Parashat Re’eh – 5786

Monotheism and the Pitfalls of Certainty

A D’var Torah for Parashat Re’eh

By Rabbi Dr. Rachel Posner

Earlier this year, two Israeli soldiers desecrated a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon. The IDF responded quickly and decisively, punishing the soldiers with jail time. It was a painful example of how our need to assert and defend ourselves can slide into triumphalism — the wish to squelch and destroy the sacred practices of others. Monotheism can be co-opted into the dangerous notion that there is only one way to serve our singular Creator. But our central tenet — Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad — does not mean that there is only one way to serve God, or that we alone have the right answers about religious practice. The Second Commandment cautions us against making our own certainty into an idol.

Parashat Re’eh contains passages that are painful to read if understood literally:

אַבֵּד תְּאַבְּדוּן אֶת־כָּל־הַמְּקֹמוֹת אֲשֶׁר עָבְדוּ־שָׁם הַגּוֹיִם אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם יֹרְשִׁים אֹתָם אֶת־אֱלֹהֵיהֶם עַל־הֶהָרִים הָרָמִים וְעַל־הַגְּבָעוֹת וְתַחַת כָּל־עֵץ רַעֲנָן׃

You must destroy all the sites at which the nations you are to dispossess worshiped their gods, whether on lofty mountains and on hills or under any luxuriant tree.

וְנִתַּצְתֶּם אֶת־מִזְבְּחֹתָם וְשִׁבַּרְתֶּם אֶת־מַצֵּבֹתָם וַאֲשֵׁרֵיהֶם תִּשְׂרְפוּן בָּאֵשׁ וּפְסִילֵי אֱלֹהֵיהֶם תְּגַדֵּעוּן וְאִבַּדְתֶּם אֶת־שְׁמָם מִן־הַמָּקוֹם הַהוּא׃

Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site. (Deuteronomy 12:2–3)

Taken at face value, these verses could inspire acts of religious violence. But if we continue reading, we begin to better understand the Torah’s meaning:

לֹא־תַעֲשׂוּן כֵּן לַיהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם׃

Do not worship your God HaShem in like manner,

כִּי אִם־אֶל־הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר־יִבְחַר יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם מִכָּל־שִׁבְטֵיכֶם לָשׂוּם אֶת־שְׁמוֹ שָׁם לְשִׁכְנוֹ תִדְרְשׁוּ וּבָאתָ שָׁמָּה׃

but look only to the site that your God HaShem will choose amidst all your tribes as God’s habitation, to establish the divine name there. There you are to go. (Deuteronomy 12:4–5)

We need to understand the Torah’s admonishment against idol worship not as a call to destroy the shrines and devotional objects of others, but as a commandment to destroy our own idols. The Torah is not concerned with governing the practices of others, but with what happens within our own borders. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses addresses the situation the Israelites will face after they enter the land, when they are building a home for themselves. The Torah asks us to tend to our own messy lives — to look inward rather than attempt to coerce others into seeing things the way we do.

The Torah spends so much time helping us define our relationship to idolatry because idols are so seductive, their power both alluring and disorienting. Idols are a negative by-product of our own extraordinary creativity. Imagine how beautiful the Golden Calf must have been, shimmering in the desert sun, its glowing body reflecting back the people’s own stunned faces. We see ourselves in the idol, and before we even understand what is happening, we begin to worship ourselves.

There are as many ways to fashion an idol as there are diverse humans. How can we know whether we are creating a work of art or an idol? We create an idol to serve ourselves and feed our desires, rather than to serve God. Idolatry confuses our minds and asks us to feed our children — our future — to the fire. Idol worship perverts the idea of Oneness, of interconnectedness, of community, of compassion. Idols represent misplaced yearning for connection and safety. Idols trade in power, not love.

Through idolatry, we sometimes worship our own ideas — that which we mistakenly believe we know. We fall in love with certainty. That luxuriant tree is comforting and delicious because we can literally put our arms around it, smell its blossoms, feel its bark. We can taste its fruit, locate it on a map. God cannot be held in this way. God is, by definition, Mystery.

Monotheism can look like certainty at first blush — and it has been misused this way many times, in crusades to destroy the “idols” of others: their religious figures, their sacred places. This is how literal readings of the Bible cause harm. Knowing our tradition and living it fiercely, defending our right to be proudly Jewish, can be — must be — compatible with epistemological humility. As Cynthia Ozick writes in her essay in Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower: “The Second Commandment is more explicit than the Sixth, which simply tells us not to kill; the Second Commandment tells us we must resist especially that killing which serves our belief.”

May we find the courage to smash the idols of our own certainty — and the humility to stay open the blessings set before us.