Q&A: That They Bow to Vanity and Emptiness
That They Bow to Vanity and Emptiness
Question
Honorable Rabbi, hello,
I sometimes pray in a Conservative synagogue, and in Aleinu they omit the phrase “that they pray to vanity and emptiness.”
I wonder: isn’t it disrespectful toward Heaven to say that the gentiles bow to vanity and emptiness when they worship our God?
After all, among us too there are people who anthropomorphize God, and among them too there are people who anthropomorphize God; and among us too there are Neoplatonic and Neo-Aristotelian philosophers, and among them too.
I thought of making a pilpul-style argument that even those among us who anthropomorphize rely on the view of Moses, about whom it says, “and I know you by name” — meaning that he knew only by the name, that all of God’s attributes are entirely equivocal, and we only have His proper name, as in Maimonides’ view, which is the plain meaning of Scripture. But at the time their religions were founded — Christianity and Islam — they thought only in anthropomorphic terms. Muhammad was ignorant, and the Council of Nicaea upheld the Trinity. And the fact that there are philosophers among us and among them does not matter; rather, it is the foundation of the religion that determines the direction of the prayer.
And this is in the spirit of “This is my God and I will glorify Him; my father’s God and I will exalt Him,” as in The Duties of the Heart, in the Gate of Unity and Faith, that even one who does not know the Name follows his fathers.
But that sounds to me like too much pilpul. Because in the end, even the “Heaven” of “Torah from Heaven” in the minds of the Jewish masses is so anthropomorphic, and the idea of knowing by the name and of “the True One” is so far from the intuition of the masses, that what difference does ancestral tradition make when cognition is so weak?
I would be glad to hear your opinion,
Many thanks,
Ofir
Answer
It depends which gentiles. There are gentiles who do not worship our God, and when this prayer was instituted they were the majority (by the way, even today they are the majority).
This sentence is not directed at the gentiles, but defines us as those who do not belong to them. The “they” are the idol worshipers. I see no reason to tamper with this sentence.
There is no such thing as idol worshipers. Most human beings want to give thanks to and be close to their Creator, each in his own way. For them, the statue symbolizes the Creator — it is certainly not the Creator — they are not as stupid as Judaism likes to make them out to be.