Stay Human
The Second Commandment isn't about idols - it's about what it means to be human.
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This is part of a series on the Ten Commandments. To see my essay on the First Commandment, click here.
The Second Word: A Call to Stay Human
You shall not have other Gods before me.
Do not make yourself an idol or any images of that which is in heaven above and that which is on earth below.
Do not bow to them and do not serve them…
Idolatry
The Torah is obsessed with idolatry. In the moral landscape of Mosaic law, the worship of statues or images is regarded as a grave sin as well as a constant and pervasive spiritual threat.
Like lustfulness and violence, idolatry is understood as an almost irresistible human vice, in which all other vices are somehow combined and amplified.
In the face of this wickedness, the Israelites cannot be complacent. Abstention is not enough. We are commanded to be idol-smashers.
But why the fuss?
An idol is a small and pitifully inert thing. Occasionally they could be grandiose—made of gold or silver—but more commonly they were sculpted from clay or stone, and were small enough to keep in one’s home.
A popular midrash about Abraham as a child reports that his father owned an idol shop. One day, Abraham’s father went out and left Abraham in charge of the store. When an older man came in to purchase an idol, Abraham asked him why a man of sixty would be willing to bow down to something made yesterday.
The man, insulted, left without making a purchase. Abraham then took a rod and destroyed all the idols in the store except for the largest. When his father came back, he was outraged at the mess and demanded an answer.
Abraham pointed to the only remaining intact idol. “He did it.”
“That’s absurd,” his father retorted. “These statues can’t move on their own.”
In this story, idols are presented not as dangerous and seductive, but rather as pathetic and impotent. The correct way to deal with them, it follows, is not through stridency and holy war, but through pointing out the absurdity of worshipping a clump of earth.
This accords with our modern view of idol worship. Where our ancestors saw something seductive and dangerous in this religious behavior, we see absurdity. And this has been the case for some time now.
As far back as the Talmud, the sages declared that the spiritual battle against idolatry had been effectively won. We have out-evolved whatever it was that made idol worship so irresistible in the ancient world. Despite a modest resurgence of paganism (which I will discuss below), in the Western World, monotheism goes largely unchallenged.
But even if the temptation to worship literal statues of deities has been vanquished, the Second Word still has an urgent message for us—one which can elucidate for us what an idol really is and just why the Torah saw them as so spiritually devastating.
Other Gods: Alienated Religion
The Second Word opens with what seems to be a very problematic statement: “You shall not have other gods before me.”
Rashi identifies the problem immediately. Other gods? Is this to say that the God of scripture is not truly the only God? Are there others whom, despite being forbidden to us, are nonetheless as real as our own?
This is more than a matter of numbers. A deeper theological issue is at stake. If God is just a very powerful being, it doesn’t much matter if there is one or two or even twenty such beings.
But if God is the source of all being—there can only be one. The question then is if we are worshipping an aspect of creation, or the source of all creation.
There is only one “ground” to all that is—one unity from which the great multiplicity of the universe emerges like a rainbow from a prism. It is this oneness that is the source of religion’s greatest moral insight—that we are all one with one another, kindred children of a single universal parent before whom we stand as equals.
It would seem, then, that God is undermining God’s own case when saying: “You shall not have other Gods before me.”
And so Rashi, citing an ancient midrashic tradition, explores the verse’s esoteric meaning.
“Other Gods” does not mean other actual deities. Rather, it means gods of Otherness—gods of alienation that do not answer when called to—who are not connected to us creatures through bonds of responsibility and love.
What does it mean to worship a god of Alienation?
The term recalls the religion of the Deists, an enlightenment-era religious movement that held that God created the world the way a watchmaker makes a watch, setting it in motion but then stepping away.
These believers acknowledged God as a first cause, responsible for our existence, but saw God as a sort of absent parent, who had long since abandoned us, leaving the world to continue working, or to start breaking down, of its own accord.
It also recalls the God of fire and brimstone sermons—a wrathful deity Who despises His sinful creations for their shortcomings and readily casts them into eternal hellfire.
It also recalls contemporary scientific materialism, which sees the world as nothing more than the blind and mechanistic unfolding of randomly formed elements operating according to impersonal laws of physics—for no reason whatsoever.
All of these worldviews are, in some sense, alienating. According to Deism, we have been literally abandoned by our creator. According to fundamentalism, we stand forever in an oppositional relationship to God, who exists for us exclusively as our judge and executioner. According to contemporary scientific materialism, we are inhabitants of a world without meaning, where supposed human value is an illusion or merely a preference.
All of this is contrary to what Judaism teaches.
For one, the God of the Torah is not merely the watchmaker who created the universe and then walked away, but rather—as I stated above—the ground of being itself. It is taught in Jewish mysticism, and asserted in the prayers recited by Jews daily, that God did not create the world in this way, but rather perpetually creates it, imbuing it constantly with lifeforce.
Consider a candle. Picture the flame and the warm ring of light that encircles it. God is like the flame, and the ring of light is the created universe. It is not truly separate. It is an emanation from God. And were God to withdraw the divine creative force for even an instant, it would all disappear immediately.
This means that God can never truly be “other” to us. We are, ourselves, emanations of the divine.
As it is written in the Me’or Einayim, “All creatures must receive their life-sustaining force from the Creator at every moment, as it is written: he renews creation every day anew.”
This does away with the fundamentalist fire and brimstone God as well. If God is within us—if we ourselves are manifestations of Divinity—it follows that any notion of God as our antagonist or condemner, rather than our inner guide and our deepest calling, is nonsense. Such a view of religion places God in the role of a cruel child on a sunny day with a magnifying glass, with humanity as smoldering ants down below.
And of course, the religion of the Torah is incompatible with scientific materialism. Not because it is incompatible with science or the scientific method, but rather, because it is incompatible with the alienation inherent in this view—the idea that life is fundamentally random and meaningless.
If all of creation is a manifestation of the divine creative force, then nothing—absolutely nothing—is a mistake or an aberration. Rather, there is a unity and a perfection to all things. And we humans are not alienated, but can feel at home in the universe, knowing that we are not truly separate from anything else, that we are bonded in kinship with all of reality, sharing a creator.
Worshipping Nature
The Second Word explicitly forbids worshipping nature, and this, more than anything else, is the reason why idolatry, in the form of New Age neo-paganism, is making a modest comeback in the west after millenia of dormancy.
I don’t say this with judgement. In fact, I would not be a rabbi today if I were not first a pagan in my childhood and adolescence.
When I was eleven, I made a new friend. Her name was Lauren. She was precocious, intelligent and wild. Later, in junior high, she would be the first of us to light a cigarette or crack open a beer.
At eleven, she was no less transgressive. She told tall tales and was a practitioner of Wicca—an eclectic, feminist earth-based neo-pagan religion.
She exposed me to the occult section at our local bookstore and I was shocked and thrilled by what I discovered there. I had always loved the fantasy genre. My favorite books as a kid were The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Chronicles of Narnia and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The reason I loved these books was because that they offered an alternative to the world I actually inhabited—a world of suburban ordinariness, a landscape of banks and pharmacies and big box stores, a sense that all mystery had banished from the world long ago.
In fantasy novels, mystery still existed—hiding in the back of a wardrobe or on the other side of a looking glass.
I didn’t have the language to describe it at the time but I was suffering from the aftershock of the world’s disenchantment. Disenchantment was the sociologist Friedrich Schiller’s term to describe the transformation of the ancient world, seen by ancient peoples as the sacred abode of spirits and the dismal haunting ground of demons, into the modern, desacralized, bureaucratic society we inhabit today.
In the words of Max Weber, for ancient peoples the word was “a great enchanted garden.” For modern people, it is a great office park—which is to say mysteryless, flat, tamed, and valued only for its ability to generate wealth.
And while we may celebrate the defeat of idolatry in the modern world, we should note that this is a consequence not only of the spread of monotheism, but also of disenchantment. The temptation to worship sculptures has, in many cases, been replaced with the temptation to worship nothing at all.
In the occult section of the bookstore, I found much of what I loved in fantasy novels. But these weren’t novels. They were non-fiction books—guides to creating rituals and summoning spirits and divining the secret meaning of things in real life. In an instant, my world was re-enchanted.
Lauren and I practiced spells together. We inaugurated a sacred grove out in the woods behind my house, and even began writing our own scripture for a religion of our own making.
Considering Judaism’s abhorrence of idolatry, it would seem that I was veering dangerously far from the straight path.
In truth, the fact that I am a committed Jew today is only because of these experiences with Lauren out in the woods. It was she who taught me that the sacred is real—that there is more to life than the orderly, the material, the economic, the tame.
Having experienced this sacredness in paganism, and having learned that it was real, I was thus equipped to seek it out in Judaism.
When I got to rabbinical school, I learned that my experience was not an aberration. Indeed, it is common enough to be considered prototypical.
Having received a dry, disenchanted Jewish education at our local Temple, we found God in paganism—either Wicca or some other version of New Age spirituality—only to return to Torah later with a sense that we were now equipped to excavate in our own faith tradition what was so easily grasped outside of it.
All of this is a rather long preamble for a statement of sympathy for those who chafe at Judaism’s strict prohibition of nature-worship.
The disenchantment of the natural world has not only impoverished our own spiritual lives, but also has led to ecological disaster. In a world where nature is seen as a “thing” and not a “being,” it will inevitably be ruthlessly exploited for resources with no regard to its inherent value.
At times, Judaism has veered into a sort of scornful disregard for the natural world. A famous teaching from the Mishnah has it that if one interrupts one’s studying to admire a tree or a field, it is as if he has committed a mortal sin.
But this has not always been the Jewish attitude towards nature. In the Torah, descriptions of nature abound—not as a deity to be worshipped, but rather a partner in worshipping the Source of All.
The trees are not our Gods. Neither are the birds of the sky or the beasts of the field. They are our brothers and sisters, and they too sing praises to our shared parent.
Rabbi Nachman, a Hassidic master known for his simple, informal, and emotional approach to spirituality, urged people to practice hitbodedut, taking long walks in nature to call out to God.
“Know,” he wrote, “that when a man prays in a field, all the grasses come into his prayer and help him, and give strength to his prayer.”
For Rabbi Nachman, the world is indeed an enchanted place. It is not an abode for pagan deities, but it is the sacred dwelling place of the One, where all things testify to the presence of divinity and the unendingly abundant flow of creative energy.
The Second Word forbids us from making nature into an idol. Doing so is an injustice to God.
But it is also an injustice to nature itself.
We are forbidden from making idols—things—of nature. In other words, we are forbidden from seeing the natural world as a thing, as a disenchanted source of resources to be endlessly exploited rather than a kindred creature with which we are continuous, with whom we lift our voices in praise.
Becoming Insensate
To make something into an idol is to flatten it, shrink it, make it manageable and tame. The ultimate example of this would be reducing the God of the Universe to a shiny, gold plaything.
The risk of worshiping an object is that we will end up becoming an object. As Martin Buber writes in “I and Thou,” when we address something as an “It” and not a “You,” we too become an It.
In the book of Psalms, it is written of idols that “a mouth they have but they do not speak, eyes they have but they do not see. Ears…but they do not hear… hands… but they don’t not feel.” The Psalmist warns us, “Those who fashion them, all who trust in them, shall become like them.” (115:5-8).’
To worship a statue is thus to become a statue—to harden and be limited, to be insensate to the world in its fullness. This is the grave danger of the graven image.
The Second Word is a call to stay human—alive to the world, capable of growth and change, capable of surprising ourselves.
“Do not make yourself an idol…”
In the understanding of the mystics, the meaning is not simply “do not make yourself an idol to worship,” but also, “do not make yourself into an idol.”
In the words of the Ishbitzer Rebbe, to become an idol is to become fixed on one agenda, unable to change or relent, unable to recalibrate, to soften, to reevaluate.
And if we refuse to make God into an object, then we will not become one ourselves. If we do not worship gods of alienation, or disenchant the world—we will remain human, capable of growth, of relation, of enlightenment.
So answer the call to stay human. Leave the world of images behind. Turn off the devices. Close the books, even against the advice of the Mishnah. Go out, like Rabbi Nachman, into the sacred world.
There you encounter a God that cannot be reduced to an image, that cannot be made into an alienated “other.”
This God is in all things, lighting them up from within, illuminating their infinite depths.
And in you as well.