Are the obsessions with money, celebrities and athletes, and maybe even Ivy League education, a form of modern day idol worship? My understanding of idol worship is when human creations or people themselves replace G-d and/or are worshiped as a god, this is idol worship. How do rabbis view idols in the modern sense? What does it mean to avoid worshiping idols?
Thank you for your question. In short, no. I don’t think that obsession with money, celebrities, athletes, or education is idol worship. Let me explain.
For the authors of the Bible and then the rabbis, idol worship meant something quite specific. It was the worship of other gods. The prophets in particular fought hard against worship of Baal and other gods of the Canaanite community. The rabbis devoted an entire tractate of the Talmud to the topic of idol worship and how to avoid it (Avodah Zarah). Halahah notes that Jews are not supposed to mimic the behavior, dress, or conduct of idolaters.
But in my mind, idol worship stands alone. While it may be similar to the worship of money or other material things, idolatry is really about finding faith in other deities. I would be hard pressed to see someone worship money in the way the rabbis envisioned people worshipping idols. Regardless of the expression, we do not worship the almighty dollar. That is not to say we should not be worried of obsessing over material things – we absolutely should. But we should call it what it is – and obsessions, as opposed to a religious expression.
The idolatry expressed in the time of the prophets does not really exist today, and the rabbis often misunderstood the expressions of paganism as antithetical to a good and ethical life. The pagans of the bible practiced child sacrifice and performed sexual rites. Today, I know many pagans. Some are close family and friends. All are incredibly ethical and loving people who get closer to the natural world through their religious expression.
My concern around terminology is that words mean something. If we are obsessing over our evil inclinations or our desires, we should analyze why and seek to find a middle path, recognizing that if we did not desire a good education – no one would go to college. If we did not desire wealth – no one would work hard in their jobs to seek advancement and improved salary. We applaud those things and we should. Idol worship is uniquely different because, for the rabbis, there was no good to be found in the worship of idols at any level.
I come from humble roots. My Dad sold toys and stationery goods as a wholesaler in New York City's Lower East Side, working six days a week for his brother. My parents did not go to college. We were not well-connected. Simply put, we were not connected. When I wanted to go to Columbia for college, I had to figure out how to get accepted on my own, and I had to figure out how to pay my way through the Ivy League. No one helped.
Later, when it came time for Yeshiva University (YU) to place me after I had studied for smicha (ordination), I had no well-connected relatives, no big donors, no name rabbis in my family pulling for me to get a desirable synagogue placement. So YU's rabbinical placement office tried to farm me off to a synagogue in Christchurch, New Zealand. I could have been the “Grand Rabbi of Christchurch.” (Say that out loud.) When I refused, they tried to sell me on Cape Town, South Africa, where Steve Biko was starving to death on a hunger strike. And then one last option: Wichita, Kansas. They would not give me a shot at anything near a significant Jewish community, choice rabbinical ground reserved for the chosen and the nepotistically well connected. (Yes, one need not go to medieval Europe to find nepotism. There is ample nepotism even in the institutionally organized American rabbinate.) So I had to find a big-city congregation on my own. And to me, having finally made it, that is the American dream: making it on one's own. So, as someone who came from no great amount of money, and had no help outside of nuclear family, and had no family strings, I approach the question with agreeing prejudice: I admire the self-made man. Like the questioner, I am appalled by society’s worship of celebrity, stardom, and money — all vacuous traits that come, go, and usually leave little behind except for some very imposing concrete gates and walls at cemeteries.
Many institutions select the people whom they will honor at their annual banquets based on the honorees’ wallets, not on their hearts or deeds of kindness. In one shul where I was rabbi, the person elected Shul President actually was — and still is — the subject of a public internet warning by the County District Attorney, advising the public of a $100,000 settlement and eleven-point injunction that bars the person from engaging in one-after-another form of deceit and business fraud. Yet that person was selected as President of the synagogue, and the person’s spouse now sits on that same Shul Board, even though the spouse was and is named equally in the injunction, monetary settlement, and on the warning website. People value access to money.
There should be a problem with the calculus that if I steal $10 million dollars and keep $9 million of the loot for myself but disperse the remaining $1 million to charitable causes, then I deserve to be guest of honor at an institution's annual dinner dance. There seems something far more noble in the person who never gets honored but who awakes at 5:30 in the morning, dons tefillin, prays to G-d, goes to work, works hard and accounts for every penny, davens again, feeds a family honestly though humbly, comes home late at night, perhaps after finishing a second job because it takes two jobs to break even, then davens a third time and drops into bed from exhaustion after spending a few moments with the children to teach them values like love, honor, respect, honesty, loyalty, trust, devotion.
The people who score the most “Likes” on Facebook and “Hits” on Youtube are idolized. Psy has half a billion hits on one of his posts. Miley Cyrus over a million for her VMA performance. Many of our athletes, who will turn down a one-year-contract offer of $5 million or $10 million because they feel they can command more, are not stars off the field. Is their charity proportionate to their earnings? Are their deeds commensurate with their influence? What have they done to inspire the teenagers who drop out of school classes to watch and imitate them on the playground basketball courts?
It is true that societal values are convoluted. And that brings us back to the Torah, where Judaism’s values are emphasized: Abraham and Sarah for hosting wayfarers and Abraham praying desperately for the survival of people in two cities he barely knew. Moses living the life of humility and teaching. Aaron the life of duty.
If there was one Biblical figure uniquely wealthy beyond all others, it would seem to have been King Solomon. Yet, in his Book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), he recalls all the vain pursuits he tried to enjoy thanks to his wealth, and he looks back on a lifetime of vanities. Again and again, he laments that they all were and are vanities. In the end, this wisest of all men figures out that life is about serving G-d, living by His commandments, devoting oneself to one’s spouse and family. In the end, that is what matters. The glory and gold is left behind, to scatter in the wind as in the final scenes of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (John Huston, 1948). In the end, the idols crumble. The legends are forgotten. As they age, the celebrities desperately hide from the tabloids. The athletes in their 60s sue their professional sports leagues for early-onset Alzheimers. The idols crumble. Norma Desmond is a recluse. But rabbinic scholars will be mulling the thoughts of Rambam and Rashi from a thousand years ago.
The subject of idolatry is a fascinating. Before answering your question, it is important to define our terms. The word “idolatry” derives from the Greek words εi δωλολατρεία; , (L. idololatria = adoration) , which comes from the noun εiδωλον (= idol). Hence, it means the worship of images.
Historians of religion have long debated whether the ancients believed that the images housed the spirit of a deity, or whether the statue was said to be alive and animate. In many ancient rituals dating back to Egypt and India, it was customary for the potter to breathe into a vessel to symbolically represent bequeathing unto the idol—new life. Thus, the ancients believed that the image somehow mysteriously and magically participated in the life of the deity being worshipped. Thus, in many of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian records we discover special rituals designed to “open” the eyes of a newly constructed deity; the priest will “wash” its mouth, and so on. The prophet Jeremiah cautioned against those who worship “stones that have no breath in them.” Every man is stupid, ignorant; every artisan is put to shame by his idol: He has molded a fraud, without breath of life (Jer. 10:14).
According to Jewish theological tradition, Maimonides warned generations about the danger of thinking that anthropomorphism (human like personality traits) are an attribute of God. Interestingly, Maimonides felt that wrongful concepts of God can transform even a monotheistic faith like Judaism into an idolatrous cult and fetish.
Some 20th century theologians think that idolatry involves making something that has no existential existence apart from God into something that apart from God. Take money for example, one can easily think that money has an independence and ontology that exists apart from God. The same may also be said of the human ego, for in our wildest imagination we often imagine as though we are “God.”
According to the Hassidic tradition, the Kotzker Rebbi once observed, “ The ‘I’ is a thief – because it takes the partial and mistakes it for the whole. In theological terms, in our search for self-fulfillment, we tend to seek meaningful existence in terms of our own existence and needs—rather than see the world from God’s perspective.
The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich once defined religion as “man’s ultimate concern.” This rather ambiguous definition has a certain amount of elasticity. For many people, their ultimate concern might be the possession of power over others—that is what they live for. For others, it might be the acquisition of wealth—and that is what they live for. Each of these things by itself is not necessarily bad unless the pursuit of these things overwhelms one’s relationship with the Divine.
In capitalistic societies, we frequently see the exploitation of workers, of the environment, and the lusting toward unlimited profits at the expense of the consumer. Political philosophies can also promote idolatrous attitudes whenever government tries to usurp the power of God as the center of people’s spiritual lives. According to Jewish tradition, man does not live on bread alone—he is a creature who must find spiritual contentment through the worship of God. Idolatry can occur whenever people fail to pay attention to the deeper human and moral issues that are at stake, such individuals risk worshipping the works of their hands and ego.
One of the ways the Tanakh helps us avoid this mistaken attitude is by tithing from our best to God. Tithing teaches us that the world does not belong to man; we are merely God’s steward of the Divine treasure and are responsible to God alone for how we use our prosperity.
Even great people after their death have frequently been worshipped as deities. In the Torah, nobody knows the burial spot of Moses; God wanted to make sure that nobody would come to worship Moses as a substitute for God. Yet, in the history of paganism, holy people have been venerated with rituals that ought to be exclusively given to God.
Over the last two and a half decades, the Lubavitcher Hasidim visit the tomb of their late Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schnersohn and ask him to intercede on behalf of his followers. If Maimonides were living in the present, he would have condemned such acts of devotion as idolatrous[1] Similarly, the Hasidim in the Rebbe’s headquarters re-enact rituals of handing out sacred dollars to the Hasidim—as though the Rebbe were physically among them. Conferring celebrity status to any human being is dangerously close to treating that person as a god. Some of the Hassidic teachers have historically believed that their Rebbe was the body of God in this world (!).
I often thought that the Rebbe of Lubavitch—and rabbis in general, regardless of their denominational labels—could greatly benefit from the Eagles’ famous song, “Take it Easy.”
Well I’m a runnin’ down the road
Tryin’ to loosen my load
I’ve got seven women on my mind
Four that wanna own me
Two that wanna stone me
One says she’s a friend of mine
Take it easy, take it easy
Don’t let the sound of your own wheels
Drive you crazy
Lighten up while you still can
Don’t even try to understand
Just find a place to make your stand
And take it easy
The moral of this song is especially important for any kind of leader—religious or secular. We are not the movers and shakers of the world that we sometimes think we are. As human beings—each of us has a gift to offer the world. However, the world will never revolve around the human ego. The universe is God-centered and not human centered.
Are the obsessions with money, celebrities and athletes, and maybe even Ivy League education, a form of modern day idol worship? My understanding of idol worship is when human creations or people themselves replace G-d and/or are worshiped as a god, this is idol worship. How do rabbis view idols in the modern sense? What does it mean to avoid worshiping idols?
I do indeed believe that money, possessions, status, celebrities, athletes and the like are today’s idols. The idols in biblical times were the things that we made with our own hands. This is the lesson that the first monotheist Abraham teaches his fathers in the well-known midrash wherein he smashes the idols in his father’s shop (Genesis Rabbah 38:13).
If an alien came down to this planet and observed our culture, what would he/she/it conclude we worship. I can just imagine the report back to base. “The Earthling spends hours before the television god in silent rapture. The Earthling is almost constantly connected to his small idols by two wires joining his brain through the ears. He seems in a constant hypnotic trance while connected. The Earthling has a strange rite conducted in nature wherein he dresses strangely and chases the small ball god around acres and acres of land alternative hitting and caressing the oddly dimpled ball god in its journey from its small pedestal to its temporary burial ground in a small hole. The journey is often accompanied by a litany of both prayer and curses…”
If you find yourself caring more for the things made with human hands than for our fellow humans, this is indeed idol worship. If your focus is on stars (isn’t the TV show called “American Idol”) rather than the architect of the heavens and earth, this is indeed idolatry. How many more people know Phil Robertson whose claim to fame is calling ducks and insulting minorities on television than Norman Borlaug, an American biologist and humanitarian whose work resulted in the literal saving of more than a billion lives?
That’s at least the view of this rabbi, who, in his spare time has been known to chase that small golf ball around, but pausing from time to time to say the traditional blessing of awe and thanks for the beauty of God’s creation.
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