God Becomes a Merciful Parent

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Ki Tisa 2014

Three years ago, when Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mom” came out, my friend Dasee Berkowitz and I wrote a counter-piece about “The Spiritual Life of Parents”. It was an aspirational piece, to say the least. This week, as I was trying to recover from a high-strung parenting miscalculation involving a pinched piece of gum, a clenched fist and a busy school parking lot, I saw that Chua has a new book out. I decided to go back and read what we had written and see if I’ve been able to fulfill some of those aspirations, three years and with a third daughter now in the equation.

I mercifully gave myself a passing grade. But I was also reminded that this week’s Torah portion can be read as God confronting his own Parenthood, with a special recipe for maintaining one’s parenting hidden within:

Ki Tisa: The Sin of the Golden Calf. After the great wedding at Sinai, the Israelites have been adulterous (with a cow, no less). God wants to annul the marriage, offering to Moses that He destroy the Jewish people and restart the project with Moses as the new Abraham. Moses heroically confronts God and reframes the covenant: This is not just a Sinai marriage, he reminds God. It is also a covenant you made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – and their offspring. The Jewish project is not an opt-in faith community, but a born-into People, with God as the parent. You can divorce your wife – but you cannot divorce your kids, claims Moses, and God submits. Or as Rabbi Meir puts it in the Talmud: בין כך ובין כך קרויים אתם בנים – “No matter what you do, you are forever called my children” (Kiddushin 36a).

Yet given the tendency of these children to test and anger their parent, given their affinity for rebellion, their ignoring and blocking out their parents pleas, their messiness and their premature desire for autonomy and independence… how will the parent master their emotions, manage love, patience and discipline in the child’s long journey to maturity?

It is here that God reveals to Moses the 13 attributes of Mercy:

And God passed before his face And called out: God, God, Showing-mercy, showing-favor, Long-suffering in anger, Abundant in loyalty and faithfulness, Keeping loyalty to the thousandth generation, Shouldering iniquity, rebellion and sin, And clearing - not clearing the guilty – (rather) calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons and upon sons’ sons, to the third and fourth generation! (Exodus 34:6-7)

וַיַּעֲבֹר ה' עַל פָּנָיו וַיִּקְרָא: ה' ה' אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָו‍ֹן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה לֹא יְנַקֶּה פֹּקֵד עֲו‍ֹן אָבוֹת עַל בָּנִים וְעַל בְּנֵי בָנִים עַל שִׁלֵּשִׁים וְעַל רִבֵּעִים. (שמות לד:ו-ז)

Reading these passages in recent years, reciting them again and again on Yom Kippur, I’ve come to realize that God is asking Moses – and his descendants – to remind God of who He really is, or who He aspires to be. The Midrash has long since turned this list from a theological plea into an ethical creed: “Just as God is called showing-of-mercy – you too strive to be showing-of-mercy” (see Maimonides Deot 1:6). God’s thirteen attributes are our aspirational list to follow in God’s paths in our encounter with every person (indeed, Moshe Cordovero’s Palm of Deborah goes through each Divine attribute and translates it into a quality in interpersonal relations).

For me, God’s thirteen attributes of mercy are a powerful guide to Parenthood – not just God’s, but my own. I recite them to remind myself to be merciful, compassionate, slow to anger, truthful, abundant in loyalty… The real trick is to figure out which qualities to use at which moment: when “shouldering mistakes and iniquities” is best – and when “not clearing the guilty” is required (in hindsight, the incident with the gum and the clenched fist seems to have been the first). It is an ongoing internal rollercoaster – and it is undoubtedly the most rewarding one at that. And I am at my best when I remember that my struggle to be there for my child in the best way is the same struggle as being in the world in God’s image. I just might sometimes need a Moses to remind me of them.

As Dasee and I wrote in that piece three years ago:

During an average day of parenting we encounter our entire emotional range: from love and compassion to worry, impatience and even anger. Our kids know how to get under our skin - often because they present a mirror of our own behavior.  Viewing our parenting encounters as opportunities for inner growth can turn an emotionally messy day into a source of self-understanding and self-improvement.  This is not just psychologically sound – it is spiritual work in itself. As we use our daily encounters to become better parents, we find ourselves walking in the ways of the Divine.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mishael

P.S. If the ending of those verses sounds harsh, know that Rabbinic liturgical tradition cut the list short, dropping the stuff about “calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons,” thus leaving only the “13 Attributes of Mercy”. Even more chutzpadik, in prayer to this day we recite the list only until the word “clearing” ונקה, turning the verses’ question mark into an exclamation point: “Keeping loyalty to the thousandth generation, bearing iniquity, rebellion and sin, and clearing!”

Yet – not to end on too optimistic a note – here’s a different interpretation to those verses:

“Calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons” – why? Why should one person have to suffer on account of the sins of another? Perhaps the intent here is that God calls-to-account upon the parents the sins which they performed in educating their children. For the children’s sins are because of the iniquities of the parents – and it is the parents who are held responsible. (Iturei Torah pg. 269)

Standing Again: Three Female Poets Meet At Sinai

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Yitro 2014

In honor of our newest batch of Alumni Venture Fund grantees, especially this one.

Blessed be the Lord, Maker of Heaven and Earth, who has brought us to this generation. For too long our sins and the sins of our fathers caused us to languish in the exile of patriarchy. Until our mothers broke down the barriers, reclaimed their seats in the halls of Torah and called us all to stand again at Sinai. Now a new light shines on Zion: on women, on men, indeed on the whole wide world.

Yet as then, so now, standing again at Sinai “the divine word speaks to each and every person according to [her] particular capacity” (Pesikta 12). In the aftermath of that great event, I hear three female poets meet at the foot of the mountain:

I shall not float
unreined in space –

lest a cloud swallow
the thin band in my heart
separating good from evil.
I have no existence
without the lightning and thunder
that I heard at Sinai.

Zelda

Zelda (1914-1984)

For Zelda, Sinai is encountered straightforwardly. No feminist reading of history can pry her clenched knuckles away from the “lightning and thunder that [she] heard at Sinai.” She grasps tightly to the lessons and memories created there, as she struggles to maintain the “thin band between good and evil.” Without Sinai, humans “float unreined” in a universe of moral relativism, like an astronaut lost in space. Who dare tell her she wasn’t there?

Not so for others. Merle Feld, in a canonical poem which captures the gender predicament of history (his-story), also heard the “lightning and thunder”. But she was never given the chance to write it down:

  We All Stood Together | Merle Feld

My brother and I were at Sinai
He kept a journal
of what he saw
of what he heard
of what it all meant to him

I wish I had such a record
of what happened to me there

It seems like every time I want to write
I can’t
I’m always holding a baby
one of my own
or one for a friend
always holding a baby
so my hands are never free
to write things down

And then
As time passes
The particulars
The hard data
The who what when where why
Slip away from me
And all I’m left with is
The feeling

But feelings are just sounds
The vowel barking of a mute

My brother is so sure of what he heard
After all he’s got a record of it
Consonant after consonant after consonant

If we remembered it together
We could recreate holy time
Sparks flying

Merle Feld

Feld yearns to be of the consonants, of “the hard data, the who what when where why.” It’s a refreshing desire, especially as most liberal Jews prefer to settle for a Judaism of sounds (“the vowel barking of a mute”), staying away from the “particulars”, the consonantal certainty. It is a myth of a lost opportunity. Read this poem while standing in a Beit Midrash full of books. Feld invites us to imagine what was lost, what opportunities for Torah, wisdom and truth we had in reach – but never recorded because 51% of the Jewish people never had their hands free (or never had a spouse to pass the baby to...). If we can regain our standing together at Sinai, sparks would fly.

Back at the campsite, though, with an endless domestic to-do list, stands Israeli poet Chava Pinchas Cohen. She did not make it to the mountain. But what she gained instead was the explicit name:

Explicit Name | Chava Pinchas Cohen

Everyone’s gone to the mountain already, and they’re waiting,

waiting to see, waiting in great quiet –

even, strangely, the camels, the donkeys –

In this quiet not a bird twitters 

or children on their fathers’ shoulders. 

An overwhelming quiet, as if before some

wondrous thing.  Still—I want time

to hang out the laundry, 

time for myself to freshen up

and I warmed the baby’s milk so he won’t get hungry— 

and God forbid, cry at the wrong moment,

however long till then. You can expect

the laundry to dry—but the baby  

No one knew. 

And I saw that a light breeze, 

like the breath of a sleeping man, passed 

through the laundry and ballooned 

the belly of my nightgown, 

and the Shabbat tablecloth

was a white sail in the middle of the desert

and we went from there across the blue

far away to a place where 

we’ll split open pomegranates and suck their juice, 

to a place where 

love has 

an explicit name 

(Translation by Glazer: 2000, with emendations MZ; Hebrew original below)

Chava Pinchas Cohen

Where Feld yearned for “hard data”, Pinchas Cohen was invited to sail across the blue and split open pomegranates. As Elijah discovered at Mt. Sinai centuries later – God was “not in the noise” which the men experienced at the base of the mountain. God fled that scene and traveled like a light breeze across the Israelites’ encampment, seeking someone with whom to steal away to the pomegranate orchard…

Pinchas Cohen uses the Jewish texts and traditions as her own, not begrudging her distancing over the generations but not unaware of it either. She sits as an equal at the table of Jewish study and weaves from the (male) midrashic vocabulary a new religious language. Struggling with the humdrum rhythms of parenthood and the existential uncertainty of life, she recreates a Sinai which is relevant to her life as a modern mother, a modern seeker of God (truly, an ode to the struggle to find “time for myself to freshen up”).

Pinchas Cohen’s poem might be seen as giving in to an apologetic spirituality which is often hegemonically thrown at women (“you are holier than men, so you don’t need those particulars”). But I see in her embrace of the Shabbat tablecloth, of her nightgown’s fertile encounter with the “light breeze”, an opportunity for both men and women. Feld is grappling to move from vowels to consonants, a necessary endeavor. But Pinchas Cohen is sailing across the blue to a land of eros, where a new revelatory language is given “an explicit name”. That’s a Sinai men and women alike can yearn to stand at.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mishael

שֵׁם מְפורָשׁ - חוה פנחס-כהן

כֻּלָּם כְּבָר הָלְכוּ אֶל הָהָר וּמְחַכִּים

מְחַכִּים לִרְאוֹת, בְּשֶׁקֶט רַב מְחַכִּים,

שֶׁלֹּא כְּמִנְהָגָם גַּם הַחֲמוֹרִים, גַּם הַגְּמַלִּים

בַּשֶּׁקֶט הַזֶּה צִפּוֹר לֹא צִיְּצָה

גַּם יְלָדִים עַל כִּתְפֵי אֲבוֹתֵיהֶם,

וְהַשֶּׁקֶט רַב מִנְּשׂא כְּמוֹ לִפְנֵי דָּבָר

נוֹרָא וְגָדוֹל וַאֲנִי עוֹד רָצִיתִי

לְהַסְפִּיק וְלִתְלוֹת אֶת הַכְּבָסִים

לַעֲשׂוֹת זְמַן לְעַצְמִי לְתַקֵּן רֵיחוֹתַי

וְחִמַּמְתִּי אֶת הֶחָלָב לַתִּינוֹק, שֶׁלֹּא יִרְעַב

שֶׁלֹּא יִבְכֶּה חָלִילָה, בָּרֶגַע הַלֹּא

מַתְאִים, כַּמָּה זְמַן עַד כְּלוֹת. הַצִּפִּיָּה

שֶׁתִּתְיַבֵּשׁ הַכְּבִיסָה וְהַתִּינוֹק מָה.

אִישׁ לֹא יָדַע

וַאֲנִי רָאִיתִי שֶׁרוּחַ קַלָּה, כְּמוֹ נְשִׁימָתוֹ שֶׁל אִישׁ יָשֵׁן, עָבְרָה

בַּכְּבָסִים וְנִפְּחָה כְּרֵסָהּ

שֶׁל כֻּתָּנְתִּי וּמַפַּת הַשַּׁבָּת

הָיְתָה מִפְרָשׂ לָבָן בְּאֶמְצַע הַמִּדְבָּר

וְיָצָאנוּ מִשָּׁם עַל הַתְּכֵלֶת

הַרְחֵק לַמָּקוֹם בּוֹ  

נִפְרֹט רִמּוֹנִים וְנֹאכַל עֲסִיסָם

לַמָּקוֹם בּוֹ

לָאַהֲבָה

שֵׁם מְפֹרָשׁ.

I shall not float unreined in space lest a cloud swallow the thin band in my heart that separates good from evil. I have no existence without the lightning and thunder that I heard at Sinai. Zelda, "The Spectacular Difference," translated by Marcia Falk, p. 231

לֹא אֲרַחֵף בֶּחָלָל מְשֻׁלַּחַת רֶסֶן פֶּן יִבְלַע עָנָן אֶת הַפַּס הַדַּקִּיק שֶׁבְּלִבִּי שֶׁמַּפְרִיד בֵּין טוֹב לְרַע. אֵין לִי קִיּוּם בְּלִי הַבְּרָקִים וְהַקּוֹלוֹת שֶׁשָּׁמַעְתִּי בְּסִינַי. זלדה, עמ' 215

Release, Please: A Poem for the “Shabbat of Poetry”

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | BeShalach Shabbat Shira 2014

Release, please

Release, please, this bound one

By the power of your right hand

Receive the song of your people,

      Exalt us, Lord, and make us

pure. Almighty one, protect

      those who seek your oneness:

Bless them, and cleanse them – bestow

      Upon them your merciful justice.

Mighty one, holy one, in your

      Goodness guide your assembly.

Turn, sole one on high,

      To those who remember your sanctity,

And accept our cry and plea –

      You who fathom all mysteries.

Translation by Peter Cole

Translation is merely a preliminary way of coming to terms

with the foreignness of languages to each other.

Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator

This Shabbat is known as “Shabbat Shira”, the Shabbat of Song, thus named because we read the Song at the Sea, perhaps the first Hebrew poem. This month many Bronfmanim have committed to study a book of poetry in honor of Edgar Bronfman (other are studying Mishna Pirkei Avot or one of two books). I have been plowing through a new anthology of Hebrew Mystical Verse, with Hebrew original and new translation side by side. It is there that I came across the above translation.

I often find that poem’s are locked to me, until I read them in translation. The translations’ attempt to –as Benjamin described it - “find the intention toward the language into which the work has been translated” allows “an echo of the original [to] be awakened”. I guess I see the light of a poem best through the dull refractions of a translation.

Those who fathom mysteries might have recognized the source of the poem quoted above: the Hebrew poem “Ana b’Koach”, which appears in numerous places in the Siddur. Here are two translations and the original, side by side:

Release, please, this bound one By the power of your right hand Receive the song of your people,       Exalt us, Lord, and make us pure. Almighty one, protect       those who seek your oneness: Bless them, and cleanse them – bestow       Upon them your merciful justice. Mighty one, holy one, in your       Goodness guide your assembly. Turn, sole one on high,       To those who remember your sanctity, And accept our cry and plea –       You who fathom all mysteries. Translation by Peter Cole, The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition, 2012, pg. 35

אָנָּא בְּכֹחַ גְּדֻלַּת  יְמִינְֶךָ תַּתִּיר צְרוּרָה קַבֵּל רִנַּת עַמְֶּךָ שַׂגְּבֵנוּ טַהֲרֵנוּ נוֹרָא נָא גִבּוֹר דּוֹרְשֵׁי יִחוּדְֶךָ כְּבָבַת שָׁמְרֵם בָּרְכֵם טַהֲרֵם רַחֲמֵי צִדְקָתֶךָ תָּמִיד גָּמְלֵם חֲסִין קָדוֹשׁ בְּרוֹב טוּבְךָ נַהֵל עֲדָתֶךָ יָחִיד גֵּאֶה לְעַמְּךָ פְּנֵה זוֹכְרֵי קְדֻשָּׁתֶךָ שַׁוְעָתֵנוּ קַבֵּל וּשְׁמַע צַעֲקָתֵנוּ יוֹדֵעַ תַּעֲלוּמוֹת

This poem has enchanted readers for centuries with its opening phrase in Hebrew: : אנא, בכח “Please, by the power”. “Oxymoron of oxymorons” as one Israeli poetdescribed it. This opening phrase has enchanted modern Hebrew poets as they employed it in various means. Please, with power. Please, without power. Please, softly; Please, with full force. Please.

But Cole, our translator, has flipped the order of the words, releasing something which seems to recover a new "echo of the original":

Release, please, this bound oneBy the power of your right hand

In Cole’s rendition, the focus is not on the power, but on the bound one, and its need to be released. Who is the bound one? In one new Siddur, the following explicit translation is preferred:

Please, by the power of Your great right hand
        Set the captive nation free.

“The bound one” becomes “the captive nation”, losing the nuance and double meaning which has propelled this song for generations. In Hebrew liturgy the bound one refers just as much to a person’s soul – bound in the twine of the physical body – as it refers to the bind of exile. And what is that exile, that captiveness? The exile of the Jewish people, or the exile of God herself, the exile of the Shekhina. Truly, in the mind of the Kabbalists, those three are all one. כולא חד – an individual’s soul, the Jewish people, God’s feminine presence in this world – they are all metonymic of each other, all echoes of something greater than all three, yet equally present in every individual’s existence. And it is that bind for which we ask release.

As the poem continues, it weaves power and gentleness, protection and prowess. From the first “please”, it cajoles the powerful God into a different dynamic. God’s powerful right hand, which appears in the Song of the Sea with all its scary might – נָטִיתָ יְמִינְךָ תִּבְלָעֵמוֹ אָרֶץ – “You stretched out your right-hand / the Underworld swallowed them” (Exodus 15:12) is asked to engage in the most delicate of tasks.

Nuance is everywhere. The Jewish people are described as those who “seek your oneness” (not those who know anything for certain). God – as one who “fathoms all mysteries” (so different from, say, “knower of truth”). The “mighty one” is asked merely to “guide”. The “sole one” – to “turn”. The “fathomer of all mysteries” – to “accept”. Asking God to make us pure, we seek to be cleansed. Yet the image this conjures is that of a parent washing a baby, the full force of the adult body honed into an almost painful delicateness as it handles the fragile bundle. In Cole’s echoing, “Release, please” the image is of an amazingly powerful force minimizing itself (tzimtzum!) in order to very gently unwind a tightly knotted ball of string.

This poem has a long and clouded history. Scholars squabble if it was written in the 16^th century Galilee, 12^th century Germany, or 9^th century Babylonia. Tradition claims it harkens back to 2^nd century Judea. What is known is that this poem is actually a poetic encoding of God’s 42 letter name (as opposed to, say, the seventy-two letter version, or the four letter one). In Hebrew the poem consists of seven lines with six words each – totaling 42 words – the first letters of which make up the 42-letter name. It is with this name that God created the world, says the Talmud (In case you’re curious, it begins אבגיתצקרעשטנ…). Being the most potent of names, it must be hidden from humans, who might abuse its power for their narrow-minded intentions. The best place to hide the name is, of course, in plain view, so it was encoded into poetry. Here’s a challenge: take these 42 letters and try to write a poem using them as the first letter of each word. Over the generations, various poets attempted to write poems which begin with those specific letters (such as אנא באש גבורת ידך תלהט צרי). It is the Kabbalists soduko.

Most of those poems have been left to languish in musty manuscripts. A handful were published. Ana b’Koach is the only one to receive inter-generational success, even becoming a hit on Israeli radio a few years back. With its mixture of Nuance and mystery alongside clarity and potency, it has managed to transcend the math and mysticism and become its own being. In some siddurim it appears in as many as 13 different places.

The poem is recited at times of liminality, those times which are “betwixt and between”: before falling asleep, or just as the soul leaves a body. Most prominently, it is recited just before Lecha Dodi, during Kabbalat Shabbat, at the exact moment between the work-week and the holy-day. Times of transition are times of vulnerability, times in which we feel the fact that we are “in a bind”. Whether it is the call of freedom, or the burden of constriction, we feel the weight of our boundedness most deeply. It is from there that we call out: “Release, please”. Or at the very least: loosen the straps on our existence.

In prayerbooks – but not in the original poem – an additional line is added: “Blessed by the name of His

glorious kingdom for ever and all time.” ברוך שם כבוד מלכותו לעולם ועד – the same response as is said upon reciting God’s explicit name, or after the first line of the Sh’ma. A version of this sentence, said in Aramaic, makes for the famous responsive line of the Kaddish – יהא שמיה רבה מבורך לעולם ולעולמי עולמיא – Yehey Shmey Rabba…

With its beginning and ending, this poem evokes a different one, from Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Mercy”:

Sit down, master, on this rude chair of praises, and rule my nervous heart with your great decrees of freedom. Out of time you have taken me to do my daily task. Out of mist and dust you have fashioned me to know the numberless worlds between the crown and the kingdom. In utter defeat I came to you and you received me with a sweetness I had not dared to remember. Tonight I come to you again, soiled by strategies and trapped in the loneliness of my tiny domain. Establish your law in this walled place. Let nine men come to lift me into their prayer so that I may whisper with them: Blessed be the name of the glory of the kingdom forever and forever.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mishael

On Idolatry: What is Our Golden Calf?

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Bronfman Fellowships | Text and the City | Ki Tisa 2013

The principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the whole procuring cause of judgment, is idolatry.  The idolater is likewise a murderer. Do you inquire whom he has slain? If it contributes ought to the aggravation of the indictment, no stranger nor personal enemy, but his own self. By what snares? Those of his error. By what weapon? The offence done to God. By how many blows? As many as are his idolatries.
[“On Idolatry”, Tertullian, 2^nd Century Church father, Carthage] 

This week’s Parasha, Ki Tisa, with its Golden Calf and broken tablets, tells the tale of the biggest mistake the Jewish people ever made. Not too long after the wedding at Sinai is over, God finds his new wife, Israel, in bed with an adulterer –and a cow no less… In one of the fieriest moments in the Torah, Moses, having come down the mountain and broken the tablets, takes the hoofed object of the betrayal, melts it down, and forces the Jewish people to drink its molten gold. Through this scene, and many others, the Torah identifies its most serious enemy: Idolatry.
As a child I could never understand the draw of idolatry. Judging from the stories told in kindergarten, it seemed quite stupid. Why would people be drawn to worshipping “stones and trees”? If even Abraham could see that the statues in his father’s store were powerless – how could the rest of the world be so stupid? The idea that we, crazy Jews, were the only ones who saw the light on this issue was in itself suspicious. Years later I read that the rabbis agreed with me to some extent: “The desire to worship idols has passed from this world – it has now been given to all transgressions” they say in Sanhedrin 75a. Many pagans in late antiquity might agree (see “Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?”). In the post-pagan world, where idolatry became the shared enemy of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you might expect idolatry to stop acting as a useful category altogether.
Unsurprisingly, idolatry never died. The history of Idolatry is fascinating and ever relevant, for while it is no longer about idols and statuettes, it is every bit about defining what God and religion mean. Changing conceptions of God create different ideas about what is idolatry. Or to put it differently - the notion of the alien, or false, god, shapes the concept of God. As Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit put it in their monograph, “Idolatry” –
The prohibition against idolatry is the thick wall that constitutes the city of God, leaving the strange gods outside and marking the community of the faithful. [However] the location of that dividing wall is not fixed, rather opposing conceptions of idolatry define the outskirts of the city of God differently. It is essential for the self-definitions of non-pagans to share the general concept of idolatry, but they do not share a specific definition of what is idolatry and what is wrong with it. [Idolatry, pg. 236]
It is by knowing what idolatry is that we know what Judaism is, what a relationship with God is. It is by knowing what the act of “slaying one’s own self” as Tertullian describes it, that one knows what it is to live a meaningful life. Which leads me to the question I’ll be pondering this Shabbat: What are today’s idolatries? What is it that we would identify today as “the principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world”? What is our golden calf?
In the 19^th and 20^th century, idolatry was alive and well. Marx saw idolatry in fetishism, the fetishizing of money and price. The religious literature of the 1950’s saw idolatry in totalitarianism and fascism, the 1960’s saw idolatry in the military-industrial complex or mainstream bourgeois culture. For others it is liberalism and political correctness which is the great idolatry, and fetishizing of equality while losing the compass of the sacred. Common to all of these is the identification of group-think of various kinds as idolatry. What kind of God does this make for then? Obviously, the God of individual autonomous thought… (how American!)
Who today are contenders for the crown of idolatry? The destruction of the environment (or its conservation?), our addiction to consumerism or careerism? Our loss of sacredness, deification of the individual (or of the community?)? Or simply a life “lived without meaning”?
Some prophets have identified that “the principal crime of the human race” can be found in religion itself. If this is a cry against any kind of organized religion in the name of science – count me out. But if it a cry against fundamentalism and religiously-sanctioned-violence – I’m in. If we are not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, I would frame this in the following Jewish terms: the greatest idolatry of our times is the taking of God’s name in vain to justify un-godly actions, a hillul hashem.
I am sure there are others that I missed. There are more idols out there to identify. However – regardless of definition – it is the category of idolatry that I want to hold on to:that internal criticism that I might be deifying something that is not. If we are to live the life of service to our values, we must identify what the idolatrous golden calves which distract us are. We must identify them in order to melt them down in the fire of our passions, to bring upon us a better world.

כל המודה בעבודה זרה--כפר בכל התורה כולה, ובכל הנביאים, ובכל מה שנצטוו הנביאים, מאדם עד סוף העולם:  שנאמר "מן היום אשר ציווה ה', והלאה—לדורותיכם". וכל הכופר בעבודה זרה, מודה בכל התורה כולה; והיא עיקר כל המצוות, כולן.

רמבם הל' עבודה זרה ב:ז