The Optics
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In the story of the Golden Calf where the Israelites, fresh from having received the commandment about not worshiping idols, go ahead and immediately worship an idol, there’s a little dispute about whose responsibility it is. From the top of Mount Sinai, God sees what’s going on down below and says to Moses, “Guess what your people, who you just brought out of Egypt, are busy doing down there while you’re gone.” (Kind of like my husband might say to me, “Guess what your daughter did with the dog food while you were at work.”) Moses is dismayed but he also wants to set the record straight: “Actually, God, you brought them out of Egypt. They’re your people.” (“Actually, honey, you’re the one who wanted to have kids. She’s your daughter.”) And when Moses comes down the mountain and confronts his brother Aaron (“What were you thinking!?”), Aaron says, “It was the weirdest thing – they all gave me their gold jewelry, I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” Seriously. That’s what he says. All the parties involved were concerned, above all, with doing damage control and managing their image — what’s known in politics as “the optics.”
We know a lot about the optics these days. In the wake of the government shutdown and debt ceiling debacle over the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of talk about the optics on both sides. Who’s going to be blamed? How did the Republicans look? How did the Democrats look? How did the Tea Party look? How did Obama look? And although we all know that optics won’t pass a budget or raise the debt ceiling, they are what most politicians seem to think about most of the time. The optics is what election campaigns are based on, despite the fact that the optics – how things look on the surface – is often very different from the substance. Sometimes you can even have just optics and no substance at all.
The second commandment of the Ten Commandments is, I believe, about this distinction between optics and substance. The distinction between how something looks and what it is. Or the distinction between something that only has looks and that which ultimately is. The text in English translation is: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.” On the historical level this was just an expression of the religious politics of the ancient near east. The Israelites were monotheists who worshiped a God with no shape or form; a God who is utterly unrepresentable. The commandments were part of a campaign against the influence of pagans – Egyptians, Assyrians and others who worshiped natural elements or animals or who used idols to facilitate the worship of their gods. (Check out the play Mother Wove the Morning this week that explores some of the darker side of that culture war.)
But the historical reading of this second commandment or any of the Ten is only one dimension and is most interesting, really, if you’re a historian. Scripture has not survived for thousands of years by having only historical meaning – it’s the layers of meaning that give it its staying power. What’s interesting, to me at least, is – what are the deeper spiritual layers here and how can they teach us something today?
For those of you who missed the first of my “Ten Commandments” sermon series, I’m borrowing my approach from Dr. Eliezer Diamond, a Bible professor here in New York. He offers a vision for how moderns can engage with ancient Scripture, especially when we’re tempted to write it off entirely. He says that the beautiful, truly inspired spiritual wisdom contained in the Bible is being “held captive” by the narrowness of vision of its authors – a narrowness rooted in the constraints of their time and place. The good stuff is buried underneath a pile of junk. And it’s our job to redeem it, to excavate it; to set it free and give it new life. It’s our job to discard the superficial meaning in favor of the deep meaning.
This is a particularly useful metaphor for looking at the prohibition against idolatry, which is all about the superficial versus the deep; the fake versus the real. This commandment is not just a quibble with pagan gods – it’s about the dangers of trying to represent God at all. In a sense, the second commandment is a subcategory of the first – “You shall have no other gods before Me.” In fact, all the other nine commandments could all be seen as living under the umbrella of the first. The first commandment is to focus all our heart’s longing on the real God – the liberating and loving power of life itself. The other nine deal with strategies for staying connected to that focus and avoiding all the ways we might get distracted from it. They warn about not reducing the intangible to the tangible; about not mistaking an image or a simulation for the real thing.
In our culture we mistake images and simulations for the real thing all the time. We mistake social prestige for personal power; we mistake superficial attractiveness for inner beauty; we mistake competitive games for moral battles; we mistake fitness for health; we mistake money for wealth. Our media-driven culture teaches us to bow down and serve the projections of ourselves; the performance of success in our careers, in our relationships, in our finances. The things and people that we “have” become more important that who we are. It’s no coincidence that the word “idol” means both an image of a human in the form of a movie star and an image of a god in the form of a golden calf. We imbue the temporal with the significance of the eternal. We worship the finite as if it were the infinite.
The narrative of the Golden Calf begins with the people kvetching that Moses has been gone too long. He was the source of their connection with this infinite God and in his absence, they were starting to lose the thread of what this God had been about — this abstract, formless, shapeless force of liberation that had taken them out of Egypt. It was too hard to hold on to their faith when the miracles weren’t happening right then and there. So they told Aaron to make a god for them who could lead them. Something shiny and solid that they could see and touch. Aaron instructed them to give him all their gold earrings – symbols of adornment, prestige, and financial wealth. It was this gold that was melted down and became the golden calf. It was this gold that the people worshipped. They were bowing down and serving their own status symbols! They had replaced the God of liberation with the God of materialism and appearances.
We all do this to some extent. What a world of trouble we’ve gotten ourselves into by worshipping material wealth and appearances. The problem is that these are optical illusions. We’re never going to find true happiness, real relationships, or a deep connection with the living, loving God if we don’t let go of our idols. And unfortunately many of us don’t find this out until the end of our lives. The cannon of urban mythology is brimming with stories of people on their deathbeds looking back on their lives with some form of regret, some version of — they wish they had spent less time pursuing wealth, beauty, and prestige and more time with their families, more time with God, more time with themselves. They wish they had not bowed down and served the wrong priorities. And then you get the very occasional people who get a second chance – who are given a terminal diagnosis that turns out to be wrong. And when they are released from their hospital room back out into the world, they plunge into real life for the first time with abandon; with authenticity and vigor and gratitude. They invariably see their near death experience as the greatest blessing of their lives because now they are free to really live — they no longer care about the stuff they have; they no longer care about the optics.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of a modern mystical movement in Judaism, says that when you think about dying and having to account for your life, you shouldn’t worry that God will ask, “Why were you not more like Moses? Why were you not more like Sarah or Rachel?” You should worry that God will ask, “Why were you not more like you?” He understands that the commandment to not worship something fake is really a commandment to not be something fake. Because, as Emerson says, “what you are worshipping, you are becoming.”
We squander so much of our own life force trying to become something other than what we are. We try so hard to achieve in so many arenas – to have the right kind of body, the right kind of job, the right kind of friends, the right kind of online persona. To have the right kind of family in the right kind of neighborhood, be it Brooklyn Heights with a brownstone or Williamsburg with tattoos and an ironic mustache. We do it because it feels satisfying. We do it because it’s fun. We do it because we feel like we have to do it to be loved. We do it because we’re starving for social validation. We do it because we’re scared. We do it because, like the Israelites who made the Golden Calf, we get impatient waiting for the flashes of revelation to return to us – they are so few and far between.
And so commandments like the second commandment can help us stay connected to the deepest truths we have available. And the more we let them permeate our consciousness, the more meaning they can have for us. So “you shall not make for yourself a sculpted image,” can become, “you shall not make of yourself a sculpted image.” Or even, “you shall not sculpt your image. You shall not bow down to it and serve it.”
Because when we bow down to the image of who we think we ought to be, then we abandon who we are. And all our power is lost. All the true power that we have in this world comes from our connection to our most authentic selves – what I would call our God-selves. That’s all we really have. And if we substitute something fake, our connection to our God-self gets distorted. It gets harder and harder to reach.
In the poem we read earlier, Stephen Mitchell writes, “Blessed are the man and the woman who have grown beyond their greed… and no longer nourish illusions. They delight in the way things are and keep their hearts open, day and night. They are like trees planted near flowing rivers, which bear fruit when they are ready.”
Don’t worry so much about the optics. Instead, imagine that you are a tree planted by a flowing river. That river is the source that flows love and strength and inspiration to you, that cannot be used up and that is always available to you. This indescribable energy is the only real source of your life and your life is ultimately defined by it. Let yourself be bathed in it, and make a promise with yourself that you will sculpt no other images of yourself and bow down to serve no other gods.
