Judges, Chapter 17 - False Worship | Prophets of Israel Daily

[music] >> Shalom friends. Welcome back to Judges chapter 17. Shalom Jeremy, good to see you. Good to be here. Um this is uh this is a good one. You know, it's sort of a puzzle. I want to open with a puzzle. [music] You know, yesterday Jeremy, you brought us through the final act in Gaza, the prayer, the pillars, the 3,000 Philistines crushed under collapsing stone. You know, the most dramatic death of any shofet, of any judge. Tamut nafshi im Plishtim. May my soul die with the Philistines. Among the most famous last words in history. And it was the closing scene of the era of the great deliverers. So we open chapter 17 expecting what? A successor, a new salvation, right? Another deliverance. Instead, the book of Judges pulls the camera back into the quiet hills of Ephraim. And we meet a man named Micha, named Micah. No no enemies here. No oppression. No Hashem speaking. Just a household, a mother, and some silver. Why does the Tanakh pivot to here? Why does Sefer Shoftim, the Book of the Judges, climax not with a great savior, but with a private idol shrine? It's like anticlimactic. It's painful. If I wrote I wouldn't have written it that way. But it's clearly there's a greater wisdom here. But that is the question chapter 17 is going to answer, I believe. Right? So let's let me walk through it. Verse 1. Vayehi ish mehar Ephraim. There's a man from the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Miyahu. Miyahu. Who is like Hashem? That's what his name actually means. The very cry of the sea. Mi kamocha ba'elim Hashem. Right? Who who is like you, O Hashem? By the second verse, the navi, the prophet, dropped the divine ending of his name and sort of like a nickname they call him Micha. As if the original name was already too too much for him. Sort of beyond what he, I guess, deserves. At least that's how I feel, right? He's stolen 1,100 silver pieces from his own mother. She had pronounced a curse on whoever took them. And then he confesses. And his mother, hearing that the the thief was her own son, immediately overrides her curse with a blessing. Right, verse two, baruch beni la Hashem. Blessed be my son to Hashem. And then she does something that appears to make no sense at all. Right, verse three. Hakdesh ikdashti et ha kesef la Hashem. I hereby dedicate the silver into Hashem from my hand, from my son, to make a graven image and a molten image. You heard that right. I dedicate the silver to Hashem. She says to make an idol? This is not paganism that we recognize. There's no ba'al here, no foreign god imported from Sidon. Right, Micha's mother believes she is honoring Hashem. The silver is offered in his name. The image will be made for his sake. The whole project in her mind is an act of devotion. And that is exactly the danger. You know, Ari, that's exactly what the Rambam, Maimonides, describes as the origin of idolatry. And so, that's how it started in the world. In the beginning, it didn't start with like a rebellion against God. It began with sincere people that reasoned like, "Okay, God created the sun and the stars. It must honor him." And then, in honor to honor him, they were honoring the sun and the moon and the stars. And then eventually, you know, generation by generation the intermediaries thickened until the original object of devotion, Hashem, was forgotten and only those proxies remained. And so Micah's mother is a textbook case of exactly this. It's like bringing us back to the beginning where there's absolute idolatry that starts off with really good intentions. She's not a heretic. She's a believer who's just slipped away. And that's exactly the way that the book of Judges is going now. It's showing us that we are so far away from Sinai that we've now entered into idolatry that looks like done in order to serve God. Exactly. And what follows reads almost like an inverted Mishkan, an inverted Tabernacle. Micah builds a Beit Elohim inside his house. He fashions an ephod, right? The What's it called? The um The vestment that the Cohen Gadol wears. The The vest, right? He He acquires teraphim. He consecrates one of his sons to serve as a priest. Every element of legitimate divine service has a counterfeit in Micah's home. And he doesn't seem to even know that he's sinning. He calls his shrine a Beit Elohim. It appears that he truly believes that he has built something holy. Then comes the verse that will echo throughout every tragic chapter still to come in this book. Right? Verse 6: Biyemey Mahem Ein Melech B'Yisrael. In those days there is no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. We tend to read this as a complaint about political anarchy. But the chapter we were reading isn't about lawlessness, it's about religion, divine service. Micha is not robbing caravans or or murdering travelers, he's worshipping sincerely, enthusiastically, expansively. The problem is it it's not that he's doing what is wrong in his own eyes. The problem, my friends, is that he's doing what is right in his own eyes. When the eye becomes the arbiter of true divine service, what do you get? Micha's house. A ford and teraphim, right? Idols and the vest side by side. Blessing an idol in the same breath, a son consecrated as a priest because he happened to be available. Right? The Torah's insistence that we do not get to invent the true divine service. Lo taaseh ken laashem elokecha, you shall not do like these things to Hashem your God. It rests on that very point. Religion that conforms itself to whatever my heart desires stops being true. It becomes um self-portrait in a religious medium, right? And and then a a young man enters the picture. A Levite sojourning. He has left Beit Lechem Yehudah looking for a makom asher yumtza, somewhere to find his place. The geography is not incidental. Bethlehem from the tribe of Judah is the city of the future goel, the eventual birthplace of King David, the anointed redeemer of Israel. The man who walks out of that city is precisely the kind of man Israel needed, a Levite, son of Torah, called to correct and to instruct. But what he does instead is hire himself out to the very problem he was born to solve. Right? Micah who was somewhat entrepreneurial in his idolatrous enterprise immediately sees the upgrade. A Levite is better than a son. He hires him on the spot. Verse 10. A Sarah check a Liam in 10 shekels of silver per year and a suit of apparel and your sustenance. 10 silver pieces a year, clothing, food. He makes the offer and the Levite agrees. You know, Ari, it's worth pausing on what a Levite is supposed to be. Shevet Levi, the tribe of Levi, was given no portion in the land precisely so that his portion would be Hashem. He was meant to be the voice of Hashem and the Torah and chuva and the correction for people. And the Levite walks into Micah's house. He's the man that's supposed to walk in there and say, "No. That is not what Hashem asked. That is not how Hashem is served." But instead of serving the purpose for which he was created, he looks at the shrine, looks at Micah's like, "All right, how much?" And I think that that corruption that we're seeing here, it's not just that he joined an idol cult. It's that he used his credentials as a Levite and the Levite's signature on Micah's project is what makes it feel like there's an authentic service that's being taken place and you can see that a Levite becomes a cohen, the total confusion. And it just takes absolute idolatry trying turn it into the service of God. Yeah, you know, one could make the argument about certain elements of certain streams of modern Judaism, but I'm not even going to go there. It it It's about It's the modern equivalent of granting a certificate of kashrut on bacon. Bacon is kosher for the right price. I'll give you that certification. Right? And then comes the line that more than any other captures the spiritual disease of the chapter. Micha, gazing at his fully outfitted shrine, silver ephod, teraphim, and now an actual Levite in residence, declares verse 13. Ataya dati ki etav Hashem. Now I know that Hashem will do good unto me, seeing I have a Levite as a priest. Now I know. That's really the essence of why what idolatry is about. I want you to really take this to heart cuz I've been thinking a lot about this as I read this chapter. What is idolatry about? That's what it's about, certainty. Control. Assemble the right components, hire the right credentials, and divine favor is locked in. Hashem becomes a mechanism. Say the right words and you're good. Right? It's a mechanism, and divine service becomes the user manual of this mechanism. Micha is not asking what Hashem wants from him. He is calculating what he can extract from Hashem. It's not a relationship. You know, my high school rabbi would always say, it's it's a vending machine. This is the deepest line in the chapter. The whole project of avodah, of divine service, is to dismantle the now I know. Right? Avraham at the Akedah, Abraham when he was sacrificing Isaac, does not know. Iyov, Job, he didn't know. Moshe pleads with God, hodeeni et drakhecha. Please let me understand your ways. Let me know. Why did Moshe ask that? Because he doesn't know. Right? Micha thought you know, he he he solved the riddle of Hashem. He cracked the code. You know, Ari, the contemporary form of that isn't building shrines in Ephraim, obviously. It really lives in every place that we arrange the learning, the practice, the community, real and sincere-looking, around conclusions that we've already reached that are counterproductive. They're not really where the Torah is pointing us. They're not really where Hashem resides. I mean, without casting stones, it really lives inside Orthodox communities that are on the outside performing all the rituals and all the practices, but in their hearts, inside Israel, they're not serving alongside their brothers. Outside of Israel, they're making a new Jerusalem in places that there's not Hashem's place. And so, they are only doing what's right in their own eyes. And I think the Tanakh is the everlasting testimony that's showing us uh this is the way. And you can fall into something that looks like sincere worship where it's the exact opposite. And that's really what we need to learn. I'll tell you, Jeremy, I could judge, but I'm far from confident that I don't have a little bit of Micha in me as well. That there that there aren't places in my life where I'm not guilty of doing exactly that, taking what I already wanted, what already felt comfortable, what already suited me, and then hanging a mezuzah on it afterwards. So, now we can return to our opening question. Why does Sefer Shoftim, the Book of Judges, climax not with a great deliverer, but with a private idol shrine? And I think the answer is because the deepest threat to Israel was never the Plishtim or the Midianim. It was always this, the slow inward corruption of avodah itself, of the divine service, and having that corrupted. Samson could fight 3,000 Philistines. Gideon could route 120,000 Midianim. Dvorah and Barak could shatter Sisera's chariots, but none of them, no shofet, could save Israel from a religion built in its own image. From the moments everyone becomes the arbiter of their own divine service, no military victory matters. The ephod and the teraphim sit on the same shelf and we call it holy. This is why the chapter ends without judgment. The judgment is the chapter. The judgment is Micah standing satisfied in a house he calls a beit Elohim with a Levite he bought with silver he dedicated. "Certain Hashem will do good to him." Right? Not knowing that everything he has built is precisely what Hashem warned us against. The text leaves him there because the Torah trusts us to to feel that judgment just by viewing it. Right? And sitting in the hills of Judea today in these same hills where our Levite began his journey, this story unsettles in a it's just unsettling, you know, after everything Am Yisrael has carried these last years, there's no shortage of declarations offered in Hashem's name. Some of them, baruch Hashem, are real. Some of them are versions of Micah's mother handing over silver to make an image of what she already wanted. Micah would have been horrified to be called an idolater. He thought he was a baal teshuvah. He thought he was a man of great divine repentance, a returner of stolen silver, a builder of holy spaces, an employer of clergy. He thought he was doing what's right. That, the chapter telling us, that's the warning. May our houses become batei Elohim in truth, shaped by him, not shaped to flatter us. But the story isn't yet over, my friends. The Levite walks out of Micah's house in chapter 18, and what follows is the unraveling directly from this seed. So, stay tuned for chapter 18 tomorrow with Jeremy. But before we move on, and we're approaching the Book of Samuel, I want to share something close to my heart. You know, this Torah, this daily Navi, it costs something to produce. It costs time and effort and resources, and we do it because we believe with everything that we have that the world needs this right now. So, if you've been blessed by the Book of Judges, consider blessing someone else through the Book of Samuel. Uh sponsor a chapter or the whole book in memory of someone you've lost, in honor of someone you love, or simply as your way of saying, "I believe in this mission." It would mean the world to us out here in Judea. Reach out at the landofisrael.com or to me at re at the landofisrael.com. Hazak u'baruch, my friends. Be [music] strong and courageous. Bizrat Hashem, we'll see you tomorrow for Judges chapter 18.