Among the tragedies which we mark by fasting on the seventeenth of this month of Tammuz is the Sin of the Golden Calf. Let us recall the historical background before considering how that sad piece of ancient history came about – and how it relates to us today.

As described in Exodus (Ch. 32), our forbears' patience ran out shortly before Moshe was supposed to return from his forty days of communion with Hashem on Mt. Sinai. Assuming that Moshe was dead, they approached his brother Aharon and demanded some sort of substitute: "Make us a god to lead us!" they cried.

A mere forty days after the earth-shaking Revelation of the one G-d at Sinai, the witnesses resorted to a graven image!

In order to see their failure in perspective, we need to go back in time. Indeed we need to go back to the very beginning.

Before the Fall, Adam was a perfect being in a perfect world. He was good through and through. The evil which G-d had implanted in the world was separate from Man, not a part of human character. As we know from Genesis, this evil was first embodied in the Serpent, the tempter of the Garden of Eden. The Serpent, "the most cunning of all the wild creatures," sought a crack in Man's psychic armor, a way to penetrate into his heart.

It sought… and found.

The Serpent got the woman to focus on what we commonly call the Tree of Knowledge, and G-d's prohibition against eating its fruit. But this abbreviated name will mislead us. The full name, the name by which G-d Himself introduces this mysterious "centerpiece" of the Garden of Eden is: The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:17).

Adam before the Fall possessed vast knowledge. He was actually a prophet of the first order. But there was one thing he did not know: the taste of evil. Adam was created to be naturally inclined to the good. Just as we have an appetite for food and drink, Adam had an appetite for the good.

By eating of the Tree, this appetite, or inclination, was compromised. Against G-d's express wishes, Adam brought into his sphere of knowledge the experience of evil; and into his psyche, a yetzer hora, an inclination to evil. For all the rest of human history, this inclination would be in conflict with his original inclination to good.

The Appeal

How did the Serpent, the embodiment of evil, accomplish its coup d'ètat? How did he succeed in persuading Adam and Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, to take a taste of evil?

You folks – the Serpent argued – are not calling the shots in your own lives. You are not independent. You are merely the pawns of your natural inclination to good. Taste of the fruit and bring the yetzer hora and the experience of evil into your world! "You will (then) be like G-d, knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:5). If, afterwards, you decide to do what is good and right, you will be making a truly independent and mature choice.

It is very difficult for man, whether Adam and Eve, or Arnold and Evelyn, to resist this kind of argument.

The results of that first taste of evil are well known to all of us. The human heart became home to all sorts of serpentine appetites and inclinations, not all of which could be charmed by the flute of the yetzer hora.

Halting the Downward Slide

Human history continued its downward slide from the time of Adam. To mention just a few highlights: the fratricide of Cain (Kayin), the insubordination of the Tower-of-Babel generation, the iniquities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the abominations of Egypt.

Then, twenty generations after Adam, a man was born who would go against the tide – and the slide: Avraham. He was a man who dedicated his whole life to goodness, and to the cultivation of the yetzer hatov, the inner inclination to do good. His hospitality knew no bounds. But he wanted to do chesed not only for the bodies of those with whom he come in contact, but also for their souls. He thus actively taught large numbers of people about the one G-d, and the meaning of trust in him, the Source of blessing.

Avraham and his wife Sarah blazed a trail that should have led humanity back to the Garden, to the edenic world that had been lost. Their descendants moved ever closer to the goal, basing their lives on the clear and obvious premise that the Creator's own guidelines are unsurpassed. They appreciated the folly of each individual attempting to pick his way through the "moral minefields" of life – or worse, creating minefields of his own, as Adam did – in the name of independence, self-sufficiency, and the like.

This vital awareness of our lack of self-sufficiency, and our utter dependence on G-d, was reinforced by two centuries of slavery in Egypt, And when our ancestors declared at Sinai, "(First) we will do, and (then) we will understand," they demonstrated magnificently that the lesson of the Egyptian slavery had not been lost on them. The Sages tell us that if they had only maintained this level of awareness, they would have merited the ultimate Redemption.

But that was not to be. When they demanded that Amram make them a god to lead them, they revealed that they had not fully absorbed the lesson of their servitude after all. Instead of turning to Hashem for guidance through Aharon, the prophet in their midst, they decided to take the situation in hand themselves. They decided to forge their own solution to the "Jewish Problem": the Golden Calf.

Much has been written by our great Torah commentators to explain all that lay behind their choice of the calf, and exactly what they were trying to accomplish. But suffice it to say that above all else, they demonstrated a brazen self-reliance which blew up in their faces. When Moshe saw on that fateful Seventeenth of Tammuz that this "malady of Adam" had not been cured, he had little choice but to smash the Tablets of the Law. For without absolute reliance on Hashem, serious Torah observance cannot be.

This crucial message will ring in our ears as we fast again this month on the anniversary of that sad occasion. We are still in need of a cure for this cancer of spiritual self-reliance.