The Protagonist, that is, You, Lives Inside an Animal! Part One

Judaism vs. The Golden Calf

You are the Protagonist, larger than the cosmos. Your self derives from the Divine Self, not from existence. Existence is a parochial concern on your remote borders. As such, you do not enter the room to find G-d; you bring G-d into the room when you enter; a G-d one arrives at is a G-d related to externally and thus superficially. G-d precedes all arguments; He is the Jew’s assumption, not the Jew’s conclusion. Not to put it too dramatically, but we’ve been sold a pack of lies about what it means to be a self and be ourselves. The lies were developed around the axiomatic assumption that the self derives from existence, which means that the self, in its effect on existence, is often the problem.

But the self is not our problem. Alienation from the self is. We are taught not to get too wrapped up in our feelings and focus on serving others, but those who say such slogans without qualification do more damage than good. “It’s not about you” is not valid for all definitions of “about” and “you.” The most common story on earth in 2024 is that of the “selfless” individual devoted to others only inasmuch as it extends their immortality, their sublimation into ideology. However, one must turn inward and go deep into oneself to truly serve others. The Jewish way in “other” is self; in our very holiness and apartness we find the only path to unity, and our holiness demands our whole unknowable self. By any other path, we are united only as an activist or an idolator by subsuming the subjective to the Great Objectivity, cutting ourselves down or stretching ourselves out to fit, and “becoming part of something bigger than oneself.” Our Torah, the revelation of G-d, is given precisely through the collapse of the subjective/objective distinction, which is why it is the piercing, all-embracing truth of our reality beyond question.

But then there is a golden calf.

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Idolatry is not a denial of G-d but the belief that there are other uncreated powers. To put it existentially, it’s the belief that G-d is merely an existence. In intuition, it is the sense that there is nothing categorically different about G-d, that He is not immutably unique.

In Jewish Law there is also a category "tantamount to idolatry" called shituf, literally “partnership,” with different roots and different applications. Shituf isn’t as severe as idolatry but it is still forbidden. It says that though G-d is the single ground of all existence, others help. The classic example is discussed by Rashi and the midrashim on the story of Creation, which is written to negate the reading of G-d consulting or "partnering" with angels, G-d forbid, in the act of creation. Since we would know that these partners are themselves created and thus unable to “unseat” G-d from His unique position as Creator, partnership with angels wouldn’t technically be idolatrous. It’s shituf.

These are relatively primary concerns of Judaism, its eternal enemies. Only a little mental legwork shows us how any all-embracing ideology, even a nominally theistic one, must seek to explain G-d in its own terms and supplant him by becoming the explanation/cause of G-d. The worshippers of the golden calf thought they had G-d in their pocket; political activists tend to follow the same faith.

In light of this, debates over whether the Nazis were technically atheists (as the Bolsheviks were) become trivial; the "G-d" of the Nazis is measured/grounded by Nazism; this is idolatry. Similar idolatries can be found among all of today’s enemies of the Jews. The Talmudic dictum that anyone who is a heretic toward idolatry is called a “Jew” holds, as it did in ancient times. Abraham's challenges to Nimrod's godhood include demands like, "Make the sun set in the East," intended to demonstrate that the self-described deity is himself not sovereign over nature, that he is embedded in a system. Pharaoh, of course, is the archetypal false deity at the top of his pyramidal hierarchy, not a G-d denier but G-d apathetic. The Egyptian oppressor saw G-d as a foreign issue (Egypt, and deeper, the Nile, being the deepest truth), and so Egypt is broken by demonstrative plagues.

Seeing all this idolatrous bloodshed, one might wonder if the idea of any ultimate ground to existence is misled. Perhaps we can do without one, without any god. This sin, as opposed to idolatry, the Torah seems far less concerned with, and for a simple reason: it's patently absurd. It is, in fact, the definitive embrace of absurdity. If there is no deep ground to things, then things can (at least in theory) do anything and mean anything. There is nothing to make them obey any of our understandings. The most you can say is, “What happens, happens.” To a rationalist, this is called “giving up.”

Indeed, all the ancient philosophical proofs for G-d's existence, as you’ll find in Aristotle or Plotinus and defended by Jewish philosophers like R'Sadya Gaon, Rabbeinu Bachya ibn Pquda, or the Rambam, are more proofs of an "ultimate ground to rationality" than proofs of G-d, the one who revealed the truth in the objective mysticism of Sinai.  They examine some very simple or basic aspect of reality, e.g., "a pebble," and then seek to explain it. They arrive at some Ultimate Thing That Explains All Others And Which Itself Needs No Explanation, without which nothing else can be rationally explained. That is, because they use the capacious definition of "explanation" for "cause," the ancient question, "Does G-d exist?" is the same as, "Is there an ultimate explanation of things?" and the most successful attacks on these proofs all say, "Not really."

The denial of G-d, then, is classically the denial of the rational mind of man. It says that our tendency to organize the world rationally, to ultimately explain the pebble, has no justification, just like everything else. It’s just something the human mind does, which in itself means nothing. (Taking "the universe" as an ultimate explanation or the like solves nothing, as quickly becomes evident to anyone who learns about the ancient proofs. There are many other prevarications, some clever and others empty.) A respectable atheism—and people do still write books in this vein on occasion—instead bites the bullet and says, indeed, the absurd is what we must bravely embrace. Our tendency to rational explanation is just another thing that happens, with no extraordinary access to the nature of anything.