By Rabbi Dovid Sapirman, Dean, Ani Maamin Foundation
The primary navi during the forty years leading up to the destruction of the first Beis Hamikdash was Yirmiyahu. After a massacre at the hand of Nevuchadnetzar’s army, the surviving Jews were forcibly marched to Bavel, beginning an exile that would last seventy years.
However, they were not the first to be sent into galus. A larger group had been taken eleven years earlier, and Yirmiyahu had written them a letter of chizuk. In it, he told them to remain staunch in their faith, and gave them responses for when the Babylonians attempted to entice them into idol worship. Tell the gentiles, he wrote, that our Creator has made the heavens and the earth in His infinite power, and the idols are nothing but foolishness, and in the end, “at the time they are visited upon, they will be destroyed.”
The simple meaning of this pasuk is that someday, all these idols would be destroyed by the enemies of Bavel. But Radak quotes a fascinating interpretation by the Kuzari. When you “visit” the idols intellectually by looking into them carefully, you will see that there is no substance in them.
Over the course of history, many belief systems have risen up with the goal of tearing down our belief in Torah. Various religions have laid claim to the one and only truth, with glorious promises to their followers; endless ideologies have enticed our people time and time again. All of them are baseless. All of them collapse like a house of cards under scrutiny.
Atheism, for example, bows to the idol of science, claiming that there is no intelligence behind anything in the universe; everything has come about by chance. But nothing in the natural world is purposeless. Every creature in existence has all the tools it needs to live precisely as it does. People and animals breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Why has our supply of oxygen not run out? Plants take in carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen! An intricate food chain supplies nutrition for all the billions of species on earth, from the biggest to the smallest. The complexity of a single leaf boggles the mind.
Those atheists who refuse to acknowledge this are determined not to admit that there is a Creator, in order to continue living without responsibility to a higher power. In moments of truthfulness, some of them have openly stated so.
“At the time they are visited upon, they will be destroyed.” When you investigate idols carefully, you discover that there is nothing there.
