Breaking Idols in the 59th Century

Among the traditional 613 Mitzvot or Commandments, fully 19 are prohibitions against idolatry. Jews are forbidden from having idols, worshipping them, profiting from idols (like Abram’s father), fraternizing with idol-worshippers… The list goes on.

If we remember that the Torah emanates from an era in which the world was filled with rival gods, we can understand this fixation. The Torah is, after all, mainly a constitution for a new nation under the control of Aaronite priests, with room for only one God.

But should contemporary Jews, secure in their beliefs, be concerned with idols and idolatry?

Let’s explore the question. First, what is an idol? Traditionally, it is a physical object believed to have powers that cannot be explained by its physical nature. That is, an idol is something that, in some of its aspects, partakes of the supernatural. Idols, made of ordinary materials, have the power to protect, help, sustain, even cure the sick. They can also bring down plagues and other punishments when provoked or “offended.”

So, any physical object we consider lucky or unlucky is an idol. This group includes not only rabbit’s feet and lucky neckties but also amulets and religious jewelry. Although it is a commandment to post a mezuzah on your door, it is pure idolatry to kiss it. And it must also be said that the treatment of the Torah Scroll in the synagogue raises it from an object of profound respect to a magic object…kissed in its cover, not to be touched by human hands when it is open.

(It could be much worse. There are religions where the followers not only pray to statues but also kiss and revere replicas of the device used to torture and kill their founder.)

Again, what all idols have in common is the belief that they can influence what happens in the natural world through supernatural means. (Many Jews, for example, say healing prayers when the Torah is open.) People who practice idolatry believe that there are causal connections between their idolatrous practice and some outcome, when, by any reasonable measure, there is no such connection.

As I see it, this mistaken causal connection between A & B—what scientists call a Type I error or False Positive—is the true essence of idolatry.  Its common name is Superstition, again, the belief that A caused B when there was no actual causal connection. And it is just as problematic when the idol is not an object but an imaginary construct—that is, like almost every religion’s notion of God.

I know a young man who went to an orthodox synagogue for the first time and prayed that his ailing father would receive a kidney donation. After his father did, in fact, receive a kidney he was convinced it was the effect of the prayer and still attends that synagogue regularly. When I heard this story, I was reminded of B.F. Skinner’s famous pigeon training experiments in the 1940s. He would teach (condition) pigeons by rewarding a certain action with food; the pigeon would continue that action until the response was “extinguished” by the experimenter. In one experiment, however, he rewarded the pigeon randomly, with the result that the pigeon would repeat whatever it was doing just before the reward… incessantly.

Prayer provides psychological benefits to the person who is praying. But petitionary prayer, asking for a supernatural intervention from God, is a form of superstition.

Even the most devout religious practitioners of all faiths have argued that it makes no sense to ask God to intervene and alter the course of God’s own laws. And there’s even a passage in Bava Metzia where the rabbis tell us that if we’re coming home from a voyage and see a fire in our town from a distance, it is wrong to pray it’s not our house. The rabbis argue that you have committed two sins in such a prayer: you’ve wished the fire on someone else and you’ve doubted God’s wisdom in choosing where to start that particular fire.

Deeply religious people are typically confused about this. On the one hand, they believe that God can cure a disease and prevent a crime, but, on the other hand, will also say that the Shoah was an “unknown good” that we poor mortals cannot understand.

Among rational people (that is, people who do not base their ideas on the supernatural), though, there are rules for claiming that A caused B. First, we must demonstrate that A came first.  Then we must show concomitant variation, that is, the more A the more B. And, finally, we must prove that there isn’t some third factor C that caused them both. This last requirement prevents us from confusing correlation or proximity with causation.  Without this last requirement we might, to illustrate, impute some significance to the fact that changes in the average salaries of American rabbis are closely correlated with changes in the average cost of beer.

Of course, the logical rejoinder to this rational critique of superstition in general and petitionary prayer in particular is to accuse me of putting all my concern onto False Positives while ignoring False Negatives. (That is, failing to recognize a causal connection when there really is one.) Some might accuse me of setting the standard of proof too high or even of prizing scientific reasoning above other ways of finding the truth.

This complaint has some merit. I am relatively uninterested in False Negatives—except in medical research, where they can be quite unfortunate. As for prizing science… Science is not how we find the truth but how we test claims about what is true. A true belief can come from anywhere, even a dream. But we have no way of recognizing its truth without the application of logic and science. And science, moreover, is not one of many ways to test a claim: It is a distillation of everything humankind has learned about the difference between justifiable and unjustifiable beliefs. The only alternative model is to believe whatever makes you feel good, which, accounts, I regret, for too much unfortunate human behavior.

Albert Einstein, physicist and prophet, gets it exactly right: “Judaism is not a creed: the Jewish God is simply a negation of superstition, an imaginary result of its elimination.”