Idolatry (2)

 

The Fifth Principle Of Faith

 

The fifth of Maimonides' thirteen principles of faith commands us to worship the Creator and not any of His creatures.  This principle translates faith into action.  Sometimes idolatry can be identified in faith; however, at times it is apparent only in practice.  The fifth principle ensures against this danger.  The final border between idolatry and monotheism is found in one's form of worship.  If man worships any other creature, he mars the monotheistic faith.  However, idolatry's greatest offense is not only the creation of alternatives to God.  Leafing through the Prophets we read of lechery and wine which "take" the heart.  Here lies another deep source of our battle with idol worship.  We are faced with an imperfect world that has suffering and injustice; and the injustice may be combated, except that the priests of idol worship, instead of contributing to the battle against injustice, create an artificial paradise of emptiness.  They use sex, drunkenness, and in many places, drugs as well, to attract people in the name of religion and remove them from the continuum of suffering.  However, this is done in a way which leads them to sink deeper into the very miseries they wished to escape.  The classic example of this approach is those people who get drunk from Friday to Sunday, and in this way find themselves an "artificial paradise" which allows them to forget their families and their poverty stricken surroundings.  Too often the drunkenness itself is the cause of the poverty.

 

     Idol worship means replacing God.  This is like betraying one's spouse.  But idolatry has still other negatives.  We sometimes create imaginary and artificial beings which do not allow us to see and solve the real problems that we face.  Rav Kook teaches us in Ikvei Ha-tzon that this idea was expressed in the Midrash.  As is well known, the Ibn Ezra interpreted the phrase "elohim acherim" [lit: other gods] as what seem to others to be gods.  This is a subjective claim.  There are no other gods, but there are those who accept these imaginary beings as gods.  In contrast Rav Kook brings a wonderful idea from the Midrash: "Why are they called elohim acherim?  [Acherim can also mean "late"] because they delay [me'acharim] the entrance of good to the world."  True, there are no other gods, these are illusions but they are dangerous illusions, because they obstruct the good.  If a person takes the wrong yet harmless medication, it can still be dangerous, not because of what it contains but because of what it is lacking: It stops the person from taking the real medicine.  Idolatry is not competition for God; there is no foreign god who wants to sit on Gods throne.  Yet the Torah fights against idolatry, because through its influence man loses so much potential good for idol worship delays the realization of ideals.

 

     This is the great danger of idolatry.  Idol worship was not based on the goal of bettering the world, but on escaping from it.  However, unlike Christianity, this was an escape not to the beyond, but to physical excess.  This approach is of course also found in the modern world.  The most outstanding example is the carnival.  We find a society filled with problems, guided by the idea that the central point of the year are those days on which we "let loose."  This is a kind of idolatry which does not allow - or at any rate does not help - man to extract himself from his real difficulties.  Sometimes it is even worse.  The most outstanding example is again found in a monotheistic religion.  We hear that in certain Islamic groups, drugs were used in order to create a group of fanatic murderers with no restraints, who were promised a "paradise" that the drugs created for them.  They had experienced "paradise" and would do anything to return.  The Torah wants man to achieve happiness, but not happiness which is artificial and destructive. 

 

Overcoming Anthropocentricity

 

The Torah teaches us that God created man in His image.  The atheist responds glibly: man created God in his image.  This battle of slogans expresses two opposing philosophies.  However, the truth is more complicated.  I am convinced that both sides are right.  "Man created god in his image" is precisely the definition of idolatry.  In contrast, prophecy is an attempt to present us with a concept of God that is utterly divorced from our ideas about ourselves.  "The image of God" is a kind of sign-post to us in this regard.

 

     The perception of God as a reflection of our image is indeed idol worship.  man projects what is in him onto the image of God that he constructs.  One of the messages of prophecy is the need to overcome this type of projection.  We will bring the simplest example of the struggle of prophecy to free itself from this trap.  Prophecy totally removed the concept of gender from God.  God is neither male nor female.  He is completely above sexuality.  This is particularly noticeable when we compare this approach to pagan mythology, and see its overpowering sexuality.  The Bible does use "grammatical gender identification" for God; we say "ata" the masculine "You" and not "at" the feminine version, but this grammatical sexuality does not mean a thing.  God does not have a gender at all.  This fact distances God from human concepts.  This is of course only the first stage, which would later develop into an attempt to construct religious concepts which are not a projection of our human lives.  This would develop as we saw in one of the earlier chapters, in the theory of divine names.

 

The desire to overcome anthropocentricity is expressed in the battle against the many gods.  The gods constitute a kind of family in heaven which contains lust for power, sex and war, just like the human family.

 

     The conflict between the gods describes the different sides of human emotions and it in essence gives expression to, or a projection of, what exists inside man.  We learn from here that God is beyond the vices and petty desires of man.

 

     Judaism fought against perceptions like these, yet Christianity returned to them.  And indeed, in Christianity once again a family appears.  The concept "son of god" which in the Scriptures is a completely allegorical concept, now once again becomes a realistic concept.  Later in the history of Christianity the mother also appears, the Virgin Mary.  The  idea of the Virgin Mary is a projection.  Not only that, but here we have again the projection of the image of man onto God.

 

     This is a human projection which fits into the psychological mechanism that Freud investigated.  This means that indeed, the Freudian approach is applicable here.  The gods are a projection of human desires, weaknesses, and limitations.  This is the essence of idolatry.  Clearly, Freud's analysis was correct to a great extent with regard to Christianity as well.  In Christianity, for example, we find sacraments, holy rites, which alter man's status.  One of these sacraments is related to the Last Supper.  Jesus, as we know, died while eating the Paschal sacrifice.  Jesus the Jew ate matza and drank wine, as was the custom; however, this eating received a very different interpretation in later generations, when the matza became Jesus' body and the wine became his blood.  I will not go into the issue of the drinking of the wine, which is an issue of contention between the various churches.  However in classic Christianity the person swallows the holy bread, which is the body of Jesus.  This is clearly a custom with idolatrous origins, which can be traced to various ethnic tribes, whose rites include a holy meal.  In the meal the group eats the god which is identified with a certain holy animal, the Totem.  The image of the god is a human projection.

 

Idolatry and Nature

 

Idolatry is based on a number of guiding principles.  The first principle is the mythic image of the world, which means the projection of the human reality onto the world and onto God.

 

     However, there is another central element in idolatry: the recognition of nature as a divine being.  Rabbi Akiva fought against this principle in his debates with the pagan philosophers.  One of Rabbi Akiva's counterparts claims that if God created poor people, we must not "disturb Him" and try to alter their poverty.  When we give charity we are opposing the divine decree.  This type of view is in essence a recognition of nature as a power, and thus also a recognition of the rights of the powerful.  The "right of the strong" is an idolatrous principle.  This leads us to the question of our attitude towards nature, which we will discuss in the next lecture.

 

Saving The Princess

 

The world of mythology found expression through two great mediums: art and tragic theater.  Remnants of the connection between idolatry and these two worlds remain until today.  This is the reason for the historical antagonism that exists between them and Judaism.

 

     Here lies the significance of one of the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Braslav: he speaks of the need to save the "chen" [beauty] in the world.  For many of the great artistic expressions were vehicles for idolatry, but they are not idolatrous themselves.

 

     In Rabbi Nachman's writings we find a recurring motif, about the princess who is captured by the "Sitra Achra" [lit. The Other Side, meaning the kabbalistic concept of the power of evil] and must be saved.  One of the levels of interpretation here, is that the princess is art.  In other words these are the means which idolatry employed in order to express its mythology.  One of the missions of redemption is, perhaps, to redeem this princess.

 

     The debate over the status of the arts is part of a larger argument about our understanding of reality.  To use a kabbalistic phrase, we could say that the great debate is whether the concept of tzimtzum is to be taken literally or not.  Phrased according to the interpretation at the center of the Hasidic revolution, is the world indeed "empty" of God's presence, and therefore God's word can be heard only through the study of Torah, or, as Chasidism teaches, the divine voice emanates from the world as well, even if this voice (in the words of Rabbi Nachman) is not a direct voice but an echo of the first divine voice heard at the creation of the world.

 

     One of Rabbi Kook's central ideas was the concept that indeed in all the world's phenomena there is a divine spark which we must uncover.  The human ideal, according to this idea is not to confine oneself to the four cubits of Halakha, but to search for religious meaning in the various levels of human existence.

 

     The prophets taught us to look to the heavens and ask who created all this.  Nature is God's creation, culture is man's.  The connection with nature exists even if its status is problematic.  The attitude toward human creativity is even more problematic.  Often man's baser and more primitive drives find expression in art.  Here we must remember again what we learned from Rabbi Kook, that human creativity must be respected.  We must separate the baser drives from the artistic creation and search for the holy spark inside it.

 

 

(This lecture was translated by Gila Weinberg.)