God?
and smashes them at the base of the mountain. He says, like, what I'm doing is a physical representation of what God has already just done with the covenant.
Yeah, well, and to the degree that what's written on stone is the inscription of the deepest tradition, what he's dramatizing is the idea that this idolatrous celebration, orgy, you said, is destroying what's most foundational to culture. He's dramatized. That's being dramatized in the text. It's what he's dramatizing by his actions.
Can we also see that, yes, he's a messenger from God, and I think there's clearly that verbal echo that sort of, you know, the way God feels is his anger and then Moses' anger. But I wonder if there's a sense in which Moses is, as it were, identifying himself with the guilt of the people, that he's, as it were, completing the sin of the people by shattering the tablets.
It's, as it were, it's the kind of the catastrophe that they brought about has rendered the covenant... So you think he was wrong in smashing the tablets?
It was sinful?
Well, I don't know. I think maybe it's a moment in which the kind of the collectively guilty action is completed and he identifies himself with the act of his people. I don't know. Well, you could also conceivably read it as
I'd like, in some way, a kind of over-response, is that he's so appalled by the goings-on that now he impulsively destroys something that's of great value that's been entrusted to him. So do you think he was wrong?
Well, I don't know. No, I'm curious.
Well, I don't know. I mean, it doesn't seem that dashing the tablet of tradition to bits is necessarily the right response to the emergence of licentiousness. Although I would say that is what conservatives are doing now in the main...
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