This week we started learning the story of het ha’egel, the big mistake Bnei Yisrael made by making and worshipping a golden calf (Exodus 32, 33:1-4). Mistakes are tricky things! It’s easy to feel upset with ourselves and others for doing the wrong thing. But do strong negative reactions provide us with the best mindset for learning and growing from our mistakes?
We examined the feelings that we have right before we make a mistake—anger, sadness, fear—and how those feelings don’t set us up to make the best decisions. Bnei Yisrael, driven by fear, justified their need for an idol to Aharon with the following arguments:
- Moshe was gone and he was their connection to God, so they needed a new one.
- They didn’t have a leader—they were lost.
- Moshe was not God, but maybe they sort of confused God and Moshe, so they thought they needed to replace both of them when Moshe didn’t come back.
God finds out about the idol and gets so mad as to want to destroy the whole people. Moshe finds out and gets so mad he breaks the first set of stone tablets, grinds up the golden calf, and makes Bnei Yisrael drink it in their water. Aharon calls them a people driven towards evil. The tribe of Levi’im believe Moshe is justified when he instructs them to kill 3,000 members of the community. Talk about a negative reaction!
In all of this, the text is silent about how Bnei Yisrael is feeling. We proposed some ideas, and then dug into the emotions we ourselves have right after we make a mistake—feeling drained, sad, guilty, regretful—and how those feelings frame the way we think about ourselves:
- Sometimes I tell myself that I can learn from this and do better next time.
- Sometimes I’m hard on myself for the mistake I made.
- Sometimes it’s good to know I’m in the middle, sometimes I’m kind to myself and sometimes I’m not because I’m in the middle of figuring it out.
- Sometimes I tell myself that I’m stupid for the bad thing that I did.
- When I do something bad, I get more upset than you’d think.
- I feel mad and angry and frustrated with myself.
We wrapped up our learning by talking about what it means to be compassionate:
- Being kind
- Being loving
- Being nice
- Wanting good things for someone
- Helping
- Not bragging or boasting about things you have that other people don’t
The moments when we make mistakes are maybe the moments when it’s both the most difficult and the most important for us to feel compassion towards ourselves and others so that those mistakes can turn into productive lessons. Even God doesn’t manage to feel compassion towards the Jewish people initially after het ha’egel, but eventually God does (Exodus 34: 6-7). And since we’re all created betzelem elohim, in God’s image, we can do it too.