Run
from Idolatry
One doesn’t hear the phrase “idol
worship” so much today. If you hear it at all, it is used mostly to describe something
that went on long ago, thousands of years ago, before the world became
enlightened with democracy and the New York Times. But as the saying goes, the
Devil’s best trick is to convince you that he doesn’t exist. Idol worship is
everywhere today and getting more intense with each passing moment.
Here’s how you spot it. Watch the people
who make saviors out of worldly entities and throw themselves at their feet. They
offer sacrifices, even their children, and will slaughter all who don’t join in
on the worship. Following all that is wild acts of sin.
Some examples. I don’t recall as a
kid hearing the term GOAT in discussions about sports. We would talk about all-stars
and legends of the game. There were many of them, more than I could even
remember. Sports talk today is mostly about determining who is the GOAT, the
greatest of all-time, the one, the one god so to speak.
It’s an absurd topic. Athlete
Michael Jordan is constantly called the GOAT of basketball. Here’s what he says
about it. “I don’t want it in a sense because I think it disrespects Wilt
Chamberlain, Jerry West — you know all the guys that prior to me I never had a
chance to play against. What everybody is saying I am, I never had the chance
to compete against other legends that was prior to me. When I hear it, I cringe
a little bit because it’s a little bit embarrassing because no one knows. I
never had the chance, once again, to play against those guys. I would love to
have played against them, but I never did. And for you to say that I’m better
than him. I mean it’s your opinion; it’s their opinion. I accept that as their
opinion. If you ask me, I would never say that I am the greatest player, and
that’s because I never played against all the people that represented the league
prior to Michael Jordan.”
Sounds reasonable. You can see a
bit of why this guy was such a great athlete. (Baseball player Ted Williams talked
the same way.) He had the right attitude about his athletics. But that doesn’t
stop the sports writers whose favorite topic is GOAT talk. They do it in every
sport. It dominates sports discussion.
And it’s really weird. Sports
writers and pundits can be intelligent, but they are not the most urbane of
people. There’s a lot of macho, a lot of bluster, a lot of tough talk. They
admire athletes and athletes are physical. They compete against one another.
They try to win. It’s not Church. Every athlete on some level is a ruffian,
even tennis players. And the sports writers imitate them.
It’s alarming to see these tough
talking sports pundits throw themselves at the feet of the GOATs. They sound
like teenage girls screaming for the Beatles. You half expect them to wet their
pants as did the girls during Beatlemania. Some of them are former athletes,
their muscles still bulging through their jackets. Yet, they get all giggly
when talking about the GOATs. Actually, they alternate. They giggle and then
they roar. Back and forth it goes. It’s very confusing. To a large extent, the
GOATee achieves dominance through the GOAT. It’s a vicarious conquest. You see
this with doctors and Harvard graduates. The guy knows that he is not modern medicine
itself. He is not Harvard. But by his association, he becomes a kind of king.
In my view, GOAT talk is bad for sports.
It’s a winner-take-all enterprise. You wind up feeling as if this one guy or
gal is the only one to have ever played the game. Everybody else fades away, even
people who are just about as good. This is what talk about God is supposed to
be like. There’s only one God. He’s perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful. Nothing
is even comparable. But that only happens with God, not with anything in the
physical world. GOAT-talk imitates religious-talk like sportswriters imitate
athletes.
GOATees talk about their GOAT as if
he were all-powerful and all-knowing. Flaws are hidden. Michael Jordan missed
more than half of his shots. We don’t talk about that. We replay his best
moments over and over, even though those comprise much less than a percentage
point of his years of playing.
GOAT talk also involves downplaying
the achievements of all the other players, even really good ones. Take Wilt
Chamberlain for example. Wilt actually has better statistics than Michael. They
both averaged 30.1 points a game in their careers, but Wilt also had 22
rebounds a game to Michael’s 6.2. He was an incredible force on the court, but
mostly what you hear about him is that he didn’t win, so Michael is better.
But Wilt did win. He won two
championships and with two different teams, which is a special accomplishment. He
reached the finals four other times. Those also are highly successful seasons,
except for the last game or two. The man won plenty.
Michael understands all this, which
is why he doesn’t like being called the greatest of all-time. But the sports
analysts mostly don’t understand it, which is interesting since they spend
their days and nights analyzing sports. And if you hear them rattle off sports
statistics and complicated arguments full of arcane sports facts, you realize
they are not dummies. But on this topic, they become dummies.
Seems to me that what the sports
writers are engaging in is idol worship. The world was created to honor the
glory of God. People are supposed to do this consciously. When they don’t, they
worship idols. To worship an idol, you have to warp your brain. You have to lie
about reality. To make a god of anything worldly, you have to live in fantasy;you
have to lie about reality.
For years, the tennis world saw the
Swiss Roger Federer as the GOAT. Then the Spaniard Rafael Nadal started to beat
him. Roger is older, but we won’t talk about that even though it’s a sport
based largely on stamina. When we are declaring a GOAT, we forget facts. Then the
Serbian Novak Djokovic started to beat Nadal. He’s younger than Nadal, but we
forget that. For about a year now, ever since Djokovic caught up to the other
two in grand-slam wins, Djokovic has been the GOAT in the eyes of what seems
like most pundits and fans. I saw a slew of articles just a week ago referencing
Djokovic with the adjective GOAT.
Recently, a strange thing happened.
It’s called COVID. You may have heard of it. We’ll get to all the idolatry
around that in a bit. Djokovic has refused to say whether or not he has
received the COVID shot which some call a vaccine. So the country of Australia,
host to one of the four tennis grand-slams, a former democracy turned tyranny,
refused to let him play. Officials there shoved him into a low-class quarantine
hotel, surroundings he surely isn’t used to anymore, and generally disrespected
him. With Federer being injured, Nadal won the tournament.
Guess who is the new GOAT? The articles
are everywhere. I glanced at a number of them. Not one mentions that Djokovic
wasn’t allowed to play! How can you declare Nadal better when they didn’t play
one another or even play in the same tournament?
Like idolatry, GOAT-talk is
disloyal. You go from this god to that god as the human race has done for
6,000 years. We don’t talk about Jupiter
anymore except when discussing astronomy. We have new gods. The old ones are
dumped like boyfriends or girlfriends.
There are GOATs in every area of
life. The Beatles are the rock music GOAT. I could go on for far too long about
how overrated they were, how, for all their good music, their lyrics were quite
often banal and their facility with musical instruments even worse. They also
were not the world’s greatest human beings, with 3 of the 4 being adulterers,
all being disloyal to old friends, and all living like kings while pretending
to be humanitarians. No matter, the Beatles won this spot as music GOAT, and you
simply can’t have an intelligent conversation with Beatle worshippers.
Speaking of people with whom you
cannot have an intelligent conversation about their god, there’s Zionists. God
is infallible, right? That’s how Zionists see the state of Israel. It never
does anything wrong. If you show mounds of evidence of Zionist military and
police brutality, even cold-blooded murder, the Zionists will deny it all. Can’t
be. God is perfect.
You cannot have an intelligent discussion
with idol worshippers. With Zionists something else happens. They won’t let you
talk intelligently about Zionism. Zionists brought censorship to the world. Nobody
on the planet is allowed to criticize the state of Israel. Nobody on the planet
is allowed to ask questions about the Holocaust either. The connection is that
Zionists have acquired the rights to the Holocaust. They own it now and are
very strict about who uses their material.
Just try to compare COVID tyranny
and mandated vaccination to the Holocaust. Evidentially, that makes you an antisemite.
Don’t even try to make sense of that because it’s senseless. What’s the point
of Holocaust education if you are not allowed to spot another Holocaust? It is
fair to say that the point of Zionist sponsored Holocaust education is to
justify the formation of the state of Israel and its continuation as a very
messed up place. If anybody else uses the material, it undermines the real
goal. And the real goal is not merely to have a so-called Jewish state (which
it’s called even though it is atheistic and antagonistic to religious Jews) but
to have an idol.
Idolatry isn’t just about the sensation
of worshipping false gods, it’s about the excitement generated by exaggerated
fears. COVID-19 is an exaggerated fear. In the state of Israel, 8,000 have died
of COVID in two years, or so we are told. Really, the great majority of them
died with COVID, as they were deathly ill with other conditions like in every
other country. Really, the average age of death is 80. Thus, the 8,000 number
is not as it seems. But let’s go with that number. Did you know that every year
8,000 people die in Israel from cigarette smoking with 800 dying from second-hand
smoke? Yet over the last two years, I have not seen a single article in the
Israeli press about deaths from smoking. I have not heard a single utterance
from the government about the hazards of smoking. The government has shut down
the country, shut down life in 100 different ways over COVID. Yet, smoking isn’t
even a discussion point. As I said, idolatry requires denial of reality. You
deny facts. You make up facts, which of course aren’t really facts. They are fantasies.
Living in terror is denial of reality.
Death is scary and someday all of
us will be dead. So, there are things to fear in this life. That’s where God
comes in to help us. The book of Psalms is all about enemies, dangers, and
fears. But all that is couched in faith that God will help us. Idolaters don’t
have God, so they are full of fear. And they create idols to save them from the
fears.
That brings us to the topic of
vaccines. I haven’t in all my life witnessed hysteria as mad as that
surrounding vaccines. People talk as if vaccines will have us living forever.
They are the panacea. They are gods.
Sorry folks, there really are good fact-supported
arguments that vaccines, like the Beatles, are overrated. The incidence of small-pox,
measles, and many other targets of vaccines, really did plummet before vaccines
were introduced. Good plumbing works wonders. Visit an out-house some time and
you’ll see what I mean.
I’m not getting into the topic of
whether vaccines can help sometimes. I’d much rather discuss this notion that pharmaceutical
companies are infallible. These are profit seeking entities, some of which, like
Pfizer, the most famous of them, have been caught lying, stealing, and killing.
Would you trust me with your life? Would you trust any stranger? So why do you
trust them? Did you know that the US government has exempted vaccine makers
from tort law? You cannot sue them. Such conditions have been placed on COVID
distribution by all other countries. It’s crazy. Such trust. It’s a denial of reality
that’s so extreme that it reminds one of idol worshippers.
And idol worship it is. There are
others: feminism is another. That’s rampant today. People have turned women
into gods. I have no doubt that they are channeling some kind of idolatrous
force of the goddess when they say the ridiculous things they say about women. I
saw a list recently of somebody’s greatest conductors of all time. All kinds of
women I never heard of filled the top ten. Toscanini was 35th or so.
Leonard Bernstein did even worse. Tina Fey topped the list of comedians of the
last twenty years. She’s very funny, but she’s not Chris Rock or Lewis C.K. You
can’t even make the case. But idolatry doesn’t care about making a case. It rants
and roars instead.
Some say that idolatry lowers
people because the people imitate the gods. I agree. But I believe something
else happens as well. The gods are created in our image. They are products of
our lust, our greed, and our arrogance. Wherever you see idolatry you see bad people,
you see arrogance and heartlessness.
How many feminists have the police
remove their husbands from their homes? How many Zionists not only turn away
from Israeli military murderousness but cheer it on? Of all the Zionists who
pushed me to move to Israel, how many have lent me any help or had me over
their house even once? There’s only one, but that’s largely because she was a
friend of my wife and she’ also not really a Zionist. Her husband is. Want to
know who has had me over? Anti-zionists, Neturei Karta even. I get invitations
from them all the time. You know, the so-called soneh Yisroel. They are the
ones who have been kind to this Jew.
The COVID worshippers tend to be
cruel too. One hears not just loud-mouths like Howard Stern but polls talking
about denying health care to people who deem the COVID shot unsafe. “Let them
die.” This week rock music “legends” Neil Young and Joni Mitchell gave the
Spotify website an ultimatum to either censor the Joe Rogan show or remove
their music. Why is this? Because Joe’s show was spreading misinformation about
COVID. That’s the claim. Joe, who tests each person who walks in the studio for
COVID, has interviewed very knowledgeable scientists who don’t buy into the
government’s COVID narrative. We can’t have that. We can’t hear two sides of
the argument. Anything that doesn’t match the government story is deemed misinformation.
Neil and Joni are supposed to be hippies. If I recall correctly, in the 1960s,
we questioned authority, in particular that of the government and big corporations.
Either Neil and Joni have changed,
or they were never hippies. Most hippies weren’t ideological hippies. They were
just people who enjoyed sin. I had a coworker who told me that in the 1960s he
went to protests only to meet women. The government at that time was basically conservative
so they opposed the government. They didn’t question authority. They opposed
morality. It really shouldn’t be shocking to see Neil and Joni promoting censorship
and cozying up to greedy corporations and tyrannical governments. They never
had ideals. They liked making music.
Idolatry is an act of arrogance at
its core. It takes arrogance to deny truth, to demonize others, to sacrifice
children. It’s a waste of time to talk to idolaters because you are dealing
with arrogance. And you’ll never eradicate someone else’s arrogance. Try
eradicating your own.
The only salvation is in the Torah.
Not that we can’t make an idol out of that. There are godol worshippers, Gemara
lomdus worshippers, Zohar worshippers, rebbe worshippers. Idolatry is
everywhere. The proper approach I believe was expressed by Shlomo HaMelech: Fear
God and keep His commandments. Don’t fear COVID, don’t fear the Israeli
government. They are dangerous for sure. But most of the day you should focus
on God. You do that with Jewish life. Focus on that. Engage in the full range
of commandments, all of them, not on one or two. Engage in the full range of
Torah, or at least a fuller range than you likely do now. Chumash, Tehillim,
Halacha, Mishnah, Gemara, Musar, Chassidus, even if just a tiny bit of each, or
most of them.
Shlomo also said there’s nothing new under the sun. There was idolatry then. There’s idolatry now, both in the gentile world and the Jewish world. Watch out for it. Run from idolaters. Run from the idolatry in yourself.
