Shattered Tablets, Shattered Selves: Beyond Idols and Airstrikes

Originally published on Jewschool

“The extreme nationalisms of our century are laboratories for the study of what ultimate concern means in all aspects of human existence, including the smallest concern of one's daily life. Everything is centered in the only god, the nation — a god who certainly proves to be a demon, but who shows clearly the unconditional character of an ultimate concern.” — Paul Tillich¹

How could the Israelites, so soon after being delivered by God with pillars of fire and clouds of smoke, turn to idolatry? What greater proof of God’s presence and might could there be than the Ten Plagues, the splitting of the sea, and the theophany at Sinai, during which the Israelites themselves begged Moses to act as an intermediary “lest we die” (Ex. 20:16)?

Moses, it seems, may actually be part of the problem. The Torah relates:

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.” (Ex. 32:1)

It is out of fear that they have been abandoned by Moses — not God — that the Israelites build the golden calf, for Moses is “the man who brought us from the land of Egypt.” The Israelites turn to idolatry because they never truly left it behind. They are only able to follow the commands of a God who cannot be described, deciphered, or depicted so long as there is a concrete thing for them to point to — in this case, Moses.

Sigmund Freud argues that all social groups are formed around some central figure-image:

A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.²

In every group, there is something — real or imagined — at the center in whom members of the group can take as a model for themselves. And since each member has the same ego-model, I can also see myself in all the other members of the group. In this sense, all groups are idolatrous: we revolve around an image onto which we can project ourselves. When the Israelites fear that their central image — Moses — might be lost forever, they immediately seek out a new one.

For Freud, it is not just the shared projection that unites the group, but also love. Each of us understands the central image as loving us, and we therefore love both it and each other. As an example, Freud discusses an army: “The Commander-in-Chief is a father who loves all his soldiers equally, and for that reason they are comrades among themselves.”³

This explains why the Israelites emphasize that Moses “brought us from the land of Egypt” — Moses is the loving father who has rescued the Israelites (the Israelites’ complaints at the time now long forgotten). It also helps us understand the Israelites’ strange proclamation, upon forging the golden calf, that “this is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Ex. 32:4). Did the Israelites not just declare that Moses was the one who brought them out of Egypt? Now that the calf has replaced Moses as the central image, though, it too must be understood as the locus of love.

The loving object at the center of the group need not be an actual person. Commenting on Freud, Jacqueline Rose elaborates:

It is central to Freud’s thinking on this topic that what binds people together, for better and worse, is their commitment to an internal ideal. Because we are narcissists, we will only relinquish… our self-devotion for something or someone that we can put in the same place. Something that makes us feel good about ourselves. Something that tells us, even if we are a multitude, that somewhere, somehow, we are also the only one.

Nowhere is such a “commitment to an internal ideal” clearer than in modern nationalism. Each member of the volk revolves around the ideal of the nation — a god crafted in their own image who loves each of them as its children. Nationalism’s primary symbols — the flag, the anthem, and above all, the soldier — are representations of that central ideal to which each of us can point and say, as the Israelites did, “This!”

But nationalism, however crude, is not unique: each of us, nationalists or not, have ideals and images upon which we can project our identities and through which we join together with others. No matter how altruistic the ideal, such a projection will almost inevitably have a narcissistic element: I love the image because I can see myself in it, and I know that it loves me for the same reason.

We can now understand the Israelites’ terror: what God is demanding of them is to organize their identities around a non-image, a void. Even more disturbing, it is a void whose love and desire for them is cryptic. God begins by describing Godself in the terms the Israelites later ascribe to both Moses and the Golden Calf: as the one who redeemed the Israelites from Egypt. In the case of Moses and the calf, this signified not only love but an intelligible love: the Israelites can imagine that Moses loves them because he appears to them as a father figure, and they can imagine the calf loves them because they constructed it as a reflection of themselves. In God’s case, the redemption from Egypt signals not intelligible love but an inscrutable desire — why did God redeem the Israelites, and how are we to understand the terrifying demand inherent in that desire?

In a homily on the giving of the Torah, Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira imagines the Israelites at Mount Sinai gradually realizing that God will force them to accept a covenant whose content they do not yet know.⁴ An even more striking account of the terror of God’s ambiguous desire is the tradition that at Sinai, the Israelites heard only the silent sound of an aleph⁵ — that we heard that God demands something from us, but not what that thing is.⁶ All the many generations of halakhah are, in that framework, a neurotic attempt to pin down just exactly what it is that God wants alongside, paradoxically, the recognition that we will never quite get it right.

Hannah Arendt described a conversation she once had with Golda Meir, who told her, “You will understand that, as a Socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.” Arendt was horrified:

I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love toward Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that?⁷

Zionism, like all nationalisms, places the nation above all other values: everything — even the individuals of that nation — must be sacrificed for it, and it is the final standard by which the value and morality of action is judged. In this, Zionism is in no way unique: in fact, it fulfills the ancient Israelites’ yearning to be “like all other nations” (I Samuel 8:5). But it does mean reducing Judaism to a sort of self-worship in which what is ultimately demanded of me is unambiguous and obvious – to serve the nation of which I myself am a part – and in which I am loved precisely for being part of the thing I love.

The Torah advocates for a fundamentally different orientation. To organize our identities and collective life around God’s void forces us to recognize that we are never quite sure who we are or what is demanded of us. This is not an appeal to quietism — we must still act in response to that demand as best as we can, but we retain the humility to know that our relation to it will always be one of interpretation and translation. I can never take refuge in a stable, fixed identity — God’s infinite negativity always disturbs me. God desires me, but I can never be sure why.

We most powerfully experience this disturbing, inchoate desire-demand when faced with another person. As the philosopher Eric Santner puts it, “Revelation… is an opening of a space of human possibilities organized around the claims made upon me by the Other insofar as he or she is singularly out-of-joint with respect to the social intelligibility produced by… inscription in law.”⁸ In other words, when I recognize another person as themselves lacking a singular, closed identity — when I realize that I don’t know them — I also recognize the infinite claim they make upon me in a way that disturbs my own identity, and this experience is a revelation as miraculous and terrifying as the theophany at Sinai. I cannot articulate the demand, I cannot say where it comes from, but I know it is there and that I cannot escape it.

The destructiveness of nationalism lies in the fact that it stabilizes both my identity and that of the Other: I can easily categorize them — enemy, foreigner, non-citizen — and they therefore cannot break open my own identity nor open me up to the demand made upon me. In Judith Butler’s words:

[I]f certain populations — and the Palestinians are clearly prominent among them — do not count as living beings, if their very bodies are construed as instruments of war or pure vessels of attack, then they are already deprived of life before they are killed… To kill such a person, indeed, such a population, thus calls upon a racism that differentiates in advance who will count as a life, and who will not.⁹

Taken to its logical conclusion, nationalism determines who is valuable: if the nation is god, then those whom it loves must live and those whom it does not are disposable. I have an infinite obligation to the former, and I concern myself with the latter only insofar as doing so does not impinge upon my primary loyalty. In Israel, each airstrike affirms this calculation: Palestinian faces are not created in the “divine image” of the nation and therefore can be killed tens of thousands at a time.

This is not to lament that absent nationalism, we would be free to join a homogenized, global mass — in fact, the opposite is the case. It is only when I can recognize both the person before me and myself as fundamentally estranged from each other and ourselves that I can experience the full weight of the inarticulable obligation I owe them. What I see in them is not myself but not-myself and not-them — I see the divine void that they, like me, carry with them.

I want to believe that if the F-16 pilot had to look each Gazan in the face, again and again, he would never drop the bomb, but I know it isn’t true. For millennia, humans — Israelis and Palestinians recently among them — have killed each other while looking into each other’s eyes. If nothing else, this fact at least testifies to the horrors of nationalism: how bloodthirsty must an idol be if it can demand we slaughter with our eyes open?

Moses destroys both the Golden Calf and the first set of Tablets — the image around which we organize ourselves and the intelligibility of the demand made upon us. Perhaps this is to say that it is only once we have allowed our identities to shatter that we may yet hear the unending echo of the aleph, turn our faces towards one another, and catch God’s fathomless eyes staring back at us.

1. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 1-2.

2. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 80.

3. Ibid., 43.

4. Esh Kodesh, Mishpatim (5700).

5. Zerah Kodesh, Moadim, Shavuot.

6. What Eric Santner refers to as the “excess of validity over significance.” See Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 38.

7. Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 467.

8. Santner, 105.

9. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, xxix-xxx.