Addictive Idolatry

“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” Exodus 20:4-6 NIV

Image – A friend of mine who is a Catholic priest used to tell me, “Our addictions kept us alive until God’s grace could find us.” Addictions are our hiding place when the world is not safe. Becoming human entails communicating who we truly are in a place where we feel safe enough for intense personal disclosure, but when we don’t feel that we will be accepted with all our warts and scars, we retreat to a safe place we make for ourselves. The psychological goal of addiction is safety. Unfortunately, choosing an addictive safe house leaves us exactly where we sought escape. We just didn’t notice what was happening.

The yetzer ha’ra is the life force that keeps us going. It provides the willpower to stay alive when we are threatened with extinction, both physical and psychological. The yetzer ha’ra is the reason we gasp for air when it would be easier to just let life go. It refuses to let us die. But because it is the will to live, it will do whatever is necessary to stay alive and when there is no safe place in the world, it hides us from the world in inner fantasy. It creates a world that blocks out the threat of reality. The result is that we do not deal with the world as it truly is, and that means we cannot grow because growth can only happen when we confront the painful reality of being alive in this world.

The yetzer ha’ra is simply doing what it must do, what it is supposed to do, but in the process the by-product of the will to live is the progressive pathway to death. In this role, the yetzer ha’ra is essentially self-defeating, internally contradictory, and the ultimate threat to life. It just doesn’t appear that way. The actions of the yetzer ha’ra seem to offer a safe haven but this safe haven is really an execution chamber. The reason our self-constructed addictive safe houses are really death row prison cells involves the word pesel. Usually translated “idol,” pesel is derived from a word that means, “to hew, to shape.” Since physical idols are shaped by craftsmen, the connection is obvious. But is that the end of the story? Is this commandment simply a prohibition against little statues of Jesus, religious jewelry, or a golden Buddha? Abraham Heschel points out how easily human beings move from possessing a symbol of a god to worshipping the symbol as if it were a god. Perhaps the Bible itself falls under this warning. Our theological arguments often seem to be about worshipping the Bible rather than the God revealed in the Bible.

But there is another aspect to “idol” that suggests a different application. While pesel is directly associated with the skills of physical construction, could it not also be connected with the psychological skills of rebuilding the world to fit my needs? Don’t we all, in some degree or another, have the capacity to reshape our worlds into safe houses for fragile egos? Isn’t addictive retreat from a brutal world actually a form of pesel? If you think that it just might be, then there are some serious and frightening consequences.

Since the active construction of a different world removes us from God’s creation (no matter how terrible that creation has become), this protective maneuver of the yetzer ha’ra brings death instead of life. It is a form of idolatry. God is the god of life. Within us is the option of serving the God of life (the yetzer ha’tov), an option that requires us to operate within the fractured, threatening world; and the option of serving ourselves (the yetzer ha’ra), an option to create a world less threatening, a world that God did not create. Serving this self-constructed world violates the commandment, “You shall

not make for yourself any representation or any likeness of what is in heaven or on the earth or beneath the water under the earth.” Are we not “on the earth”? When we create the artificial safe houses of our addictions, are we not constructing a misrepresentation of God’s true creation? Doesn’t that entail that addiction is really idolatry? And isn’t idolatry the most serious of all sins of mankind?

Woe to us, those who have no safe place in the world. We will survive, but we will survive as idolaters, cut off from real life, wasting away in our self-constructed death row cells. We’ll have company, no doubt, but we won’t have communication for communication requires vulnerability and vulnerability means risk, the very risk that we wish to avoid. Yes, addictions kept us alive in the interim. But they become solitary confinement cells if we don’t exit when grace arrives.

How we exit is another story.

Topical Index: idol, addiction, pesel, Exodus 20:4-6