Torah Tidbit

Parashahs Ki Sisa (when you count)  Exodus 30:11 – 34:35 

God concludes His instructions for building the tabernacle, appoints craftsman by name to lead the project and creates the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments.  Meanwhile down below in the camp the Israelites go off the rails by building and worshiping a golden calf as their new intermediary between them and God.  Moses crashes the party and the tablets, eliminates the ringleaders and argues/prays with God over 40 days to forgive Israel.  Israel as well repents during that time and at the end, God inscribes a second set of tablets that Moses first carves out from rock.  

“They have strayed quickly from the way that I have commanded them.  They have made themselves a molten calf, prostrated themselves to it and sacrificed to it, and they said, ’This is your god, O Israel, which bought you up from the land of Egypt.’” – Exodus 32:8

Walking the Walk

How in the world could a peoples, who had experienced so many major nationwide laws-of-science suspended miracles, including God talking to all of them, fall prey so quickly to the seemingly ludicrous activity of worshipping a statue instead of the Infinite One?

In times past, mankind had an intense desire towards idolatry.  All things have their opposite balance in this world, so the stronger the positive draw towards the Infinite Eternal One, the stronger the negative draw to the opposite – a physical (not infinite and not eternal) being that can be immediately comprehended with our normal intellect.  The Talmud relates that at the time of the Second Temple the Jewish sages cried “uncle” to God and asked that this desire be diminished.  Their prayers were answered so well that now we can’t comprehend such idolatrous desires – but we also can’t comprehend the stronger desire towards God as well.

However, aspects of idolatry are still alive and well in our time.  Even those who deny the existence and demands of a Creator, are invariably betrayed by their souls and attempt to strive towards the Divine.  However, their striving is corrupted as it works through their intellects, causing them to adopt surrogate “gods” and “religions”  Amazingly enough, the scientific community, after two centuries of actively promoting humanism, is now turning more popular hypotheses and theories into issues of belief, guilt, fear and repentance.  Those who disagree are called “unbelievers” and are actively driven out of scientific communities.  

For the Noahide, the laws against idolatry help develop an awareness and resistance to these still alluring distractions.  In general, these Noahide laws match those of the Jew, both in nature of prohibitions and punishments.  It all boils down to several simple concepts:

– Don’t worship anything that has physical form, including things made to represent the infinite.  God is infinite and non-physical.  Anything physical takes us away from that hard-to-grasp concept.

– To count as worship, there has to be physical action – bowing to, praying to, giving offerings, etc. – Although only believing (but not doing any actions) that such Gods exist is more or less permissible, it is discouraged nonetheless.