("Idol Worship Stone" - image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Our readings in the Torah at this season, in the book of Deuteronomy, are full of anxiety about idolatry.
At times, in these readings, the hazard of worshiping sticks and stones seems to lurk behind every citadel corner and under every field tree.
This week, in our reading, for example...
"You shall not set up a sacred post, any kind of pole beside the altar of the LORD your God that you may make, nor erect a stone pillar, which the Eternal One your God detests... If there be found among you, in one of the dwelling places that the Eternal One your God is giving you, a man or woman who has affronted the Eternal One your God and transgressed God's covenant, turning to the worship of other gods and bowing down to them, to the sun or the moon or any of the heavenly host, which I never commanded..." (Deuteronomy 16:21, 17:2-3)
...and horrible punishments follow.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev (1740-1809) offers a reading of this particular biblical segment that, at first, may seem excessively clever or artful, and, beyond that, may seem to undermine the warning of these verses, against veneration of anything temporal and this-worldly--but I think he's on to something.
First, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak notes how, in scripture, our ancestors bow down out of respect before righteous individuals--and he offers, for example: "...as Obadiah was on the way, behold Elijah met him, and Obadiah recognized him, and he fell on his face and said, 'Are you indeed m'lord Elijah?'" (I Kings 18:7)
The Berdichever explains that righteous individuals embody divine inspiration and represent the work of fulfilling divine teaching to such a great degree that one may well bow down in respect before them; by contrast, he says, to "the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven, which I [God] never commanded."
And there's the cleverness, as he reads the Deuteronomic verse to say that, grand as the sun and the moon and the stars may be, such heavenly bodies never are charged and are not commanded by the Divine in the justice-seeking way that human beings are--and, for that reason, ought not inspire the awe one may feel at encountering a notable person.
"How lovely on the mountaintops are the footfalls of the messenger," says the reading from Isaiah that accompanies our Torah-portion this week (Isaiah 57:2)--and an ancient rabbinic interpretation asks, "What can be so special about mountains that they should merit such association with a message of redemption?"
The teaching answers, "Rather, you must understand that the great ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, are called 'mountains,' as we read 'Hear, O mountains, the Eternal One's argument,' (Micah 6:2)," with actual rocks and stones, however majestic, being excluded by this interpretation as plausible recipients of divine impetus toward justice and righteousness.
In a vein that I read as similar, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in a 1953 address to the Rabbinical Assembly of America, cautions against a philosophical version of mistaking the possible locus of indwelling divinity. Heschel warns against what we perhaps may call an idolization of abstractions, or of notions, suggesting:
"We are not ready to emend the text and begin the Amidah, the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy, by saying, "Blessed be It, the Supreme Concept, the God of Spinoza, Dewy, and Alexander." Indeed the term "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" is semantically different from a term such as "the God of truth, goodness, and beauty." Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob do not signify ideas, principles, or abstract values... The life of him who joins the covenant of Abraham continues the life of Abraham... We are Abraham, Isaac, Jacob."
That is to say, important as words can be upon the path, only a human life can be the living quest for righteousness. Crucial as ideas are, only human life can become righteousness' actualization in this earthly world.
A propos father Abraham, though, and Obadiah and Elijah, we come, in turn, to an equally real hazard--that of idolizing forebears and other human beings.
Back to E. E. Cummings for a moment, whose third Norton Lecture at Harvard (or 'nonlecture,' as he called it) I found helpful last week. Some more:
"...so far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a matter of individuality. If poetry were anything--like dropping an atom bomb--which anyone did--anyone could become a poet merely by doing the necessary anything; whatever that anything might or might not entail. But (as it happens) poetry is being, not doing. If you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet's calling (and here, as always, I speak from my own totally biased and entirely personal point of view) you've got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being. I am quite aware that, wherever our socalled civilization has slithered, there's every reward and no punishment for unbeing. But if poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you--nobody else--who determines your destiny. Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys, but none of them can ever be you."
It will be no novelty if I pause here for a moment on some tension between Cummings and Judaism. It may well be you are recalling that our Torah is full of rewards and punishments, not to mention obligations and duties.
Obedience, however, is not the same as righteousness. The latter, not the former, is the apogee and the sine qua non of being human. And the difference between obedience and righteousness is individuality.
Many books and lots of other people may tell you about righteousness. Only you, as your own, distinct, inimitable self, can quest for righteousness and be it.
We should not exist as a species of robot. If you shudder at the thought, it is a good sign you are still alive. If some part of you chimes in, as you embrace such vital chutzpah, remonstrating that it might be better, or more true to a divine plan, if we all were slavishly compelled to uniform compliance, let me suggest you fear for your very life.
Back to pianist Jeremy Denk, whose musical thinking I found helpful two weeks ago. Some more from the New Yorker, where he writes about once having won a piano competition:
Years of grad-school indulgences (liquor, Chinese takeout, kitchen appliances) had left me with a Visa bill of forty-five hundred dollars, and I was able to erase it in a flash. All that remained of my glorious prize, of all those months of practicing, was a photograph of Princess Diana handing me my award onstage at Royal Festival Hall, which I faxed to everyone I knew. At the time, my hair resembled hers.
This close shave made me wonder: How could I convert my high thoughts about Mozart into hard cash? Within a year, I decided to leave the Midwest for New York, in search of a new teacher and a serious career. My first few months in the city were marked by financial panic and a deep nostalgia for closets. The expensiveness of things conspired with their copious availability. I never had a budget. I survived by currying favor at the Juilliard gig office, and was assigned to weddings and parties, where I thundered on pianos that whimpered at what was being asked of them. I made conversation with drunken grooms, society ladies, recently minted lawyers.
The locations got worse and worse. "White Christmas" was filmed at the Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, against its now vanished riot of Yuletide kitsch. I had caught a flu in the course of filming the "about town" segments. We couldn't work until after business hours. It was 3 a.m.; I was wiped out, coughing, sniffling, hovering over the food tray, stuffing my face with handfuls of greasy shrimp crackers. Periodically, I'd be called back to the set, to mime seasonal enthusiasm. What had I done? What had happened to all my musicology lectures, to all those hours of crafting Bach preludes and fugues?
I'd come to New York partly in search of money, and here I was, bathed in the stuff, playing "New York, New York." Vast sums were being spent, it seemed, for my cheesy humiliation.
Talk about the rewards and incentives "for unbeing"--per E. E. Cummings--and about the hazard of doing, more and more, what others want from you. And that can happen, too, in the world of spirituality and religion, just as much as in any career.
My point--if your search is for the truly divine, the truly transcendent, the truly worthy, the truly good, and for true righteousness, by all means study, by all means seek tradition, by all means strive; but, for heaven's sake, also be sure to be truly you.