A full transcript of this episode is available below.

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On TEXTing: IRL – Ideas for Real Life, Elana Stein Hain brings the big dilemmas facing North American Jews into conversation with classic and modern Torah texts.

The Golden Calf, Institutional Crisis, and the Making of a Mob Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Elana: Hi everyone. Welcome back to TEXTing IRL: Ideas for Real Life, where we wrestle with the big dilemmas of our time, through the lens of classical and modern Torah texts. I’m your host, Elana Stein Hain. We’re recording on February 12th, 2026. 

Today we’re seeing a lot of what I might call mob mentality. My central image of an American mob is from January 6th, 2021, the attack on the capitol building people believing that they’ve been betrayed by the system organize themselves into a burn it all down kind of crowd. 

To me, mob mentality is an act first, investigate later contagion that’s designed to intimidate and escalates into violence often. But honestly, it’s evident in many places, especially and constantly in online discourse, and I’m worried about it. I have a feeling I’m not the only one. 

What’s perhaps most disturbing to me is that theorists now reject the idea that mobs are inherently irrational or just spontaneous. Instead, they suggest that mob behavior is about identity, legitimacy, norms, and moral meaning under conditions of stress. 

As a Jew, the idea that mobs are rational is even more concerning because it means that there’s a premeditation, a stickiness, if you will, to one’s identification, to a group who’s willing to go beyond the boundaries, beyond the norms. The word mob itself conjures up violence, pogroms, Farhud, and Jews, along with others, often end up as a target. 

I wanna think about what we should do about mob mentality through the lens of this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa. We’re actually, we’re not afraid of a different mob. We are the mob. The Israelites themselves turn into a group that rushes to worship the golden calf, and they don’t just go beyond the bounds of normative behavior. They’re actually upending the very foundation of what Jewish identity was supposed to mean at the time. And it’s no surprise that the rabbis read them as becoming violent in the process, though that’s not in the biblical text itself. 

My chavruta today, to talk about these developments and how we should respond to them is Franklin Foer. Frank is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic. Personally, I have found some of his writing, especially over the past few years, truly illuminating of our current moment, so I really appreciate that he’s here. 

Frank, thank you so much for joining me today. 

Franklin: I couldn’t be more delighted to be here. Thank you. 

Elana: I don’t think you have enough books behind you, my friend. So let’s—

Franklin: I’m running outta space. 

Elana: You’re ready for TEXTing. You’re ready for TEXTing. 

Franklin: Let’s do it. 

Elana: Let’s, let’s situate everyone. Okay. The Israelites are still at Mount Sinai. Okay. They’ve experienced Revelation. Presumably they’re supposed to be on cloud nine, right? So, but Moses goes up the mountain, he’s late. He’s late in coming down. Maybe even by a few hours. The institution that they trusted, let’s call him Moshe, is gone. And they’re not really sure what to do about it. 

And so that’s where we’re picking up here. And of course, everybody listening, you can find the text in the show notes. So let’s look at the text for a moment of what happens when they disassemble into a mob and, and take it from there. We’re in Shemot, Exodus chapter 32. 

“Vayar ha’am ki boshesh Moshe laredet min hahar,” the people see that Moses is tardy in coming down the mountain, “vayikahel ha’am al Aharon,” and the group congregates—pay attention to that preposition—upon Aaron. “Vayomru eilav kum aseh lanu elohim,” they say to him, get up, make us a God, or Gods, who will go before us, “ki zeh Moshe ha-ish,” cause this guy Moses, “asher heelanu me’eretz Mitzrayim,” who took us out of Egypt, “ lo yadanu meh haya lo,” we don’t know what happened to him. 

And the first thing I wanna say, Frank, is when I read this, it’s unbelievable how quickly this happens. Let’s say Moses is a few hours late, right? It almost seems like Moses was the only thing standing between them and whatever they are now. So how much stability was there to begin with, if that’s the case? 

And I think the idea of emotion playing a big part, fear playing a big part. I mean, that’s obvious here. They’ve been through an emotional rollercoaster. They get out of Egypt, they cross the sea, they are suddenly in the desert and don’t know what they’re going to eat or drink. They experience a revelation. Moses is gone. Of course, they’re on an emotional rollercoaster. Right? So that’s the first thing that I notice here. What do you notice? 

Frank: Yeah, there, there, there may be what you would describe as a politically underdeveloped people that we see this in all sorts of chapters of history. When there’s a transition from one era to another, people are especially insecure. 

And if you’ve been a slave and you’ve, you’ve existed in a condition of total dependence, the idea of independence is something that’s extremely scary. And, and Moses steps in and he fills the void. He is order, he is stability, he is strength. And when he disappears, all of these latent insecurities, all of the underdeveloped political habits of the Jewish people end up exploding in this sort of way where. They don’t just, you know, start begging for Aaron to, to play the stronger role. They start begging for a golden calf. 

And I’m struck by how in conditions like, like this and in conditions of kind of despair or anxiety, people don’t turn to the practical solution. They become, they become revolutionaries of sorts. And so, I mean, I think of the golden calf almost as kind of the mob making a revolutionary demand of, of Aaron. 

Elana: Well, so it’s so interesting because I’m thinking, I’m noticing two things in what you’re saying. One is that they’re returning to certain habits that they haven’t really had enough time or enough space or enough to, to develop or evolve their way out of. So meaning there’s a, there’s a return to something more, more primitive, you might say. But when you talk about revolution, that’s not always a return to something more primitive, right? Sometimes that’s just what’s here right now is just not working and we gotta get out of it. 

And so it is interesting to consider… It’s interesting to consider which of those is stronger in certain moments. But I, I love what you’re saying about politically underdeveloped people, because I wanna read the Midrash, ’cause you know, I, I love the Bible, I love the Torah—I love what the rabbis do with it, right? So there is something rather remarkable.

And this is kind of a late Midrash I’ll be honest with you. This isn’t like the original third century, fourth century, fifth century, where some centuries later, but it’s still magnificent. And it’s called Bamidbar Rabbah. Right, it’s Numbers Rabbah.

And the Midrash is noticing that the way it talks about the people congregating upon Aaron is, they’re called nation. They’re not called Israel.  And so it offers us that every place the people are just called, “am,” the people, it’s an expression of something negative, but where they’re called “Israel,” it’s an expression of something positive. And it gives an example of “the people were complainers.” That’s in Numbers. “The people spoke against God and Moses.” “Until when will this people scorn me?” God asks. And then of course, from our example in the golden calf episode, Moses “saw the people, that they were unruly and out of control and the people assembled around Aaron.” 

And when I think about “the people,” you know, my first thought is to say, oh yeah, well part of the problem here is you know, you, you just, in a mob, you just become anonymous and it’s just the people and, but then I did some more reading about the mob because to be honest, and we’ll get to this, in my head, I’m sort of like, what is the difference between a collective and a protest movement and a mob, right? Like, what’s the difference between all these things? 

And I, what I was reading about is the idea that a mob actually has norms, it has deep belonging. It’s not fully anonymous. Right. Meaning I understand the individual supplement, it’s not fully anonymous, but it’s, it’s actually having new norms. 

And I think what you’re saying about the politically underdeveloped people, what they’re doing is instead of being Israel, which is what they were taught to be, which is a collective that does certain things, it doesn’t do paganism, it does, you know, worshiping the one God, right? Instead of being that group and belonging to that group and having those norms, they’re actually receding. To a group that’s prior to that, which is a group that doesn’t have those norms. A group that maybe has other norms. 

 Frank: So, what you were just describing, which is the kind of the transcendent power of the mob. That, that, that when people de-individuate, when they, they become part of this structure that is kind of rising up, it not only—it does erase their individuality, but it there, there is a spiritual component to it as well that this sense that you’re, you’re part of a movement that’s seeking transcendence, that you’re seeking to transcend whatever the existing order is and to replace it with something else, that there is this quasi-religious experience to, kind of, a mob that’s in process of overturning something. 

Elana: It’s very interesting to note that here their leader is gone. 

Frank: Yes. 

Elana: Or to their mind, their leader is gone and so they go back to the underdeveloped. And what you’re also describing is that actually sometimes a mob, it’s not about the leader being gone, it’s that the leaders that they have, they are actually against, meaning those leaders are too far and we actually have to push them overboard. Where do you think institutions stand within that? 

Frank: Right. Well, I, you know, when just thinking about the Israelites or the people or whatever we’re gonna call them at this moment—

Elana: Right, I know. Sometimes I like to call them us, I, you know, sometimes.

Frank: Right. We were kind of, you know, it’s not just that we were undeveloped, we have as human beings, I think this is universal, like a need for order, that, that when there is no—when order does not exist, the rest of life becomes very difficult. It’s one of our most basic needs. 

And Moses was order and when Moses disappeared, that kind of, the deep anxiety that is provoked by a lack of order comes rushing to the fore. And I think that this is where institutions come in, that, you know, that when institutions are incapable of providing that type of order—and, and it’s not as simple as just, like, providing this governance function of kind of law and order, but there’s kind of a responsiveness that institutions need to have in order to to thrive. 

And when people feel as if there’s this great distance between themselves and their institutions, I think that that’s a moment when, when the mob starts to form. 

Elana: You know, it’s funny, in the continuation of the text, it’s wild, you know, Aaron, he lets them build this calf, right? He sort of like, the way he tells it, he throws the gold in there and it just happens on its own, right? That’s the way he tells it to Moses at least. And they say, “eileh elohecha Yisrael,” this is your God, Israel, meaning they go back from people to Israel. It’s almost like they’re saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s not that we’re not being what Israel is—this is what Israel is. 

Frank: Yes. Yes.

Elana: This is what Israel’s supposed to be. And I feel that—I know this is a terrible—like I’m just gonna go straight for it.

Frank: Do it. 

Elana: I’m feeling that a little bit with the Christian nationalism in America right now. Basically saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not an aberration from the norm. This is what the norm is supposed to be, right? Like, that’s what scares me.

Frank: I mean, totally. I was just thinking, you know about Jews and mobs and one of the—do you know this collection, Studies in Prejudice?

Elana: No. 

Frank: After World War II, the American Jewish Committee became this, kind of started to employ all of these great,  especially German Jewish intellectuals who had fled, and especially the Frankfurt School. 

And so it implied this guy Max Horkheimer to, to basically commission a series of social scientific studies that tried to explain basically why mobs formed. But basically what they ended up concluding is that, you know, it’s not necessarily a sign of somebody’s inherent evil that they join a mob, but that there were these preconditions within their society and the yearning for tradition and purity, which is a totally sincere sentiment that human beings have, is one of the things that can be a precondition for, for, for mob-like behavior, as you were describing.

Elana: By the way, I, I have to go back to the encampments on campus. 

Frank: Yeah. Yes. 

Elana: I have to go back to the encampments because I, I understand they didn’t always get to violence, but sometimes the rhetoric was violent and also sometimes students were being intimidated and there were situations where things did actually get violent. 

And I, I looked at that and I was like, oh my gosh, first and foremost, these kids just wanna do what they think is right. Meaning they’re not, most of these kids, they’re not like deeply studied in what’s going on in the area. They saw pictures of what’s going on in Gaza and they were really motivated by that. 

And then there’s these kids also are looking for something to belong to. And then there’s also, there’s a lot of social pressure and that—meaning, there are all these different pieces that come together, and then there’s COVID for two years, which these kids spent all their time by themselves. I, I mean that really, like all of these things, but that doesn’t make me any less concerned about it. It’s almost like I wish somebody was evil so that I could say, okay, this person is clearly showing themselves to be kind of a Columbine type, and, and let’s, let’s—that’s not, that’s not what it is.

Frank: I mean, I would say there probably were people who were evil attached to this. 

Elana: Of course there were! Oh my God. I mean motivated, funded and, yeah. 

Frank: Yeah. But, but you know what we were describing with the mob dynamic where like there are no breaks, where things just start to kind of, you know, it, it’s not just a demand that could be met or it’s not just, it becomes something greater. And I think it, it—that, that part of what happens is as, as, as a protest becomes an encampment, and as people develop this sense of belonging with the collective that is protesting, I think that that is part of the dynamic where a movement goes from, you know, goes from being something that is self-contained to being this thing that kind of starts to, to be out of control. 

There is no way to satisfy the mob. The, you know, their demands are totally unrealistic because they’re in this process of, of, of transcendence. They’re identifying with something, you know, that becomes quasi religious, which is why, you know, somebody of them ended up dissolving in the violent way that they ended up dissolving. 

I would just say one other thing about the encampments, which is one of the big differences between universities that successfully navigated the last couple years and ones that were unsuccessful has to do with leadership, that they had—universities that had Aarons as president as opposed to Moseses were the ones that ended up faltering. 

Elana: Let’s go there. Yeah, let’s go there. Right? Let’s go into the text, because what does Aaron try to do? And we’re gonna put this in the show notes. You know, Aaron tries to, it sounds like Aaron tries to slow them down, essentially. That’s the way a lot of people read this is, Aaron is trying to slow them down. Right? Get them to… 

Frank: He’s buying time. 

Elana: Or he’s trying to redirect their energies, right? It’s “chag la-Hashem machar,” this is, we’re gonna turn this into actually just a, a, a, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do sacrifices to God, right? And they turn it into, “eileh elohecha Yisrael,” these are your gods. You know, like he, he’s trying, but it’s so clear what you’re saying, the negotiation is not working, it doesn’t work. And as much as we say that Aaron is the lover of peace and pursuer of peace, it ain’t gonna work here. 

And then you have Moses and I actually, I do wanna go, I wanna go into Moses for a second because Moses does something absolutely unthinkable. He breaks the tablets. That is unthinkable. Because in a way, that’s what the people were doing. 

So I wanna read to Midrash for a second, from Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer. “Vayikach Moshe et haluchot,” he took, he took the tablets, “vehaya yored,” and he’s walking down the mountain, “vayu haluchot sovlim et atzman,” and the Luchot, actually, the tablets were able to carry themselves, “ve-et Moshe atzmo iman,” and they were carrying him, right.

Just think about, like, the euphoria of the moment. They carry him, like you said, transcendence. Right? He’s experiencing transcendence. “U-k’she ra’u haegel ve-et hamecholot,” and when they saw—and the “they” is not Moses. The “they” is what’s written on the tablets, and maybe the tablets themselves. When they saw, the instruments that people were dancing with around this golden calf, “barchu haketuvim me’al haluchot,” the writing ran away, jumped off of the tablets themselves, “nimtzu kvedim al yado,” they were too heavy then for Moshe, there was no transcendence, there was only stone. And Moses could not handle it. Could not even carry himself, could not even carry the tablets. “Vehishlichan meyado,” he threw them from his hands and they broke. 

And I think one way to read this is he’s totally fed up and he’s too tired. He can’t handle these crazy people who do the wrong thing. But another way to read it is he basically says, you broke it, and I’m gonna hold up a mirror to you and I’m gonna do something radical to show you that what’s happening here is you broke it and I’m not gonna stand for you breaking it and pretending that it’s still together. And that to me is kind of what you’re saying.

Frank: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I, I’m just beginning to work on a book about America. It’s a history of American Jews and, and I, I was reading about. The New Deal and why American Jews became so fanatical about Franklin Roosevelt, who they described, you know, a lot of American Jewish leaders described as almost a Messianic figure and as kind of an American Moses. And there was this devotion to him.

And I think that there was kind of, this, this understanding that, that it was, it was stability. That this was like, this—they, they were invested in this, not because of like high-minded liberal reasons so much as they wanted a system that was kind of orderly and was like, was immune to mobs. Because they understood—I, I mean, Roosevelt had this phrase that I’m thinking of, which was, “I’m that kind of radical because I’m that kind of conservative.”

And I’m thinking of it like almost in this moment where Moses is like, doing something that seems radical, but in order to preserve, and that in order to, he needed to do something that kind of shocked the people so that he could, he could save, he could, he could save the system. 

Elana: So translate that to today, you started talking about encampments in the sense that you were saying if they were leaders of universities who were more like Moshe, more, more like Moses and less like Aaron, less of the negotiation and more of the put your foot down. You felt that that worked. First of all, you think that’s true across the board? Can you explain more, a little bit, about what you mean?

FrankL I think it’s more, it’s not even putting your foot down, it’s just like leaders who knew what they, they were, they stood for and weren’t, and knew how they were going to navigate the moment. It, you know, and, and that could involve, you know, more dialogue with the mob, you know, or the, the encampments. But it was really just having a kind of clear sense of who they are and what their values were and how they were going to get through this. They were more successful than people who were kind of winging it and buying time and engaging in what the Aaron thing is, which is like misdirection, right? 

Elana: Ah, so Aaron… So you’re saying Aaron is not, he’s not emerging—he’s emerging as reactive. 

Frank: Yes. 

Elana: Which is how he described himself, right? Even to Moshe, he’s emerging as reactive. He’s coming out of fear. He is not coming out of a place of vision. And Moses, even though he didn’t really know what he was gonna expect, he’s coming out of a place of vision. That’s where, that’s where he’s been for the last 40 days and 40 nights. He’s been thinking about the grand vision. Right? And he’s gonna—that’s an interesting meaning. It’s not negotiation or not negotiation, it’s actually how clear you are about where you wanna go. 

Frank: Or your core values, like that they have—

Elana: Or your core values. That’s even better.

Frank: —who understand kind of what’s broken in the university, meaning like that this, the antisemitism and the encampments were really a symptom of a deeper malady within the institution, that they, they’d stopped being able to deal with political disagreement and then things were able were escalating in the way that they did, or there was some fundamental flaw with the governance structure of the universities and they needed to fix that. But they also knew that they didn’t want to kind of succumb ultimately to a mob, that they needed to find a way to preserve their legitimacy and authority in the face of it. 

Elana: I guess one of the things that I’m wondering about is—forget the campus, meaning I’m sitting here as a human and I’m watching these things. What, what are, what are the ways that we either prevent a mob from forming or work against it? Is it reinvesting in the norms? Is it, is it turning off the internet? Meaning—what, what are the ways that we can actually, as individuals and as collectives? What should we be pushing for in order to prevent the mob or, you know, to deal with it once it’s here? 

Frank: I was thinking about the way in which so much of the way that discourse and politics are structured is that you have this binary between people who wanna up, overturn the order, who are kind of revolutionary in spirit, or people who end up getting stuck defending the status quo. 

And I was just thinking about the way in which that binary—which is not always fair, but that’s the way that things end up getting presented many times is, is a pernicious binary because it doesn’t leave space for the stuff in the middle, which is that, the revolutionaries, you know, may have the wrong prescriptions, but they may be correct in diagnosing that sometimes, institutions and the systems are, are flawed and unresponsive. And the people who are defending against defending institutions get stuck defending institutions as if there was nothing wrong about them. 

And I’m just struck by how, kind of, the idea of reform has basically dissipated from our discourse, and that it was like something that was, you know, people would talk about education reform or healthcare reform, but the idea of political reform, which, you know, flares up at every couple of generations, is the thing that’s intended to keep institutions responsive in a way that, it took off a lot of the oxygen that the mob thrives off of. 

Elana: It really does strike me that you find this mob situation in between Terumah and Tetzave, where we’re told to build the Mishka and then Vayakhel and Pekudei when they actually build it. 

And you know, one of those subtle things that shifts between them is that before the golden calf incident, they’re told to make the vessels first and then the structure, and after the golden calf incident, the way that it’s described is they build the structure and then the vessels. 

And there, it takes me back to what you were saying about order and people’s need for order, and it really does your, your point about institutional reform. It’s not that institutions are a problem inherently, or that they’re great inherently. It’s, actually, institutions are necessary, and you have to make sure that you’re continually reforming them in ways that will keep rupture from happening to the degree that you can. 

Frank: Well, I just think that institutions can become distant and institutions can appear to be unresponsive. And institutions—just ’cause sometimes they’re built in like heavy stone, doesn’t mean that they’re kind of fixed in stone. That they’re, they’re, they have to, they have to find ways to adapt and, and navigate changing times. And if not, then we’re stuck with the golden calf type of situation where, you know, people are willing to smash the things that they have with, without any, you know, in this mindless way where they, there’s like no, no sense of loss, no sense of kind of, of the fact that the words may end up kind of dancing off of the stone.

And that’s the irrationality, is when, when people have no sense of, uh, connection and, and devotion to the things that they are rooted in and that they know, that know to be know to be theirs and they, they let it go. 

Elana: Yeah. I guess I’m, I, I, I’m, I like to be slow and I think mobs happen when things move too fast, but, but they’re often responding to things that they see in society that aren’t actually moving fast enough. 

It’s, it’s, this is a, it’s a back and forth, but I really appreciate you talking about the reform, the need for reform, because I don’t wanna leave our listeners just thinking about the problems. I actually want them to think about directions towards mitigation. Right. At least mitigation. And what you’re really saying is, be strong like Moses and not just reactive like Aaron. And what you’re also saying is don’t just defend an institution qua institution. Think about whether reform is possible and what it would take to have that reform. 

Thank you so much, Frank, for joining me today for this conversation. I appreciate you. 

Frank: I loved doing it. Thank you. And to all our watchers and listeners, thanks for being with us. See you next time.