The Second Commandment

"Thou shalt not make unto thee
a graven image, nor any manner

of likeness, of any thing that is in

heaven above, or that is in the

earth beneath, or that is in the

water under the earth..."

~Exodus 20:4 (emphasis mine)

I'm an artist, so the Second Commandment is very relevant to me. Followers of my blog, if there are any out there, may have noticed that previous blog entries have been illustrated in various ways, usually with one picture at the top but sometimes more. That is no longer the case.

In Christian translations of Exodus, the translation makes it appear that the Second Commandment is solely referring to images of idols for worship. For most people today, that is, or at least appears, to be an unproblematic Commandment. Few people in developed countries overtly worship idols in the sense that people used to bow down to statues of Baal or Asherah or Zeus. Some do, not many. The language in Exodus 20:4-5 in the NIV for instance is softened to:

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything

in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters

below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them

However, in my Hebrew-English transliteration of the Torah, written by people who are transliterating directly from Hebrew Torah scrolls and know Hebrew intimately, there is no such easy out. A more direct and much more clunky translation which is more or less word for word is this:

Not will you do to you sculpture and

any resemblance which in the sky from

upward and which in the land from under and

which in the water from under the land

Clunky, but Hebrew doesn't work like English. The hebrew is this, reading right to left:

לֹא תַעֲשֶׂה לְךָ פֶסֶל וְכָל תְּמוּנָה אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם מִמַּעַל  וַאֲשֶׁר בָּאָרֶץ מִתָּחַת וַאֲשֶׁר בַּמַּיִם מִתַּחַת לָאָרֶץ

From left to right:

"Not do sculpture all (any) resemblance which sky upward which land under which water under land"

lo  ta'a'seh  lê'kha  phe'sel  wê'khol  tê'mu'nah  a'sher  ba'sha'ma'yim  mi'ma'al  ba'a'rets  mi'ta'hhat  wa'a'sher  ba'ma'yim  mi'ta'hhat  la'a'rets


Many of the conjunctions and adverbs and modifiers that exist in English do not exist in Hebrew and are assumed from the context. In ancient Hebrew there weren't even vowels, consonants were considered stable and fixed whereas vowels were considered active and living. In other words you could say that consonants were nonliving like stone, and vowels were living, and they didn't make marks or symbols for living things even in their language. An interesting word here is tê'mu'nah which directly means species, like a species of animal, but also means likeness. When Genesis says we are made in the image of G-d, the word is tê'mu'nah, likeness, which also means species or type. Which it is extremely hard to see what that likeness is considering the human condition, but there you have it.

Anyway, getting back on point. As an artist, the Second Commandment is very challenging to me, though I have not completely lost hope in making art that does not violate it. Ironically, I always hated abstract art, it's funny in a way. Now if I make art at all, it will have to be abstract to some degree or at least of something unliving.

Why should we regard the Second Commandment as relevant even though we live in an age when very few people overtly bow down to idols of deities? Well the first reason is that modern people absolutely do bow down to idols, they are just different idols. They are in a sense worse idols because people don't perceive them as such. Money, sex, the human figure, success, power, consumption, even technology, these are all modern idols. In the case of technology, in at least one instance it is even named as such: "the Cult of Mac." The religion of Apple, in other words. Look at our advertising: when we see advertising images of sexy bodies or desirable cars or other things, is this not the modern idolatry? It is. The connection of sex to idolatry has very old roots, some ancient pagan religions had temple prostitutes who worked their bodies for their god. Religion with benefits, you might say. ;) Actual art itself, fine art, is a cult of sorts, with people spending millions on what is in actuality only pigment on cloth. People will spend literally millions on any scrap of canvas that Van Gogh for instance might have dabbed some paint on. Ironic considering the difficult economic conditions that Van Gogh found himself in his life.

There is another reason that is not as obvious but is just as important. In the modern world we create entire mental landscapes of things with photographs, we make games and other virtual worlds (the game Skyrim has been described as "a continent in a box,") we build our mental visions with concrete and steel, we are always on the verge of closing ourselves into a landscape of our own making, both externally in the world of cars and parking lots and buildings, and also internally, in our own minds. This clearly is not what G-d had in mind, He wants to turn our focus to the real: in other words, to Himself and His creation. Every minute in the life of a truly G-d-conscious human being can be a direct revelation from G-d to himself, and part of that is revelation through His creation and His world. His, not ours. To some degree or other we have a choice: to turn towards His world or a human-created world. These two are not compatible, they are not in agreement. G-d is Lord, not us. But we make ourselves to be our own lords.

To the extent we do that, to the extent that we make our own human worlds which humans are the masters of, we cut ourselves off from this living revelation which G-d offers us every single day of our lives.

There are some truths about the Second Commandment which would not have been clear to the ancients, which are becoming clear only now. Now that we are gaining the potential to erase the real world from our minds and substitute it with an unreal human one. In many ways, this has already happened.

Ethical Overdrive

"This is how we know who the children of God are

and who the children of the devil are:

Anyone who does not do what is right is not God's child"

~1 John 3:10

People all over the world have different ideas about different religions or whether there is even any place for any of them. And I don't think it is really possible to diminish those differences much, because this debate about what the very center of existence is about is at the crossroads of extremely powerful and conflicting desires and impulses. It's a battlefield.

Think about it: millions of people out there are trying to define what your entire existence is really about, and that definition may not be one you like. It may be one you hate. I may dislike atheists defining me as chemicals in a pointless universe; atheists might hate theists for saying that if they don't believe in God they are basically frakked; I may hate capitalists defining me as little more than a market and a consumer and a source of dollars to be extracted; Hindus and Buddhists hating on Muslims and vice versa - the more critical the issue, the more it goes to the very pith of our existence, the more vehemently people will fight about it.

It may say something about politics as a quasi-religion that something of that vehemence has infected our politics as well. Lots of people are indifferent to religion but not at all to politics. Perhaps this is the ultimate degeneration of religion, that it becomes mere politics. Even to the irreligious, whatever they think is the point of existence is de-facto their religion. Nobody escapes from religion in this broadest sense, because nobody escapes making decisions about what is important in life and those decisions are based on beliefs.

So this ideological conflict about the point of life and the human person is a battleground of great ferocity. What is also clearly true is that there are good and bad theists and good and bad atheists, good and bad Hindus and good and bad Muslims, and that whether a person is relatively a good or bad person is not well predicted by what they believe. Gandhi is rightly viewed by many as a moral example, but he was an indifferent Hindu. He kind of did his own thing. His murderer was a member of a Hindu nationalist party. Almost everyone can also think of examples of Christian leaders who can say the most absolutely hateful evil things and justify them with cherry-picked quotes from the Bible, even if what they say is clearly (to almost anyone else) contrary to Jesus' own teaching.

What this suggests is that while beliefs about the ultimate meaning of existence are of an almost infinite variety, the spectrum of ethics is not nearly as wide. You can roughly divide people into these three categories:

1.) The committed ethical
(those with very high internal resistance to acting unethically, extremely high personal standards.)

2.) The committed unethical
(people who positively like acting unethically especially if they think they will benefit.)

3.) A big swath of people in between
(people with varying degrees of resistance to acting unethically.)

And while there are limits to reasoning out religion and a wide variety of starting assumptions, few such limits exist as to ethics. One need only accept in common a very few basic principles in order to start reasoning together on a common basis. So that even if you disagree, your disagreement is measured to the same standard because you agree with the same fundamental assertions.

I believe in valuing and respecting all life,
that all living things have inherent value 

Notice that this declaration does not require a specific religious belief, even if it might be best supported by a religious belief. There are probably plenty of atheists who would be willing to agree with this statement, and even if they do not agree with it ideologically, they act as if they DO agree with it when they in fact treat living things with respect. The purely ethical commandments (as versus the religious commandments) of the Ten Commandments can be derived either partially or entirely from this one sentence. A person who acts in a manner contrary to this statement is an evil person.

To me, my faith in G-d is the most important thing in my life, there is no close second. It may not, however, be something I can likely convince anyone else to agree with me about. We do not stand on common ground, we stand on a ground of irreducible division. Debates on ethics, on the other hand, start from things we all have in common or rather beliefs which all people of good will share by the nature of being a person of good will. It is possible for these people of good will to reason together towards a logical conclusion, assuming that all participants are willing to agree that the pursuit of the Good and of right action is a higher priority than personal advantage and selfishness.

This, finding common ground in ethics, may in fact be a point of leverage to finding common ground in religion as well. But whether it is or not, it is surely more profitable to start looking for ways to bring things together rather than always tearing them apart in ideological or political conflict. What is ethical is what is good, and very few people will say point-blank that they believe in being evil. That might not be much of a foundation for a better world, but it is at least some foundation.

But of course, the statement above about the value of all life is fundamentally a religious statement even if it is widely accepted by people of many religions or none. Ethics is still founded on religion, but not necessarily my religion or your religion but a vague fundamental consensus on good and evil and that it is important to be the one and not the other.

Relativism

...my foes taunt me,

saying to me all day long,

“Where is your God?”

~Psalm 42:10

I hear it all the time. "Religion is like blind men describing an elephant," or "how can you say your interpretation of G-d is correct when there are so many" or variations on that theme. It's all relative, ethics are relative, G-d is relative. Or that there is no G-d at all, and that I am just spouting some leftover of an ancient iron-age tribal superstition that has been superseded in our modern, "enlightened" age which is so glorious in its materialistic wisdom.

And to such people I say: no, the truth is not that I do not know or that no one knows. 

The truth is that YOU do not know AND YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.

Because if you knew, what you knew would change you. Your sense of your property over your own life and actions would be challenged.

This is the most fundamental faith of our culture: I do what I want.  I own me. No person or god does. Even though everything is owning us all the time. If only we truly understood what we were asking for when we ask to own ourselves, we would beg G-d to own us instead.

And you can no longer do altogether what you want if there is a universal impartial judge of everything you do and want. Make no mistake: ethics and individualism do not mix. To believe in universal objective ethics is to believe that there is something that has some prior right over our own behavior that supersedes our own rights. And if it has some prior right, in the end it has every prior right because every action has ethical implications.

Now I want to make clear that just because I understand G-d's will concerning human behavior does not mean I somehow understand the mind of G-d completely. G-d is sovereign, He decides as He decides and He is beyond human comprehension. The Eternal is not defined by men. If anything, I have a more modest opinion of human knowledge than most. People are very selective in their opinions of the value of human knowledge: that it is good for science and making money and creating human power, but for religious and moral thinking it is somehow worthless. The Eternal is not confined by human concepts, but His will for us is extremely clear and would be unambiguous to everyone except for the corruption and evil of the human heart. Do good. Do not do evil. Resist evil.

But of course we want to own ourselves, we all want to be the boss. G-d would interfere with that.

And so our government kills babies along with terrorists in drone strikes, we treat animals in horrific ways in the name of our agriculture and food, we have abortions, we have crime and drugs, we are tearing up the land and poisoning the air and seas, heating the atmosphere, we oppress our fellow man in the name of capitalism, we spread porn and the objectification of women, we are all objectified by this system, actual Nazis march in our streets, the rich go on consuming and concentrating wealth and the poor are crushed, human arrogance is without limits, and all this goes on and on in the name of the Sovereign Self. The Sovereign Self is murdering ourselves and the world.

And you may ask, "where is your God?"

He sees. He knows. He is watching.

-

It is not human arrogance to submit to G-d's will and urge other human beings to do the same. It is human arrogance NOT to.

-

If people really believed in the value of life, the holiness of life, they could deduce most of  G-d's commands to us by simple reason. But they don't. They believe in the value of themselves only.  They are unholy because they regard life as unholy. Their unholiness is prior to and forms whatever they may think about the matter; what they think and what they will accept is determined first by the fact that they are unholy. Of course they think that G-d is nebulous and ambiguous and uncertain and far away, because if He weren't they couldn't be sovereign selves. Or rather, they still could be, but they would have to become aware of the consequences.