138 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
This murmuring, then, is deeply rooted. It may be that the other forms of
rebellion derive from it. All three can and do recur, but the underlying passion
for victory and the rejection of suffering are constant, while the others come in
waves. Perhaps this is why Moses’ response to the murmuring is different from
his response to the sin of the calf or to the rebellion of Korach. In a speech filled
with “words that cannot be surpassed, words of the most intimate knowledge
and the most intimate daring,” Moses addresses God: “Indeed, a people stiff of
neck are they—forgive then our transgression!” For Buber, there are two ways to
understand this plea. The first emphasizes the people’s weakness and inability to
change: “Where and when a person or a people are just what they are, nothing,
so to say, is left except for God to forgive them.”^50 The second, however, points to
the hidden dialectic of theopolitics, and to its tragedy. Hidden deep within their
very stiff-neckedness, there is “a kind of secret virtue, which only rarely comes to
light. This is the holy audacity which enables the people to do their deeds of faith
as a people. Here Moses and Israel become one, and he genuinely represents his
people before YHVH.” What we have here is a restatement of the theopolitical
paradox: the same stubbornness and inability to endure suffering that leads to
the rejection of God’s kingship also allows the people to achieve great things.^51 It
is this audacity that allows Moses to speak to God in the way that he does, as no
one else since Abraham.
Turning to the episode of the golden calf, Buber must address a different
kind of rebellion against Moses. In this case, the Bible relates that Moses react-
ed by “reduc[ing] all resistance,” as Buber euphemistically puts it. He begins by
emphasizing the connection between the golden calf story in Exodus and the
section of the book of Kings (1 Kings 12:28) in which Jeroboam, the new king of
the northern tribes, erects golden statues of bulls at the entrances to Bethel and
Dan. There he proclaims the same words as Aaron: “These are thy Elohim, O
Israel, who brought thee out of the Land of Egypt!” Surprisingly, however, Buber
maintains the antiquity of the Exodus tradition rather than regard the period of
Jeroboam as the source of the Exodus passage.^52 He accepts that the passage in
Kings is tendentious and intended to portray the northern kingdom in a negative
light; he nonetheless doubts that Jeroboam really intended to worship other gods
or even to represent YHVH in the form of a bull. If he constructed bulls, Buber
said, they would serve the same purpose as the oxen that carried the basin in
Solomon’s Temple: they are god bearers, not gods. They are meant to create the
impression of an empty seat, to be filled by the god when he chooses to visit. The
problem arises when this purpose is misunderstood, and the sculptures are taken
for gods or even representations of God. Similarly, the worship of the calf could
not have been intended for a god other than YHVH; an explanation must thus
be provided for the violent reaction to the people’s intention to represent YHVH
corporeally, especially before the delivery of the Decalogue.