Idolatry

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, October 16, 2009

Some years we do an exercise in Confirmation class in which I ask the students to rank the Ten Commandments from 1-10 in order of their importance.

Take a moment and try this in your mind. Which commandments end up in the top 3? Which are in the middle? Which end up at the bottom of your list?

With the Confirmation class it is pretty typical for the top three to be those relating to human harm- murder, adultery and theft. (Raise your hands if one of those were in your top three). Honoring parents and not bearing false witness are usually somewhere in the middle.

Almost always the prohibition on idolatry ranks way at the bottom. Somehow, not bowing down to pieces of clay- to images of God, just doesn’t seem very important.

Yet, as Kenneth Seeskin points out in his book, No Other Gods, earlier generations of Jews saw this commandment as essential and in the view of some, as key to all of Jewish belief. One medieval rabbi even insisted that the prohibition on idolatry was equal to the whole Torah. How can we understand the importance our tradition gives this commandment?

Modern Jews can see the prohibition on idolatry as more significant when we translate the ancient ban on graven images into something broader. We can ask, what do we idolize, what do we worship or make an object of adoration? Is it wealth or fame, power or beauty? Do we sacrifice other things that we claim to hold dear for these common idols? Vanity has caused many to pursue medical treatments that endanger their health and well-being and in that sense we can say beauty has been idolized. More commonly it is not wealth really that people idolize but some vision of the security and ease that they believe wealth might provide.

Our Confirmation students tell me that it is success that has become the contemporary idol of choice. Success is pursued with excessive devotion, with a single mindedness that leads people to sacrifice other values- even honesty and family. For their extracurricular activities for example, the confirmation students tell me, it is not, do you enjoy your sport, your music, your community service, but how will this activity look to those others who will be judging you and controlling your access to the perceived doors to success.

But is that sort of idolatry, though definitely a moral sin, really up there among the commandments, equal to all the others?

To understand the perspective of earlier generations, I think we need to look at idolatry in another way. It is human nature to look for more human ways of presenting a God who is otherworldly, non-corporeal, and invisible. It is natural to seek surrogates to make God seem closer to us. And just as that human desire for a handier God got the Israelites into trouble in the desert, thousands of years ago, with the building of the Golden Calf, it continues to get us into trouble as well.

Maimonides defined idolatry as “believing in an image of God”. Idolatry is the worship of something that we have concocted in our own brain. Because we live in the physical world, it is a human tendency to try and understand God within that world as well. Thus we are forever confusing metaphors and parables for the literal. According to Maimonides every ritual, holiday, dietary law, and precept of the Torah, is uniquely designed to try and help us overcome that human tendency to cast God into our own image.

Since this tendency is so human, since we find it even within the Bible itself where God is often portrayed with human features, since it is so ubiquitous, why fight it?

To answer that, let’s look for a moment at a famous midrash on this week’s Torah portion. The rabbis noticed that when the snake asked Eve about the tree she said: “God said: You shall not eat of it or touch it, lest you die.” But as you may recall, earlier God had said only “you may not eat of it”.

The rabbis wondered where the additional prohibition came from- God has not said, not touch it. Perhaps it was because this commandment came to Eve via the game of telephone, that is God spoke to Adam before Eve was created, and then later Adam passed this commandment on to Eve. In any case, according to the midrash, the snake pushes Eve such that she accidentally touches the tree. When she sees that she does not die, she then questions the rest of the commandment.

That is also the problem with idolatry. When we create an image of God, we grow attached to it. When we later discover that our image of God is not really a God, it can lead us to give up on the entire enterprise.

We create images of God like ourselves. It’s a natural tendency to think that God likes what we like, to glorify our biases in this way.

We create an image of God that offers us some sense of control. We indulge in magical thinking. We create a God to whom we can pray, and if we say the right words or bring the right offerings, then the deity will grant our request.

But often it doesn’t happen that way, and then we feel justified in being angry with our God.

Unfortunately we don’t always understand that it is this image of God, this hypothesis of what God might be like, this idol, that has failed us and not God.

I agree with Maimonides when he says that the Torah speaks to us in metaphors and is not meant to be read literally. After all the Torah is unconcerned with many questions that might come up with a literal reading of the text. For example, I have found that third and fourth graders, when they study this week’s Torah portion, are very concerned with the question who does Cain marry? And who is he afraid will kill him, if the only people around are Adam and Eve, and Abel, who is now dead.

Later rabbis will create answers for these questions, but the Torah itself sees no need to explain who all these people are that Cain is worried will kill him or who he will marry. That is because the Torah itself understood that this first family, is a model, a symbol, and not a newscast from early in creation.

We are all Adam, living in the garden of parental care, and all Adam, eventually expelled from the garden, violating the restrictions placed upon us, becoming aware of our own sexuality, and ultimately forced to take responsibility for ourselves.

This evening I would argue further that we are also all Abraham. Abraham as you recall is portrayed in the Midrash as smashing the idols of his father Terach. These images of God that had been created by his father and past generations were an obstacle to Abraham’s understanding of the Oneness of God. Destroying them was the prelude to his deeper comprehension of God. We are, each of us, also Abraham. As we struggle to relate to God, each of us will also have to break some idols along the way.

This Shabbat as we read about creation, we remind ourselves of the great divide that exists in our tradition, between natural objects, which are finite and part of creation, and the God which stands apart from created things and is unlike anything else in human experience. Avoiding the worship of that which is not God, opens the way to a greater understanding of the meaning of our core Jewish belief in the Oneness, the uniqueness, of God.