the mistake of avodah Zara - honoring God

In the beginning of Hilchot Avodah Zarah the Rambam discusses the history of Avodah Zarah.

Their mistake was as follows: They said that since God created stars and spheres to control the world, and placed them on high and gave them honor, and they are servants who minister before Him. therefore, it is proper to praise and glorify them and to treat them with honor and that this is the will of God, blessed be He, to magnify and honor those whom He magnified and honored, just as a king desires that the servants who stand before him be honored. And this is the honor of the king. (Hilchot Avodah Zarah 1:1)

These people wanted to show honor to God, what was their mistake? A comparison with the methodology of Avraham starts to clarify this issue:

After he recognized and knew , he began to formulate replies to the inhabitants of Ur Kasdim and debate with them, telling them that they were not following a proper path. He broke the idols and began to inform the people that it is not proper to serve anything other than the God of the universe, and to Him it is proper to bow down, sacrifice, and offer libations, so that all future creatures would recognize Him, and it is proper to destroy and break all the images, lest all the people err concerning them, like those people who thought that there are no other gods besides these. (Hilchot Avodah Zarah 1:3)

In defining Avraham’s worship the Rambam leaves out the goal of honoring God. Unlike the idolaters whose initial objective was to honor God, Avraham focused on something much more basic, recognizing God. The mistake of the original idolaters wasn’t only in the method of honoring God by honoring the stars but in their very goal of honoring God!

This is strange. What is wrong with honoring God? Isn’t this the whole purpose of worship and religion?

The problem with honoring God is that it presupposes that we know what God is and therefore we know how to honor Him. However, because God is completely incomparable to anything else[1], even coming to know Him is a long and slow journey. Rushing to honor Him encourages us to remain with our preliminary and immature concept of God, which will necessarily be coarse and tied to the physical.

We seek concreteness in our service in order to make it more relatable, since we are physical and intuitively the more physical something is the more real it seems to be. Enosh and His generation thought that they could give the people a form of worship which would speak to this need for concreteness, but in so doing they underplayed the difficulty of even recognizing God as a completely abstract existence. It allowed God to remain merely a word which the people used, while their focus was on the concrete acts of worship and the bodies their worship was directed to; until ultimately God was completely forgotten.

To solve this problem, Avraham instituted a new kind of worship. The purpose of this worship was helping people overcome the feeling that the nonphysical isn’t real, and that therefore a God completely outside of the creation does not exist. Through concrete acts of worship, the idea of God enters our lives. For most people the concrete acts of worship are real and the ideas they represent are ignored (even among the idolaters the masses lost sight of the stars and were focused only on the statues which were the object of their service.) Through using such concrete acts in direct service to God, We maintain a minimal focus on Him, and can slowly go up in levels of knowing Him[2].

Additionally, this focus on recognizing God rather than honoring Him is important because in truth God has no need for our service and its purpose is only for our benefit, namely as a method of coming to recognize him.

This idea is the basis of the Torah’s entire educational path[3]: ‘The Torah speaks in the language of man”. The Torah uses many descriptions which when understood literally are very far from truly describing God. The purpose of all of these descriptions of God is for us to recognize His existence in spite of the difficulty of accepting the reality of something completely removed from the physical[4].

These descriptions are used in spite of being denigrations of God in reality; since in the common perception they are viewed as perfections. The Torah allows us to use those terms which are not generally recognized as flaws since they will help us come to recognize Him.

Furthermore, even though we use them for study, for prayer we are restricted in their use, since we must recognize that we cannot truly praise God[5]. This means that we must recognize that we are unable to honor God in fact and that all of our service must be directed only towards recognizing Him[6] and overcoming our strong attraction to idolatrous thinking.  

(Thanks to Rabbi Sacks and Avi Garelick for a great learning session on Yom Tov in which we worked out these ideas)

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[1] Yeshaya 40:18, 40:25 Moreh Henevuchim 1:55

[2] Moreh Hanevuchim 3:29

[3] And part of why Avraham’s call ‘Beshem Hashem El Olam’ is the starting point for all of the Rambam’s works. Of course the Torah went further than Avraham was able to go and ultimately reintroduced the concept of Kavod shamayim but in a subtle and careful way related to introducing the possibility of a mikdash, also see the Peirush hamishnayot on Chagigah 2:1 ‘anyone who is not concerned with the honor of His creator’. I will discuss this point more tomorrow

[4] Moreh Hanevuchim 1:26, 1:33, 1:46

[5] Brachos 33b Moreh Hanevuchim 1:59

[6] This is also why Kavana is so significant to Tefillah; the essential purpose of Tefillah is to help us focus our thoughts on God. Moreh Hanevuchim 3:51