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The Map and the Territory: Haftarat Shmot, Isaiah 27:6-28:13, 29:22-23

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January 8, 2015

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

     –Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 1946

What exactly is wrong with idolatry? In Haftarat Shmot, we know that it is wrong. Israel will triumph over the Canaanites, proclaims Isaiah, and

this will be the full fruit of the removal of his sin:
When he makes all the altar stones
    to be like limestone crushed to pieces,
no poles to [goddess] Astarte or incense altars
    will be left standing.
The fortified city stands desolate,
    an abandoned settlement, forsaken like the wilderness;
there the calves graze,
    there they lie down;
    they strip its branches bare.
When its twigs are dry, they are broken off
    and women come and make fires with them.

But why, exactly, is idolatry so awful? Isaiah does not claim here that every nation will worship the Lord, and presumably other nations will worship some entity. Many prophetic writings proclaim the absurdity of humanity worshipping the work of its own hands, and there is something to this, but there might be less than there seems at first.

When I was a boy, I attended my shul’s Junior Congregation. One Shabbat morning, we learned the Midrash of young Abram breaking the idols in his father’s store (Braishit Rabbah 38). Our teacher wanted us to re-enact the scene; I was chosen to play a man going to buy an idol. So I asked the Abram character for some idols. He said, “why would you worship an idol? It’s just wood and stone!”

I replied, “Well, I’m not worshipping the wood and the stone – they are symbols for the gods that I worship.”

The kid playing the Abram character didn’t know what to say. The teacher (who had not anticipated this) did not know what to say. I didn’t know what to say. I just figured that idol worshippers don’t worship the object exactly – it’s a symbol.

We moved on to the Aleinu. The teacher didn’t call on me again.

So once again we have the question: what is so wrong with “worshipping” idols if all you are doing is bowing down to a symbol of the god[s] that you are actually worshipping? It is wrong because idolatry represents profound philosophical and moral danger.

The great philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead called this danger the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The main form of the fallacy entails “taking the abstractions about some actuality that are focused on by some particular science (or science in general) due to its limited interests or methods, to be a complete description of the actuality in its concreteness”. Believe it or not, the above sentence represents some of Whitehead’s clearest prose, but he was getting at the problem sometimes known as “mistaking the map for the territory.”

Human beings try to understand the world and the universe. To do so, we create methods, models and constructs. There are a whole lot of good reasons for abstracting: it is useful and often necessary to study anything.

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