Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [57]
That first mitzvah is joined by a second, but one that is really only a reverse side of the first. “Worship nothing else.” Beware of idols, of false gods in all their dimensions. Do not be led astray by venerating anything less than Y-H-W-H, the wholeness of being. The temptations range from the “sticks and stones” as the Bible presents “idolatry” to the much more sophisticated distortions and limitations of truth that constitute most of religion, even in our own day.45 All of them lead us to turn away from the singular task of sacred awareness without limits. Each of them narrows our vision, keeps out part of the light. The Ba'al Shem Tov said it clearly and sharply, commenting on “Lest you turn aside and worship other gods” (Deut. 11:16). “As soon as you turn aside,” he said, “you are worshipping other gods.”46 Humans are never without something that they worship. Turn away from the whole and you are worshipping but a part, causing perud, fragmentation of reality, the beginning of all evil. This mitzvah is an admonition against false religion in the strongest sense. Any religion that makes exclusive claims and still plays on the field of “my god against your god” is by definition such an idolatry. You are turning away from the whole, worshipping one part of reality as though it were the All. Narrowness of vision, exclusion of large bodies of human experience, means that one is likely worshipping less than the whole, effecting division or “separation” within God. The One is always bigger than we imagine, beyond all our attempts to fence it in or out. The One, the only One, is always “in” wherever we try to post signs that say: “Keep out!” And that One is always out there, whenever we try to put up fences that say: “Keep within these bounds!”
Our first task as humans is to be aware, to expand both mind and heart. In seeking to carry out this task, the memory of slavery is a particularly valuable portion of our Jewish legacy. We know from experience that you cannot worship God without freedom. This means a deep inner freedom, the ability to turn inward and bring forth awareness, appreciation, and gratitude from the most profound places toward which the self can reach. We need to be free from all that which would block us in this inner turning, which is also the great prerequisite of our ability to love. Only after coming out of “Egypt,” those places that constrict us and keep us from that wholeness, are we free enough to stand before God's mountain.47
In the course of this discovery, the danger of idolatry is constant. Hence the need for the second commandment, immediately following the first. How easy it is, when you think you are “doing God's work,” to be sure that you have found the true and only way, to be convinced that others have more to learn from you than you from them. The Golden Calf is built in the very moment that Moses was receiving the tablets. If we take seriously the mystical claim that Moses’ mind contained those of all Israel, we were at once on top of the mountain, receiving the word, and (in the very same moment) at its base, constructing an idol. Might we have been fashioning the revelation itself into an idol? One of the great Torah interpreters of the last century explained Moses’ smashing of the tablets in just this way. When he came down from the mountain, ready to give God's Law, he saw the Golden Calf before him. “Oh my God!” he cried, “They're idol makers! Think what they'll do if they ever get their hands on these!” And so he smashed them, leaving only fragments of broken tablets.48 Those broken tablets, I like to say, were placed in the Ark for our generation, one that can receive them in only that way.
The second commandment, including its prohibition of idols, needs to be taken with great seriousness