The Snare That Feels Like Relief
Plus: happy Jewish Day of Love!
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July 31, 2026 // 17 Av, 5786
This week, Rabbi Shira writes about the practice of rebuilding.
The second of the 10 commandments is: do not worship idols.
If any of you have a statue of Zeus at home that you’ve been quietly leaving offerings for, we should talk. But for the rest of us, idolatry can feel like the most solved problem in the whole Torah — a commandment with basically nothing left to do.
And yet the Torah will not let this one go. It returns to the prohibition against idolatry again and again, parsha after parsha, including this week’s, Eikev: וְלֹא תַעֲבֹד אֶת־אֱלֹהֵיהֶם כִּי־מוֹקֵשׁ הוּא לָךְ — “And you shall not worship their gods, for that would be a snare to you.”
What’s left to learn from a central idea we’ve already, apparently, mastered?
The Torah scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, who reads Torah through a literary and psychoanalytic lens, takes up this question through the story of the Golden Calf. She argues idolatry was never really about worshipping a physical object. It’s instead what happens when we follow anything — an idea, an institution, a person — so intensely that we let it think for us.
Remember that the calf was built as a replacement for Moses, who hadn’t come down the mountain when the people expected him to. She claims that the calf only makes sense because Moses had already become an idol to the Israelites long before the calf existed. Once you’ve done that to a person, doing it to an idol is barely even a step.
Why would anyone want to hand their own thinking over to someone or something else?
The psychologist Erich Fromm — a Jew who fled Nazi Germany — spent a career trying to answer a version of that question. He teaches that human beings basically have two choices in their lives: either to
find their footing in the world through genuine love and real, meaningful work, or
buy a sense of safety by attaching themselves to something else instead (read: an idol), paying for that feeling of safety with their own freedom and sense of self.
When we believe that our day-to-day lives have meaning — doing work that matters, caring for the next generation, building something that you know will outlast you — Fromm would say that we have no use for idols, whether they be a website that tells us what to think; a cause that hands us a ready-made identity instead of asking us to build one of our own; or even a group of people who make you believe that the size of your bank account is what matters most.
But nature abhors a vacuum, and a particular kind of emptiness shows up when the things that make life meaningful are no longer present. No children who need you home. No colleagues to partner with at work. No board that needs you to do the pre-reading for the upcoming meeting. The feeling of standing in a very large, very quiet room, with nothing in your hands and no one waiting to see what you’ll do with it.
Fromm would say that metaphorical empty room is exactly the danger. The less we’re required to answer to anything, the harder that much freedom is to hold, and the more we go looking for something, anything, willing to hand us a script instead. A grievance we can nurse. Someone who seems very sure of himself. Even, I daresay — and please forgive me — a fixation on exercise and the body. If you feel empty enough, it will hardly matter what fills the silence. Something always will.
I think this is why the Torah can’t stop repeating the idolatry prohibition. Building a life of meaning is not a one-and-done thing. Over the course of a life we have to keep rebuilding that meaning from scratch — after every job change, every life-cycle shift, every retirement party, every loss. It takes real effort every single time, which is exactly why it can’t be commanded once and checked off.
And every time, it would be so much easier to hand the interpreting over to someone else. Someone offering a clean, coherent, confident account of what’s happening and what it means is offering real relief — from confusion, from fear, from the sheer volume of things demanding our attention all the time. That relief is real. It’s also, this week’s parsha would remind us, exactly what a snare feels like right before it closes: not a threat, but an ease, a give in the ground that seems like nothing at all until it isn’t.
Refusing that relief, and insisting instead on finding our own way — with thought, with intention, by talking to people we trust, by trying and failing and trying again, by sitting with uncertainty longer than feels comfortable — takes bravery, and patience. It’s a muscle, and like any muscle, it only stays strong through use.
None of us, probably, is going home to a statue of Zeus. But when Shabbat is over and Sunday comes, we will need something on which to stake our claim, on which to build a meaningful life, or we will find something else that would very happily do our thinking for us, if we let it. Eikev reminds us to keep finding real work to do with our own head, our own heart, and our own two hands, so there’s less room for something else to move in and do our thinking for us.
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Before we go
Tu B’Av, aka Jewish Valentine’s Day, was last week. If you’re looking for a good excuse to get your sweetheart something special or have a nice dinner, you’ve got one! Read more about Tu B’Av and tell us how you’re celebrating Jewish love in the comments.
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Shabbat Shalom Chutzsquad!