Appetites for Idols

Growing up, I was taught that idolatry — worship of concretized forms — was a kind of human appetite that Jews struggle to sublimate. In times when I rejected that teaching, I didn’t appreciate how well that replaces religious struggles to sublimate appetites for real pleasures.

Much of “religious practice” is about sublimating selfish appetites for a sense of Belonging. Judaism is not without its fixations on certain worldly behaviors, but it’s nice how they kinda reduce down to this one that can be given up without denying the body-world itself at all.

Within this cultural framework, locating the Divine as being PARTICULARLY in one thing is not actually experiencing that thing’s full nature as a part of the world. Giving up attachment to thing-as-god is necessary to give it space to be the thing it is.

Modern Jews are into saying that Judaism is concerned with this life, this world, this body, not concerned with transcendence, not negative about pleasure or embodiment. I would say that’s USUALLY true, but that a shadow inversion of that idolatry appetite can also kick in.

However, I believe that’s true at its foundation. The root of the Jewish relationship with divinity is that there is nowhere it does not obtain, and so to limit it is to REDUCE the essence of worldly things, not to exaggerate it.