So the sages and storytellers of once upon a time come up with this story about a leader who leads his people to the desert to escape the wrath of their cruel enemies. Life, as it turns out, is hard, and the deliverance they were promised doesn’t materialize. So the leader goes on a quest to figure out what to do next, and manages to extract Ten Commandments on how to live life, which will set him and his people on the straight and narrow. But upon his return to the camp, the leader finds that his people have began to worship an idol (a golden calf). So he smashes the Commandments in a rage and then grinds the golden idol into a powder and adds it to the water and forces his people to drink it. And a number of insults are thrown around (‘stiff-necked’), and God is angry with the people of Moses, and there’s a great fallout that leads to the creation of the priestly line of the tribes, and a plague, and a new set of stones on which the commandments are reset.
And out of all this — a punchy tale on the power of faith, corruption, disappointment, anger, consequence and redemption — we, the audience of this story, in our infinite wisdom, choose to focus not on the above, but on the commandments themselves. We remember them in more detail than anything else, and probably forget the part where the golden calf was not just destroyed, but forcibly ingested.
Talk about missing the point. We ignore the telling part and rush to the incidental, all in the name of easy answers (we want those commandments, not some moral about how we need to keep our heads together and not place our faith in false solutions).
It’s like hearing the story of the hare and the tortoise, and in the end, instead of getting the overall message, we make a list of the locations that the tortoise passed from and then focus on those, as if they’re central to the bloody story. As if we have something to gain from them.
The opportunists interpret the classics in convenient ways, which leads to a repeat of the very story we fail to understand: how easily we are tempted
The commandments are just the device — and the business end of the narrative — that serve a greater message. They’re irrelevant in themselves. Sure they have their use later on, but the story of the calf doesn’t hinge on their content.
But no, people still choose to make them the center of Moses’ legacy, basing an entire history on them.Talk about losing the plot.And then we wonder why the world feels off kilter and not quite in touch with what’s important. We focus on the wrong parts of our stories. The opportunists interpret the classics in convenient ways, which leads to a repeat of the very story we fail to understand: how easily we are tempted; how readily we worship the wrong things, placing our faith in quick and convenient fixes at the expense of what’s important, and then pay the price for it, and how! (get a load of this delicious chunk of irony): by swallowing our deeds (one) and then getting struck by the pain that comes with our poor choices (two).
Then, as in the OG story, a new line emerges from those who choose to ignore the distractions and who focus on the real message (three). And the story goes on (four) till the next time a number of us lose patience, our minds, and the plot again (back to square one)… and the story repeats once more…
Which is the other big message in this tale:
That history repeats itself… And that all one can do against entropy is to fix things, as best as one can, till the next time.
From your socratic Spin Doctor
PS – Speaking of ‘socratic’, what was Socrates, if not the prelude to the story of Jesus? (One of them anyway.) The fellow preached, challenged the norms, and promoted a new way of thinking among people who were so offended by his approach, they sentenced him to death, and then regretted their actions and worshipped his school of thought.
We let the devices in the stories color our approach, and then fight amongst ourselves over the details
Clearly, our stories repeat themselves in various forms. Their messages are simple and essential, which we would do well to heed, but which we ignore all the time, caught up in semantics. We let the devices in the stories color our approach, and then fight amongst ourselves over the details, wasting and/or trashing the message in our effort to defend it.
It’s a tragicomic affair that could be fixed by a simple solution: pay attention to the central message, not the bling, and see how easily we come together, with respect for every nuance, but within a game/system/set of rules that we can all appreciate and live by. It’s not rocket science. It’s basic arithmetic and practicality. Put one and one together so that something bigger can stand in place, functional and whole. As simple as that.
Alas, if it were — as simple as that — we’d have done it by now.
The truth is, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is made of golden calf powder, and we’ve been shitting gold dust ever since, mining our — and each other’s — crap for a chance to make it big and not have to worry about anything that forces us to keep our hearts in place and our minds on the plot.
How’s that for an interpretation.