Torah Study Blog

This week’s Torah portion incudes the Ten Commandments, the first of which is: “You shall have no other gods besides Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeliness of which is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. (Exodus 20:3-4)

People are visual creatures and it is a human impulse to make images. The neighboring communities of the Israelites had idols that they worshipped, and the Israelites might have wanted to do something similar. However, the writers of the Bible say that is forbidden. Perhaps the writers wanted to protect against the possibility that people would worship the idols themselves, and not God. Additionally, it was common practice for a conqueror to destroy, or cart away, the idols of the conquered. If you don’t have idols, that cannot happen.

However, in the Book of Numbers there is a passage that describes many Israelites dying from poisonous snake bites. God instructs Moses to, “Make a [serpent] figure and mount it on a standard for the people. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, he shall recover.” (Numbers 21:8) This is a direct contradiction to the first commandment that no images will be made of something from the earth!

The Bible was canonized around 250 BCE. For the next 450 years, people talked about the words in the Bible and what those words might have really meant – this is known as the “oral tradition” of “The Rabbis.” Around the year 200 CE, Judah the Prince collected the oral traditions and wrote them in a work called the Mishnah. The Mishnah does not present the final “right” answer. Instead, the Mishnah recorded the ongoing conversation, debate, and philosophy from a wide body of respected leaders of the community over hundreds of years.

The Rabbis address the contradiction of Moses making an idol by saying that, since God commanded it, it was especially authorized which made it all right – at least for that situation. But the Bible goes on to tell us in 2 Kings that King Hezekiah knew that people had started to worship the serpent standard, so he, “broke into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it.” (2 Kings 18:4)

The Mishnah Avodah Zarah offers a look at how The Rabbis handled questions about how Israelites could handle living with their gentile neighbors and their idol worship. And, like other topics covered in the Mishnah, frequently those opinions differed. Rabbi Meir said that all images are prohibited. But other rabbis said that only images that show a hand holding something are prohibited. This prohibition was likely because, a hand holding something shows domination over that thing. Perhaps it is a god-like power.

According to Rabbi Gamliel, you can tell how to treat an image by how the gentiles treat it. If it is something they venerate then it is something Israelites should avoid. But in another passage, it says that a Jew could own an idol as long as no one worships it. Or an idol could be “nullified” by defacing it in some way, even if it is only a minor defacement. But other rabbis say, no, idols are always prohibited.

Rabbi Jaech pointed out that, for rituals to be effective, there has to be something visual. In our own services the Torah scrolls themselves have become fetishized. Before synagogues had speaker systems, the Torah, which was kept on the wall that faced Jerusalem, was taken out of the ark and marched to the center of the synagogue so that people could more clearly hear the reading. Today we have wonderful sound-systems, but we still march the Torah around the room. It is a visual part of our ritual. It is what we have seen done and what we continue to do. More succinctly - it’s tradition!

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter