A Roman matron came to Rabbi Eleazar with a sharp theological question. "For the single sin of the golden calf," she asked, "why were the Israelites punished with three different kinds of death?"
Eleazar, by the custom of his day, did not engage her directly. But he turned to his students afterward and opened the answer for them. "There was not one sin at the mountain," he said. "There were three — and each one earned its own punishment."
The man who actually offered a sacrifice to the calf — who brought the animal, cut its throat, and poured the blood — faced the harshest sentence, for he had performed the full act of idolatry. The man who embraced and kissed the calf received a different, lesser penalty. The man who merely danced around it in celebration received the lightest punishment of all.
The Torah does not punish a crowd in the lump. It reads the crowd grain by grain. One man's dancing is not another man's slaughter, and Heaven sees the difference even when human witnesses do not. Exodus 32 describes the calf as a single event. Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 27, records the rabbinic answer: inside that one event, three sins happened, and three judgments were handed down.
The same fire can burn three different ways, depending on how close you stood.