Idolatry

At Sinai, G-d revealed Himself to Israel in a way He had never done before. In previous generations such revelations were limited to individuals--individuals who were chosen to build and prepare the Nation of Israel. But at Sinai, He revealed himself to every single person who was a part of this new nation. With the exodus from Egypt came a new revelation--a revelation that confirmed the existence of a "national" relationship with the Creator of heaven and earth.

His first utterance, "I the L-rd am your G-d" served to establish this exclusivity and define His oneness with Israel. In the 34th chapter of Exodus, as Moshe carved the two tablets (after the sin of the golden calf), Hashem revealed to this Nation His attributes of chesed (lovingkindness) and gevurah (restraint). The text in Verse 6 speaks of His compassion and graciousness--His kindness and faithfulness--His slowness to anger. We see the application of these attributes when He brings His people to Sinai (Verse 3) and then warns them not to come too close to the mountain lest they be destroyed by His presence. With both His openness (expansion) and His restraint (contraction or narrowness) G-d reveals His love. These attributes are applied with perfect balance. And, in situations where there is an absence of balance He provides a remedy.

In the same chapter where we see a balance of these opposite spectrums of His attributes--a chapter where we see Him opening Himself to His people and cautioning them about the boundary limits of the mountain for the sake of their lives--we also see Him provide a remedy for a different situation--a situation where there is no balance. At the giving of "the covenant between the pieces" (Genesis 15) Hashem tells Avraham that his children will be enslaved in another land until "the iniquity of the Amorites is full" (the name Amorite was a generic name that included all the "indigenous" people of the area). Just as HaShem gave the Children of Israel limits, so too, he gave the Amorites limits. And, just as he showed restraint with one, he showed restraint with the other. He gave the Amorites time to repent and He gave them the free will to act accordingly. He did not force them to obey.

But the Amorites sinned. They ignored the boundary of G-d's limits and when their iniquity was full, G-d returned a verdict that would result in the death penalty of the Amorites and a restoration of the Land to Israel, to whom it was promised. At the time of the exodus from Egypt He commanded the Israelites accordingly:

In this verse, G-d warned the nation of Israel about "the inhabitants" who were living in the Land. A judgment was passed on those inhabitants by the Court of Heaven, and Avraham prophetically received the commandment "to purify the Land." It was the people of Israel who would be the physical instrument of that judgment.

A reminder from the past

The announcement of this find during the reading of this parsha served as a reminder from the ancient past of the dangers of the inhabitant peoples, of their attachment to other gods, and of the temptation this proved to be to the people of Israel. The words of warning in the Torah proved themselves true over and over throughout the history of Israel recorded in the Books of the Prophets. Time and again Israel fell into the practices of idolatry common to the area.

History calls to us again!

In the struggle for the Land the local Arabs have reacted to the Jewish Biblical historic claim by trying to counter it with an earlier one. For years they have professed to be the ancient Philistines, calling themselves "Palestinians". The name "Palestine" was coined by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. In his brutal attempt to wipe out the memory of Judaea and the Land's connection to the Jews, Hadrian chose the name "Palaestina", meaning "Philistia", because he knew the Philistines no longer existed-- none of them remained to challenge his claim. It was the name of one of Israel's foremost enemies; adding insult to injury, it was exaltation of a name that would forever remind the Jews of the pagan enemy that had made life miserable for generations. Another of the reasons that Hadrian chose the name Philistia is that the "Philistines" were indigenous to Crete, among the Grecian islands in the Aegean Sea, and they were in no way related to either the Jews. He could identify with this pagan people much easier than he could with the stubbornly monotheistic Jews, whom he considered backward in light of Grecian culture that most Romans openly admired. In Greek society morality and beauty were seen in much different terms than in Jewish. For instance, homosexuality was esteemed as a "purer form of love" than that of a man for a woman, who was considered an inferior creature whose only purpose was child bearing. Hadrian deified his late homosexual lover with a Temple built next to the Nile, where he had drowned.

A building fanatic with projects throughout the Roman empire, Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a new Greco-Roman city named "Aelia Capitolina". In his attempt to eradicate Judaism in favor of the more "enlightened" Hellenistic philosophy, Hadrian, like the Greek King Antiochus about three centuries before, forbade circumcision, keeping the Shabbat, and the making and keeping of a Jewish calendar, (which made keeping the commanded holidays illegal). Pagan temples were constructed right over places of Jewish worship--the temple to Jupiter (Zeus) was built on the Temple Mount in place of the destroyed Jewish Temple; the temple to the love goddess Venus (Aphrodite) was built on the place a certain sect of the Christians had honored as the tomb of Jesus; before the southern gate of Aelia, the Romans put up a marble statue of a pig. At the end of the Bar Kochba Revolt in the year 135 CE, 500,000 Jews had been killed; the Romans exiled the surviving Jews and forbade them to enter Jerusalem. As hated as Hadrian's memory is to the Jewish People, he is hailed in history as a "good emperor" and glorified during the annual Jerash festival in Jordan, whose population is more than 75% Palestinian.

After years of claiming the Philistine role, suddenly their leader, PA Chairman Yasir Arafat, has found one more compelling. Discovering that the Bible said the Jebusites were the inhabitants of Jerusalem, he declared himself a Jebusite; as such, Jerusalem therefore, rightfully belongs to him and his people. This claim is now echoed by others, including his cousin, Faisal Husseini.

In keeping with this claim to be the descendants of the various indigenous peoples with a supposed 5000 year-old hereditary right to the Land, in the summer of 1997 the Palestinian Authority staged an elaborate pageant in Sebastia (the ancient city of Shomron), re-enacting the legend of the Canaanite god Baal. Youths were dressed in period costumes; there were chariots designed to the specifications of the Megiddo excavations. Torch bearers danced around an elated Minister of Culture Yasser Abd-Rabbo. This pageant celebrated the pagan Canaanite legacy that the Muslim Palestinians now seemingly aspire to inherit as their justification of usurping the Biblical heritage of the Jewish People.

As ridiculous as the whole things sounds, we need to listen, for something else is also being said to us in a whisper that only our spiritual ears can truly discern. The disturbing aspect to all this is that the claim has desperately escalated into one of embracing any means, including the romanticizing of idolatry, to thwart Israel's rightful claim to the Land G-d promised the Patriarchs would eternally belong to their children. By identifying with these pagan peoples, the Arabs invoke something much deeper than they could possible realize--the command to cleanse the Land of abomination--Canaanite, Amorite, Jebusite, Philistine, Greek, or Roman. None of these cultures, admired by the world as they may be, were pleasing to G-d.

What was the danger posed by the inhabitants of the Land?

What was the danger so immense that, included in the instructions about coming into the Land, G-d commanded annihilation of every man, woman, child, and even animal, of these nations? In Maimonides' commentary on the laws of war, he says the commandment to conquer the Land, is an eternal one. (Maimonides' stated it thus in Sefer HaMitzvot: "We were commanded to inherit this Land which the L-rd, blessed be He, gave to our forefathers, to Avraham, Yitzhak, and to Yaacov, and not to abandon it to the hands of the nations, or abandon it to desolation. He said to them, To inherit the Land and to dwell there, for to you have I given the Land to possess, and you shall inherit the Land which I swore to your fathers.... Behold, we are commanded with conquest in every generation.") Indeed, this mitzvah did not expire with the end of the generation of Yehoshua, or even with those generations immediately following his. In our modern world, in which, according to the mainstream Jewish thought, there is no longer any temptation for idolatry, the verses warning of the danger of the inhabitants and their idols seem outdated, superstitious, and hateful. Indeed, the thought of their being eternal warnings is considered ridiculous in our sophisticated society. Is this an accurate view, though?

* Balaam, a master sorcerer, was known for his ability to pronounce powerful curses. Balaam was also famous for instituting the first houses of prostitution and gambling--spreading corruption of lustful sin. He drew on this experience in his advice to Balak on how to corrupt Israel in such a way as to cause them to lose the protection of G-d. It is noteworthy that Israel's first casino was built in Jericho after the PA took control in the Gaza-Jericho First Plan. Like Balaam's advice to Balak resounding through the centuries, this casino has been very successful in luring Israelis with the glittering promise of big wins, of easy money. The Arab owner, thinking he would certainly have no business on Yom Kippur, closed that day during the opening year; to his surprise, there were some 350 angry Israelis in the parking lot.

Each of these men was an expert in manipulating the tum'a or forces of "uncleanliness" from the sitra achra (dark side) and did so for his own selfish purposes. These abilities were demonic in origin. But more significant, they were the power behind the idols that the inhabitants of the Land worshiped. The power was supernatural, but it was not of G-d! In the age-old struggle between good and evil man is given the free-will to make a decision. The inhabitants chose evil for the sake of what could be attained through the manipulation of this occult "science."

This verse sounds like what was being done was quite innocent, yet it hints of something quite different than a first reading would suggest. There are angelic princes over each of the nations. People in the earliest times were aware of this, and began to worship the sun, moon and stars--the bodies of these angels--which gave rise to idolatry. While argument can be made for the purity of the initial intentions, honoring the emissaries of G-d, the resulting paganism was sheer worship of demons. Each region had its own god or hierarchy of gods; their authority was territorial. They still occupy the same geographic regions as they always did, and they still give rise to the same corruption of morality. Man has simply become too sophisticated to acknowledge their existence. Nevertheless, the Biblical commandments were, and still are, an eternal protection against this snare, but only if it is recognized and obeyed. When the warning is ignored and we entertain these practices, we become corrupted, either subtly or blatantly, depending on the level of our acceptance of the idolatry.

The struggle against idolatry

The people of Israel have had a long history of struggling with a variety of pagan peoples, not to mention the struggle within themselves to remain pure unto G-d whilst in the Land. Idolatry was one of their greatest temptations. A simple definition of idolatry is "self worship", for the basic reason people worshiped the gods was to further their own self interests and to pursue their lusts. There was no accountability for sin; indeed, sinful acts were revered as part of the whole experience. Practices that the Torah condemned as abomination, such as sexually deviant behavior, human (mostly child) sacrifice, self mutilation, forms of divination, and conjuring the dead, were connected to formal idolatry. These practices were the means of "ensnarement" warned of in the prohibition against having other gods.

Some practices, their connection to the ancient forbidden religions blurred in our collective memory, are becoming more and more accepted in our own day, such as tattooing, cross-dressing, homosexuality, and abortion. Other practices, becoming increasingly popular in our time, have quite obvious connections to ancient forbidden rites, such as witchcraft, fortune-telling, channeling, seances, astrology. Many of these things are as prevalent in modern Israeli society as in the rest of the world. The prohibitive laws of Torah have very deep spiritual reasons. G-d's requirement of purity in His people serves as protection on the deepest levels.

The New Age... is actually not "new" at all

People have always hungered for spiritual experiences. In modern times there seems to be an emptiness that many don't believe formal religion can fill. This has given rise to alternative thought called the "New Age Movement". This term is very broad and includes some things that can be considered good. Among the ideas of this movement, called "New Age", there are beliefs that are not "new" at all, but rather very, very old.

One of these is that of the goddess, in her various forms--Earth Mother, Queen of Heaven, etc. Goddess worship was central in female dominant, matriarchal societies. Many are fascinated with this idea, as we can see from the popularity of literature and film along the Amazon fantasy line. Some women, in their own bid for independence and self worth, have begun a custom of calling Hashem "she". This is a very dangerous trend, which can open a door to the suggestion of the "queen of heaven", an concept which was thoroughly condemned by the Prophets. The practice was so hated by Hashem that He forbade the Prophet Jeremiah to even pray for the people because of it.

In Biblical times the worship of Ashteroth was very prevalent; as in other pagan ceremonies, sexual acts were very commonly part of the worship; and like the temples of other goddesses, Ashteroth's, too, had priestesses and temple prostitutes. We need to be aware of the danger of this unbalanced view that rebels against the natural order Hashem created and seduces people into sin.

Worship and praise is highly emotional, and the energies can quickly shift to sexual. Among the people of Israel halacha has always clearly insisted on separation between the sexes, especially during times of worshiping Hashem. This separation of the sexes, like their differing roles, does not necessarily imply superiority of one over the other. In Hashem there is perfect balance of the masculine and the feminine, each needing the other, each respecting the other. At the same time, the rules of separation safe-guard against sexual energies being allowed to violate boundaries, thereby creating the opportunity to sin.

In our relationship with Hashem, as well as with each other, we should see and desire the balance prescribed in Torah. In this way, we avoid the various pitfalls of selfishly insisting on pushing ourselves forward over the other, of wanting to manipulate situations to our liking, and ultimately, of trying to re-create Him in our own image. Through cleaving to the perfect Laws of G-d, surrendering our lives, and striving daily for an ever closer relationship with Hashem, we are protected from falling prey to the sin He condemns as the worst of all--having other gods before Him.

Our connection to the past

We tend to think of ourselves as separated from our past, living in a new time in which those things of ancient memory have no effect on us. With events such as the unearthing of ancient idols and the re-enacting of pagan legends, we are being reminded that we are still living the same story--a new scene of the same play. This is not a new war that we face; it is a continuation of the same war--one to purify the Land and stand as the People G-d created Israel to be. This is the same spiritual war we have been fighting from the first days of Israel's birth. Although we don't realize it, the Arabs themselves are telling us this very thing. In Jonathan Rosenblum's Jerusalem Post article, "Seeds of Surrender", he tells the following story:

We need to be conscious of the significance of our roots and of the dangers of which the Torah warns us to beware. Our roots tell us there is only One G-d and that we are on the earth to glorify Him in the continuing saga that began with Avraham Avinu and culminated with the national acceptance of the Torah Covenant at Sinai, which included every single Jewish soul. This is all a part of being awake and aware of our purpose in the world--to live as the light unto the Nations.