The Value of Idolatry

As a category of halakhically prohibited conduct for Jews, the paper argues, avoda zara makes little difference; a dead letter that does not merit rehabilitation. And the same applies to avoda zara as a category of gentile conduct against which Jewish identity is defined. Here too, inappropriate otherness in general trumps idolatry per se as the category that informs relations to other religions, rendering the difference between idolatrous and non-idolatrous religions largely insignificant.

However, the establishment of Jewish statehood raises a different halakhic problem, which in light of the alarming surge of anti-Christian rhetoric in religious Zionist rabbinic circles, demands urgent attention. The type of modern Western state Israel aspires to be is obligated not merely to tolerate the presence of its various communities, but to assume responsibility for their safety and right to flourish. However, although halakha comes reasonably well-equipped to tolerate the presence of religiously inappropriate forms of life, there exist no halakhic resource to allow representatives of the state to act as their active enablers – which, in the case of Israel’s Christian communities, for example, is precisely the responsibility of, say, the ministries of religious affairs and education! Today, Maimonides (who famously deemed Christianity idolatrous) is read in the heartland of religious Zionism as licensing theologically justified institutional and legal abuse of the rights of Israeli Christians to their property, their livelihood, their institutions and very way of life. Nowhere else in the world does the problem of idolatry raise its head for Jews as it is beginning to do here.

A solution, the paper argues, can be found in the Talmudic literature’s profoundly significant normative discourse with pagan, and later Christian Rome, which it envisaged at once as a wholly religiously inappropriate form of life, yet as offering rabbinic Judaism a highly valued normative civilizing challenge.