It is your God the Lord alone whom you should follow, whom you should revere, whose commandments you should observe, whose orders you should heed, whom you should worship, and to whom you should hold fast. (Deuteronomy 13:5)
YE SHALL KEEP — the Law of Moses,
HIS VOICE YE SHALL OBEY — the voice of the prophets,
HIM YE SHALL SERVE in His Temple (Sifrei Devarim 85:5).
AND UNTO HIM YE SHALL CLEAVE — i.e. cleave to His ways: do kindly actions, bury the dead, visit the sick, as did the Holy One, blessed be He (Sotah 14a).
- Rashi
Moses instructs us to follow God, and God alone. This formulation raises a question: surely, this is obvious? Why say “Worship only God,” when we already know that idolatry is forbidden?
One answer, supplied by commentators: some might think they can worship both the Lord and other gods. On this view, Judaism, and the God of Israel, are but one bet in a multi-strategy theological portfolio. This shallow attempt to de-risk the “all-in” nature of being a committed Israelite is forbidden. You can’t hedge being an Israelite with worshipping Zeus and Osiris and Moloch. Yet it is distinct from simply having a temptation to worship a household idol out of desperation, magical thinking, or naiveté, as in Rachel’s hiding of Lavan’s teraphim. An idolater (foolishly) believes (or wants to believe) in the idols he worships. A person who worships both YHWH and gods, however, suffers not from committing to the wrong object, but from a lack of commitment altogether. Moses is saying: “You can’t be both a pagan and a monotheist,” as some might have thought—and in historical fact, practiced. You can cultivate a range of religious metaphors, spiritual influences, and ways of worship, but at the end of it, you have to acknowledge that only God is God.
“Why not diversify one’s religious bets and add the Tetragrammaton to the Pantheon?” one might ask. Such a religious approach demonstrates a failure to understand the Lord and properly relate to the Lord, but it is also distinct from atheism or simply not having heard of the Lord.
During the reign of Herod, and at times when Jewish power has appeared to be a strong momentum play, religious opportunists and fair-weather worshippers have sought the favor of the God of winners. It is estimated that at the height of the second Temple, 10 percent of the Mediterranean world worshipped YHWH, despite a majority remaining worshippers of other cults. As soon as the Temple was destroyed, most of those followers turned to the next new thing (Christianity).
But the problem with monotheism has always been the fact that a single God behind everything is abstract and at risk of becoming merely conceptual. If only God is God that means Moses is not God, but also that your view of God is not God, your concept of God is not God, and the words which you claim to be the voice of God might well not be the voice of God. This raises a practical problem for genuine God-seekers: How does one relate to God as a “living God” (Elohim chayim) without turning God into just another living thing, different only in degree from amoebas, kangaroos, and humans?
Where can God be found, and how do we know that we are worshipping God rather than a mere projection of our own egos? This skeptical critique is a deeply serious religious challenge that every genuine seeker must face: what if our entire conception of God and way of relating to God exist lead us to false certainty? What if the metrics we use to measure our relationship to God are the wrong ones?
Because we are small-minded, argues Clayton Christensen, we measure our success by metrics that are vain and performative, designed to make us feel good in the short term. Long term value is the result of small and seemingly insignificant actions whose fruits take a long time to pay off.
Instead of engaging in small and invisible acts of spiritual service and faithful tinkering, we seek instant gratification and pay-off. We celebrate our external accomplishments and the deeds which return our efforts on time-lines we can visualize and count: minutes, days, weeks, months, quarters. Christensen argues that the Innovator’s Dilemma is not just an affliction for legacy businesses, but also for legacy adults—who optimize for immediate public acclaim and status to the detriment of creating long term value. “Who do I want to be by the time I die” is a different kind of question than “how can I improve my career prospects?” Blockbuster vs Netflix is not just a story about the bottom of the market conquering the top of the market, but a story about how our own spiritual hubris leads us to focus on the predictable, not the mysterious. Remembering that God alone is God is—we hope—an antidote to valuing the wrong things. Short-term thinking and mimetic desire (valuing what others value rather than seeking to define, discover, and create intrinsic value) are the result of failing to know that God alone is God.
Rashi interprets Moses’s commandment in a fascinating and unexpected way. Keep the laws of Moses, listen to the prophets, serve in the Temple, and do acts of loving-kindness—all of these can be derived from worshipping God alone. Said differently, when we keep the laws, listen to the prophets, serve in the Temple, and commit acts of loving-kindness without, we practice worshipping God alone. If we do these acts without worshipping God alone, however, we miss the point. Observance of the law or temple service cannot become vanity metrics—they are there to remind us that God alone is God. The acts of loving-kindness Rashi refers to—burying the dead and visiting the sick—are specifically instances where we cannot be repaid. There is no direct upside—viewed purely transactionally and narrowly—from helping someone who cannot return the favor. And yet if you believe that God alone is God, then you will ask yourself in every moment how you can principally serve rather than how you can take or get ahead. (Machiavelli might say that you can’t serve with impact unless you also know how to rule and gain power, but that’s a technical point).
The person who worships God and Zeus—out of agnosticism—wants to split the difference. But you cannot split the difference between a life devoted to service and a life devoted to the deification of one’s own ego. Rashi shows us that the abstraction of only God is God can become tangible in our relationship to tradition. Through the observance of the Torah, study of the words of sages, prayer, sacrifice, and selfless deeds, we have a way of making God concrete. It’s not the concretion of an icon, but the realization that we ourselves are the conduit through which God becomes palpable. To put it in Buberian terms, there are times when we can serve to channel God for others, and times when others can serve to channel God for us. Often its hard to tell which is which. Is our hearkening to the prophet, the prophet channeling God, or us enabling the prophet to channel God through the gift of our awareness and deep listening?
While worshipping God and only God is philosophically and emotionally challenging—who wants to live in a state of suspension and skepticism—its also accessible to us. Our laws, moral teachings, and examples of righteous character, show us that while God is bigger than anything we can grasp with our little minds, the potential for Godliness suffuses our world, if only we would seek it.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins