Shnayim Yomi - Bereshit - Shishi - #6 - Rabbi Joey Haber - The Danger of Misplaced Devotion

Do you have a hero? Like a celebrity that you're all into. I want to tell you why that's dangerous. In she she in sefer bereishit we start to get the generations from Adam to Noah, the 10 generations. Seven out of 10 are in this aliya. And one of those generations is called dor enosh. The Rambam famously says that this is the generation that started idol worship. But Rashi the based on the pasuk Rashi says something interesting. Here's what the pasuk says. Vayikra shemo enosh his name was enosh az hu chal likro beshem Hashem. And then he started to call out in the name of Hashem. Doesn't that sound beautiful? He called out in the name of Hashem. That sounds so admirable. And we read Rashi and he flips it to the opposite. Hu chal likro beshem Hashem means they started to desecrate the name of Hashem by calling other people gods. And as Rashi as the Rambam famously says, he first they started thinking that the the stars and the sun were conduits to Hashem and then they started worshipping images of the star and the suns and before you know it that became the idols and they didn't know Hashem was there anymore. But why does the pasuk say it this way? Az hu chal likro beshem Hashem. The pasuk say it in a way that sounds so innocent. They started to call out in the name of Hashem. I think the pasuk is teaching a very important lesson. Once you start to call other people and treat other people and worship other people like they're gods it's very dangerous. There's no one who's a celebrity. No one is someone that should be worshipped. Everybody's human. Yes, there's people to look up to. There's people to learn from. You can learn from a lot of people. There's people that maybe there's parts of them that you want to imitate, but don't worship anybody. So the idea of having celebrity on someone's wall or the idea of talking about someone too much, all of that is dangerous because it starts innocent and before you know it you put too much stock in a human being. They started by worshipping things that might have been holy or might have made sense, and before you know it, it turned out to full-blown idol worship. We, as a Torah Jew, we worship Hashem, nothing else. Everyone else there's things to learn from, but there's no one to worship.