Gold, Bronze, and Wood
What the Bible's lesser known Ark of the Covenant can teach us about Simone Biles's achievement
As the Israelites stood on the threshold of entering the promised land, Moses, the tragic leader who would not be accompanying them across the Jordan River, recounted the events that had brought them to this point. But Moses did not simply repeat what had come before. He emphasized, downplayed, amended, and omitted from the original stories in ways that would serve the Jewish people at this stage of their development. One such alteration involved adding one piece of furniture to the story of the Ten Commandments.
You may remember that there were actually two sets of tablets given to the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai. The first set, designed and inscribed by God, was shattered by Moses when he descended to find his nation worshipping a golden calf. After obtaining Divine forgiveness and renewing the covenant with God, Moses was told to ascend once more. Only this time, he was to craft his own tablets, upon which the Lord would inscribe the same words again. This greater involvement of Moses is recorded both in the original story in the Book of Exodus as well as its reboot by Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy. However, in Deuteronomy, Moses adds that God also instructed him to prepare a wooden ark to house the tablets. The ark is deemed so important that it is mentioned five times in the text, raising many exegetical eyebrows. Was this the same ark that was constructed from wood, but coated in gold, in the story of the traveling tabernacle? Was it a different ark, and if so, what happened to it in later Jewish history?
Rashi (R. Solomon b. Isaac 1040-1105), the greatest Jewish interpreter of the Bible, suggests that the wooden ark which would receive the second set of tablets was a new artifact, and would store those tablets until the golden ark was ready. For that interim period it would store the second tablets as well as the shards of the first set, which had been broken by Moses months earlier. Once the tablets were transferred to the golden ark, the purpose of its wooden precursor changed: Whenever the Israelites went to war against another nation, the shards of the first tablets, encased in the wooden ark, would accompany them, representing the presence of God leading them to victory.
In our peaceful moments, we display our golden countenance to the world. Its outward glow reflects the wholeness we feel inside. But in moments of crisis, when we must confront and contend with challengers from without, we cannot depend upon our golden facade. It is then that we must remember that gold melts easily, but that under the golden coating lies a wooden core, less glamorous, but more representative of life. And that core will guide us to triumph if we remember that it contains not the completeness of some mythical figure, but the shards of our own vulnerabilities and insecurities.
Only if we make peace with those vulnerabilities and understand ourselves, will we be able to compete with and defeat our external rivals. In the Bible it was Jacob, before he met his brother Esau, who wrestled with an unknown stranger, representing his own limitations. That triumph set the stage for the next day’s rapprochement with Esau. In Shakespeare’s Richard III, ghosts of those King Richard had murdered appeared to him the night before his final battle to force him to confront the evil choices he had made and presage his death in battle. Saul, the first king of Israel, received a similar lesson from the Witch of Endor who invoked the spirit of the Prophet Samuel the night before Saul’s last battle against the Philistines.
No ghost visited Simone Biles at the Tokyo Olympics and no witch conjured a spirit from her past. But the peerless champion gymnast just as surely penetrated the gold to understand the shards of her heroic life. She came face to face with the results of a dehumanizing sport, a history of abuse, and years of media glare. Over the years she had glided to heights undreamt of by generations of gymnasts, completing moves no one else would have dared attempt. She was not only the best of her class—she was its only member. And so she found herself the Jonathan Livingston Seagull of her sport, uniquely positioned to teach lessons nobody else could. Only she could answer, at the peak of her flight, the question others could not ask: What comes next?
By withdrawing from several Olympic events, Simone Biles may have made her greatest contribution to the sport. By showing the world, and especially young women under immense pressure, a true set of priorities, she has saved lives and rescued souls. Her decision is reminiscent of a classic Talmudic passage:
Shimon HaAmmassoni, and some say that it was Neḥemya HaAmmassoni, would interpret all occurrences of the word “et” in the Torah, Once he reached the verse: “You shall be in awe of [et] the Lord your God; (Deuteronomy 10:20), he withdrew (from this method of exposition, as how could one add to God Himself?)
His students said to him: Rabbi, what will be with all the mentions of ‘et’ that you interpreted until now? He said to them: Just as I received reward for the interpretation, so I shall receive reward for my withdrawal.
The biblical word “et” is often untranslatable, usually serving to separate verb and object. Sometimes it can mean “with.” The word appears thousands of times in the Bible. Rabbi Shimon found meanings for over 80% of those times before he hit a brick wall. He told his students that his search for truth had led him to those thousands of interpretations, but that the same honesty led him to halt. Both approaches, he explained, were divinely approved.
Simone Biles strove for perfection on the gymnastics floor and found it all these years, but this year she strove for the wood, rather than the gold, to honor shards over perfection. When she earned a bronze medal in her final event it wasn’t, as many have written, as good as gold. It was an affirmation that without the bronze and the wood, the gold is meaningless.