This week’s parsha opens with a familiar refrain. God offers us blessing and curse, blessings for obedience to the commandments and curses for disobedience. This obedience is deeply and intimately attached to the worship of God alone. Keeping kosher means nothing if, at the same time, you’re worshiping Baal or Asherah, which is why the parsha continues on in the same vein by commanding the Israelites to destroy all the altars of the Canaanites. God wants them to remove the temptation and remain faithful to his worship; they are not even to copy the Canaanite worship practices. This is further emphasized with the commandments to establish one centralized Temple for all sacrifices when they settle. No longer will the people be able to offer their own sacrifices. One God for a unified nation in one sacred location.

            In chapter 13, we receive instructions on how to recognize a false prophet. In short, anyone who advocates the worship of another god must be rejected, even if their message is accompanied by signs and wonders and accurate predictions of the future. The Torah states that God allowed the false prophet to perform signs and wonders as a test. Miracles, or the appearance thereof, prove nothing as far as the Torah is concerned. What matters is that we love God and obey God’s commandments, doing “what is right in the eyes of Hashem” (13:4,19).

            The impression I get from passages like this one, is that the entire Torah, the entire system of mitzvot, is the way of ensuring our continuing exclusive devotion to God. But why is this the overriding concern of the Torah? In the ancient world, the worship of many gods was the norm. This exclusive devotion to Hashem as the only God was unique. Why is it that God insists on this point?

            I believe the answer lies in a deeper understanding of God based on the Divine Name. The name that God revealed to Moses at the burning bush is a variation of the verb ‘to be.’ God’s name therefore is something like Being or ‘Was-Is-Will-Be.’ What I, and many theologians, take from this is that God is the totality of all Being, all creatures exist as finite aspects of the Infinite Divine.

            As such, Hashem is not simply one being among many, like the gods of the ancient polytheistic religions. God is the “Ground of Being” as the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich argued. To understand God as Being-itself is to understand that no finite thing, no limited being, can fully express the Divine. Therefore, to call any limited being a god is to misunderstand what Divinity is. It is quite simply a falsehood, and as we know God is Truth.

            More importantly, to elevate a limited being to the status of God is to put disproportionate emphasis on one aspect of God. To illustrate, let’s examine two attributes of God. Justice and mercy are contradictory attributes that we assign to God. Although justice and mercy often contradict one another, we understand that both are good and holy ideals to uphold. But, in our tradition, we are taught that if God upheld strict justice, not a single thing would be able to endure because of our sins; but if God were entirely merciful, wickedness would overrun the earth, ultimately leading to death and destruction as well. God must balance these two attributes in some way that is beyond our understanding for existence to continue. If we worshipped them separately as gods, they would not be in harmony, merely in conflict, and we would run the risk of placing too much emphasis on one or the other.

            For our world to be a cosmos rather than chaos, God must be the One who harmonizes the contradictory forces in our world. And to be the One, he must be the only One, infinite with all-Power and Knowledge and Goodness. Anything less than this leads to chaos and destruction.

            This is not merely the case with justice and mercy, however, it is with all our moral ideals and values. Our values often come into conflict with one another. But we cannot worship any single attribute as the full expression of the Divine. We must understand that they are grounded in something greater than ourselves, the Divine One, the Source and Substance of all. Learning to balance them, learning to do what is right, is a never-ending process which can only be achieved with a clear focus on Hashem as the Source of all goodness. This is why we are to follow God’s commandments, walk in God’s ways, and listen for his voice. It is why we must worship God as a unified community, because God’s Presence is among us when we celebrate and learn from one another. Far from being a matter of mere numbers, the prohibition on idolatry is a deep insight into the reality at the Ground of our being.