We are learning the 13 principles of the Jewish faith. Previously, we analyzed Principle 1: God exists and 2: God is one . Today we will learn Principle 3: God does not have a body.
The famous text ANI Maamin says: “The Creator, blessed be His name, has no bodily form or bodily conditions that affect Him. He cannot be compared with [or represented by] anything [human] at all “.
Our first patriarch, Abraham, not only formulated the idea that God is “one”. He also understood that HaShem is “invisible”, i.e, that He has no body or image. And that His existence is categorically different from ours. This revelation was perhaps more revolutionary than the idea of the unity of God. To better understand the magnitude of the amazing revolution carried out by Abinu Abraham, I will describe very briefly how pagan civilizations viewed their gods and idols.
To attribute to God an image, a figure or even a human condition is called “anthropomorphism”, and is one of the most characteristic features of pagan religions. The pagan gods have bodies of human forms. They are born and die. They have desires and passions, and they fight against each other. These gods, in every way, were created in the image and likeness of the men who conceived them.
The pagan gods did not give away anything for free to humankind. They did not care at all about the fate of humanity. They had excessive human passions and boundless cruelty by which, among other things, parents were able to kill their own children and children their own parents. The main affair of the gods was “conspiring against each other”, guided by an insatiable thirst for power. Take, for example, Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks, a “very advanced” civilization. His father, Cronus had six children, but he was warned that one of them would dethrone him. Cronus ate (sic.) his own children one by one. When the turn of the sixth, Zeus, arrived, Cronus’ wife Rhea deceived him and wrapped a stone in a blanket, which was swallowed by Cronus thinking he was destroying his threatening son. When Zeus grew up, he decided to avenge his brothers killing his father. But before killing him, he made him drink a poisonous potion that made him disgorge his siblings. Zeus was a very promiscuous god, with unbridled passions which he could not control. He even had children with human-women (many women who were afraid to admit an act of infidelity or rape, claimed that they had become pregnant by a god). Zeus spent his time constantly fighting against those who aspire to take his power, who were not few. Zeus, like all pagan gods, was so busy in his adventures, wars and the satisfaction of his urges, that he had no time, and absolutely not interest in the affairs of humans. If Zeus unleashed a storm, it was not because he had compassion for humanity and sent them the much needed rain. It was because Zeus had to fight his own enemies, and attacked them with lightning, or deafened them with thunders.
These gods were a (superlative) reflection of the appetites, and the lowest and suppressed instincts of the humans who conceived them (usually men of power). These gods were not worshipped out of love, but strictly for convenience. The pagan priests said for example, that if ten warriors were sacrificed to Zeus, Zeus would absorb their spirit and thus he will be better prepared to fight against his enemies, the Titans. In exchange for this useful sacrifice, Zeus would made rain in Athens or would unleash his lightnings upon the enemies of the Greeks.
This brief illustration tries to show the reader what ABODA ZARA was all about, and help us understand a little better the magnitude of the revolution that Abinu Abraham carried out, among people who were, they and their gods, much more primitive and savages than the Greeks.
Abraham Abinu’s fight against anthropomorphism was certainly the most important revolution in the history of human thought. And, as expected, it caused many reactions against him and his descendants.
We all know the Midrash that says that Abraham physically destroyed the idols of his father Terah. But we must also understand that the iconoclastic mission of Abraham went much further than that. A single man, with one single idea–the belief that HaShem, the true God, has no image, no human needs, no human traits, nor human likeness–disrupted the lies of the idol-worshippers, unmasked their deceiving leaders, and dissolved the foundations of all pagan civilizations, from the time of Abraham until today.
