The episode of the Golden Calf is full of questions. The people make an idol, sacrifice to it, and feast in front of it – and then they rise to dance, or to laugh. Countless questions come out of this scene. I want to focus on just one word: the word usually translated as “to dance.”
Early next day, the people offered up burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; they sat down to eat and drink, and then rose to dance (tzachek). (E.32:6 (Exodus 32:6))
It is not an unusual word, tzachek (צְחֹק), usually understood as laughter. But the Torah uses it very differently elsewhere. To understand what the people were doing in front of the calf, we have to see how this word has already been used in the Torah.
The first meaning is disbelief – a refusal to take the speaker seriously. The word first appears when Avraham and Sarah are told that she will have a son. Both of them laugh, with some degree of disbelief:
Abraham threw himself on his face and laughed (tzachek), as he said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man a hundred years old, or can Sarah bear a child at ninety?” (G.17:17 (Genesis 17:17)) … And Sarah laughed (tzachek) to herself, saying, “Now that I’ve lost the ability, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?” (G.18:12 (Genesis 18:12))
Lot’s sons-in-law react the same way. They do not leave Sodom because they think their father is only joking:
So Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law, who had married his daughters, and said, “Up, get out of this place, for G-d is about to destroy the city.” But he seemed to his sons-in-law as one who jests (tzachek). (G.19:14 (Genesis 19:14))
In these verses, tzachek means disbelief: refusing to truly hear the speaker, whether G-d or another person. Keep that in mind when we return to the calf. The word has a second meaning as well – an opposite meaning – and it is just as important.
The same word also refers to an intimate encounter:
When some time had passed, Abimelech king of the Philistines, looking out of the window, saw Isaac sporting with (tzachek) his wife Rebekah. (G.26:8 (Genesis 26:8))
Potiphar’s wife uses that same word when she accuses Joseph of trying to seduce her:
She called out to her servants and said to them, “Look, he had to bring us a Hebrew to dally (tzachek) with us! …” Then she told him the same story, saying, “The Hebrew slave whom you brought into our house came to me to dally (tzachek) with me.” (G.39:14 (Genesis 39:14), 17 (Genesis 39:17))
This second meaning is not necessarily a bad thing. Isaac’s very name is the same root, tzachek – and he is a forefather. When Isaac tzacheks with his wife, he is engaged in marital familiarity, or outright intimacy. Potiphar’s wife uses the word for sex (though not love). In other words, tzachek is what loving husbands and wives do with each other. It is personal, intimate and special. The word is strongly tied to fidelity.
These two meanings are opposites: disbelief is a refusal to engage; intimacy is complete engagement.
This is not unusual in the Torah. I have written before about the dualistic quality of words. The first time the noun for “holy,” kodesh, appears in the Torah, it describes not holiness but a prostitute, kedeisha (G.38:21 (Genesis 38:21)) – sex as commerce, versus sex as an elevating bonding of body and soul. Lavan, the man who tears people down, shares his letters with the bricks used to build up, and with the birth of a new generation. And Horeb, the mountain where we received the Torah, shares its root, ch-r-v, with the sword. Tzachek is very much like these words: it contains both a thing and its opposite.
Both of these meanings explain what was going on at the Golden Calf.
The first meaning – disbelief, refusing to take something seriously, refusing to truly hear the speaker – stands against what the Torah wants from us: to hear and to grow, in good faith. The Torah considers good faith a primary virtue. Rejecting the words of G-d is a good way to kill a conversation.
So when the people laugh, it amounts to a blanket rejection of the giving of the Torah at Sinai. G-d had produced the incredible revelation at the mountain, and the people ended up laughing in disbelief, just as Avraham and Sarah and Lot’s sons-in-law had done. Tzachek is a way of refusing to come to grips with what had just happened.
The opposite meaning is even more profound. When the people tzachek in front of the golden calf, they are doing more than dancing. They are taking what belongs in the privacy of a marriage and exhibiting it in public. More than this: the people are committing adultery. We are married to our spouses and to G-d. So when we tzachek out of either marriage, we are committing both idol worship and adultery.
At the calf, the two opposites meet: the people refuse to engage with G-d while throwing themselves completely into the idol.
This is the linguistic potency of the Torah. In a single word, we are told that the people scoffed at the revelation at Sinai, preferring instead to frolic in escapist hedonism. And we are also told, with that very same word, that the private and intimate, loving relationship that belongs between two married people was instead made into a public and openly adulterous spectacle – a betrayal of our marriage to G-d.
P.S. The Torah is also telling us that laughter or intimacy is not itself good or bad. Tzachek is a key part of a holy relationship; Isaac himself has this word as his name. The word contains the potential to be either. Like anything else, sex or dancing can be obscene or holy, deeply corrosive or profoundly beautiful.