The eirev rav gathered around Aharon.
"Make us an idol! Now!" they demanded. "Moshe is gone!"
Needless to say, this put Aharon in quite a tough spot. He didn't know what to do. Saying no seemed like the right thing to do, but it was also dangerous. After thinking it over, he decided that he had no choice but to make it seem as though he were doing what they asked him to do.
"I will do what they want," Aharon thought. "But I will do everything very, very slowly . . . and I'm sure that before anything bad happens, Moshe will come down and everyone will thank and bless the true G-d."
Aharon said to the men: "All right. In order to make the idol, I'll need gold - and lots of it! Go to your wives and tell them that you need their gold earrings and jewelry to melt down and make an idol."
He figured that when the husbands asked their wives to donate gold for an idol, their request would start a nice, big, time-consuming argument . . . which would buy enough time for Moshe to come down from the mountain, before things got any worse.
But Aharon was in for a surprise. Oh, he was right about the women - they wanted no part of any idol business. When their husbands asked for their gold, the women said, "No way! We won't have any part of this ridiculous scheme!"
The surprise was that the men were ready and willing to take off their own gold earrings (those were the style then) and fill up basket after basket with thousands of them. In record time, they had collected plenty of gold for the idol.
Besides the women, the tribe of Levi and many Jews from other tribes also refused to donate gold.
