פסילי אלהיהם תשרפו באש לא תחמד כסף וזהב עליהם ולקחת לך פן תוקש בו כי תועבת ד' אלקיך הוא (“The idols of their gods you shall burn with fire; you shall not covet and take for yourself what silver and gold is upon them, lest you be ensnared by it, for it is an abomination of Ha-Shem your G-d;” VII, 25).
The Talmud goes on to detail what is permitted and what forbidden: הנכרים העובדים את ההרים ואת הגבעות, הן מותרין ומה שעליהן אסורין כו' ר' יוסי הגלילי אומר אלהיהם על ההרים ולא ההרים אלהיהם, אלהיהם על הגבעות ולא הגבעות אלהיהם. ומפני מה אשירה אסורה? מפני שיש בה תפיסת ידי אדם וכל שיש בה תפיסת ידי אדם אסור (“The foreigners who worship the mountains and the hills, [the mountains and hills] are permitted and what is upon them is forbidden.... Rabbi Yossi ha-Galili says, Their gods are on the mountains, the mountains are not their gods; their gods are on the hills, the hills are not their gods. And why is an asheira forbidden? Because it has tfisath yad [i.e., it has been handled by human beings], and whatever has tfisath yad is forbidden;” עבודה זרה מ"ה., ע"ע רמב"ם הל' עבודה זרה פ"ח ה"א-ג ושו"ע יו"ד סי' קמ"ה סע' א').
An asheira, it will be remembered, is a tree dedicated to idolatrous purposes in the Canaanite cult. Trees can be handled by human beings; the seeds must be planted, the young trees tended, and so on. As a rule, this is not the case with mountains or hills, and so they cannot have been created for such purposes, and hence ought not be prohibited.
But is that really so?
Elsewhere, the Talmud discusses the war between Israel and Og, king of the Bashan. Og, it will be remembered, was a prodigious giant; during the struggle, the Talmud tells us, אמר מחנה ישראל כמה הוי, תלתא פרסי? איזיל ואיעקר טורא בר תלתא פרסי ואשדי עלייהו ואקטלינהו. אזל עקר טורא בר תלתא פרסי ואייתי על רישי' וגו' (“Og said, The camp of Israel is how large? Three [square] parsei; I shall go and uproot a mountain of three [square] parsei and throw it upon them and kill them. He went and uprooted a mountain of three [square] parsei and raised it over his head....” ברכות נ"ד:).
A parsa is a unit of linear measure equivalent to about 3.8 km (we said that Og was a formidable giant). The Talmud’s insistence that Og in fact lifted this uprooted mountain over his head demonstrates that his intent was neither idle boast nor wishful thinking; at the same time, it also demonstrates that for him, at least, the mountains of the Bashan had tfisath yad, and were capable of human manipulation. If so, and if the principle is indeed enshrined in halacha that whatever has tfisath yad can be rendered forbidden by being used for idolatrous purposes, why, indeed, were the mountains not forbidden?
B.
If we go a bit further in our Talmudic research, we discover that the Canaanites ought not have had the ability to render anything in the Holy Land unusable through their base rites, מכדי ירושה היא להם מאבותיהם, ואין אדם אוסר דבר שאינו שלו (“since it is an inheritance to [Israel] from their forefathers, and no one can render forbidden an article which is not his;” עבודה זרה נ"ג:). As Rashi clarifies the matter: הארץ וכל המחובר לה ירושה לישראל היא מאבותיהם שהרי לאברהם נאמר "כי לך אתננה" וגויים שבאו אחרי כן לא יכלו לאסרן בהשתחואה (“the land and everything connected to it is an inheritance to Israel from their forefathers, for it was said to Avraham, ‘to you I shall give it’, and the nations who came afterward were unable to prohibit [even the trees in it] by bowing to them”).
If this is the case, it would appear that the Canaanites’ handling of asheiroth and dedicating them to cultic purposes should not have denied their use to Israel, since the asheiroth, or anything else growing out of the sacred soil, were never really their property.
So what went wrong? אלא מדפלחו ישראל לעגל גלו אדעתייהו דניחא להו בעבודת כוכבים וכי אתו עובדי כוכבים שליחותא דידהו עבדו (“But since Israel had worshipped the [golden] calf, they revealed that in their opinion they were comfortable with idolatry, and so when the [non-Jewish] idolators arrived, they were acting on [Israel’s] behalf”), the gmara concludes. In other words (continues Rashi), הלכך הויא עבודת כוכבים של ישראל ואינה בטילה עולמית (“Therefore, the idols were Israel’s, and could never be nullified”) save by destruction, as the Torah commands.
So it would seem that our question returns: If the asheiroth belong to Israel because of the tell-tale revelation at the incident of the calf, and because tfisath yad applies to them, why are the mountains of the Bashan not prohibited, since Og had tfisath yad in them, and they were likewise used for idolatrous purposes?
C.
We turn to yet another Talmudic source, where we learn: מתים שהחי' יחזקאל עלו לארץ ישראל ונשאו נשים והולידו בנים ובנות כו' ומאן נינהו מתים שהחי' יחזקאל? אמר רב אלו בני אפרים שמנו לקץ וטעו כו' והרגום אנשי גת (“The dead men whom Yechezqel revived [cf. Ezekiel XXXVII, 1-12] came to Eretz Yisra’él and married women and sired sons and daughters... And who were the dead men whom Yechezqel revived? Said Rav, 'They were bnei Efrayim who calculated the end [of the Egyptian exile] and erred... and were killed by the men of Gath;” סנהדרין צ"ב:, רש"י שם).
The bnei Efrayim, smarting and impatient under the Egyptian yoke, endeavoured to figure out how much longer their suffering would last. Based upon the calculation, some of them made a break for it, and succeeded in escaping from Egypt. But they were tragically, grievously wrong in their estimate, and were slaughtered by the warlike Plishtim of Gath. Indeed, their bones still littered the eastern approach of the coastal route to the Holy Land at the time the Exodus actually took place (cf. Exodus XIII, 17, Emeth l’Ya’âqov, ad loc.).
A little thought reveals the tremendous implications of this historical fact. A significant group of bnei Yisra’él who had died before the Exodus, and therefore were not in any way implicated in the incident of the calf, were subsequently resuscitated by Yechezqel ha-navi, and rejoined Israel. These men, at least, had not lost their original status as staunch monotheists and opponents of idolatry in all its forms.
Concerning the Bashan, the Torah tells us: וכל הבשן ממלכת עוג נתתי לחצי שבט המנשה (“And all of the Bashan, the kingdom of Og, I gave to the half-tribe of M’nashe;” Deuteronomy III, 13). If we then turn to Joshua XVI, 1-4, we read: ויצא הגורל לבני יוסף כו' וינחלו בני יוסף מנשה ואפרים וגו' (“And the lot of the sons of Yosef came out... And the sons of Yosef, M’nashe and Efrayim, inherited.....”).
Even though M’nashe and Efrayim were classed as tribes in their own right, they retained an organic link as sons of Yosef, and their territorial holdings in the Holy Land were assigned jointly, to both together.
In other words, a significant number of bnei Yoséf had had nothing at all to do with the calf, and so their title to the land was unsullied by it. It is for that reason, it seems to me, that the mountains of the Bashan were not forbidden them, despite the tfisath yad exhibited by Og.
D.
A little more thought reveals that our story appears to take place within a rather large time-frame. The bnei Efrayim attempted their abortive get-away at some point before the Exodus. From the Exodus (and the golden calf) to the invasion of Eretz Yisra’él was a span of 40 years. The period of the Judges (including the conquest of the land) lasted some four centuries. The combined reigns of Kings Sha’ul and David total some 43 years, after which Shlomo ascended the throne and built the First Temple, which stood for 410 years. It is not clear precisely when Yechezqel revived the dry bones, but he himself tells us that his prophetic career began in the thirtieth year of the Babylonian Exile.
Add it up, and it approaches a millennium from the golden calf to the likely time the bnei Efrayim rejoined Israel; yet, for all that time, the mountains of the Bashan were permitted to their inhabitants on account of the bnei Efrayim. This comes to tell us something of the true nature of our environment.
The ôlam, our universe, is a closed, self-contained continuum dimensioned along four axes: Height, Length, Width, and Time, a box of contoured space-time, if you will. Its self-containedness means that we are constrained to physical perceptions along those four axes. But our universal “box” is itself contained, located within a metaphysical realm of non-space/non-time. Chazal explain one of the most puzzling appellations of the Divine, ha-Maqom (literally, “the Place”): שהוא מקומו של עולם ואין עולמו מקומו (“For He is the place of the ôlam, and His ôlam is not His place;” ב"ר פס"ח סי' ט'). G-d is not subject to the physical and temporal constraints to which we are subject. He created them for us to hide reality from us (the root meaning of ôlam is “hide”) so that we can exercise our free choice.
The Torah itself tells us this at the beginning: B’réshith bara Eloqim begins the Torah, a phrase which Rashi finds untranslatable, שאין לך ראשית במקרא שאינו דבוק לתיבה שלאחריו (“for the term réshith does not occur in Scripture unless it is bound to the term after it”), which usually requires the grammatical realtionship in Hebrew called smichuth, in which two nouns are in apposition; yet, réshith is followed by the verb bara.
The Ramban explains that the phrase can only mean that הקב"ה ברא כל הנבראים מאפיסה מוחלטת, ואין לנו בלשון הקדש בהוצאת היש מאין אלא ל' ברא (“the Holy One, Blessed is He, created all created things from absolute nihility. We have no way in the Holy Language to express bringing forth something from nothing save the term bara”). Réshith, then, is a word which has no referent whatever before it; to have meaning, it must be דבוק לתיבה שלאחריו, bound to what follows, in this case, the physical ôlam.
Even though we are within the ôlam, bound to physical means of perception, we are in fact not of it; our essences, our neshamoth, belong to Meqomo shel ôlam, and our actions here are never simply what they seem. Idolatry, worship of the “forces of nature,” does not seem at all unreasonable within the parameters of the temporal ôlam; viewed from the perspective of the atemporal Meqomo shel ôlam, it is seen as the outrage it is. Nevu’a, “prophecy,” is the Divinely granted faculty to perceive metaphysical reality. The atemporality demonstrated by the fact that the mountains of Bashan remained unsullied by idolatry. Despite Og’s tfisath yad, in the merit the bnei Efrayim who had left the world so much earlier and re-entered it so much later, is primâ facie an indication of the fundamental, ultimate unreality of the ôlam and the true nature of our total environment.
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