Everyone who has lived in the frum world, and especially
those who have questioned its norms, are familiar with what I call the taivos canard: the assertion that people
only have "questions" about frumkeit
because they're hedonistic cretins looking for excuses to throw off the ol hatorah and wallow in their taivos (base desires). This is often
said as though it's a truism, but occasionally someone will cite an authoritative
source in support. Most often the source is a gemara in Sanhedrin (63b) that says, "lo uvdo avodas kochavim ela l'hatir lahem arayos," "[People] don't worship idols except to
permit to themselves sexual licentiousness." They interpret this to mean
that people want to do aveiros, but they can't because they know Hashem will
punish them. So they come up with "questions" that allow them to
convince themselves that Hashem won't punish them after all, and they can do
whatever they want.
Like many such "sources," this one is taken wildly
out of context. The interpretation takes the statement as a metaphor for not
following halacha. "Idols"
is interpreted as representing rejecting
frumkeit, and "arayos" is interpreted as representing
base desires. So, "the only reason people
worship idols is to permit arayos to
themselves," becomes, "the only reason people reject frumkeit is to permit themselves to
indulge their base desires." The problem with this interpretation is that
the statement in the gemara is very
much not a metaphor.
The context of the statement is a discussion of the
prohibitions surrounding idol worship. This segues into the question of why the
Jewish people worshipped idols, and R' Yehuda provides an explanation:
Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: The Jewish people knew that idol worship is of no substance; they did not actually believe in it. And they worshipped idols only in order to permit themselves to engage in forbidden sexual relations in public, since most rituals of idol worship would include public displays of forbidden sexual intercourse.[1]
This isn't a metaphor about rejecting Judaism to assuage a
guilty conscience by someone who can't control himself. It's a literal
explanation of why someone would worship an idol he didn't believe had any
power: because he wanted access to the temple prostitutes. The "forbidden
sexual relations in public" R' Yehuda cites as the reason for the Jewish
people's idolatry is almost certainly a reference to the sacred prostitutes
that were common at pagan temples in the Ancient Near East. In particular, temple prostitutes
were strongly associated with Asherah worship, which was common among the ancient
Israelites.[2]
Not only isn't it a metaphor, but the ensuing discussion in
the gemara disputes the reason R'
Yehuda gives. R' Yehuda states that people only worshiped idols to permit themselves to have
sex in public with the temple prostitutes, and
the gemara proceeds to argue against him, and to bring proofs that the
Jewish people worshipped idols because they really believed in them! The quote,
like so many, is yanked out of context and used to make a polemical point, even
though in context it means nothing like what it's used to mean.
Of course, pointing out that a proof text used for an
argument doesn't really support the argument doesn't mean that the argument is
wrong. That this gemara doesn't mean
what people have come to use it for doesn't mean the taivos canard isn't true. It's really, really not, but this isn't
the place to explore all the reasons why it's not. It's enough here to note that
in an authority-based system like halacha
and frumkeit, arguments tend to rely
on authoritative sources to give them validity. The corollary is that if the
source used to bolster an argument doesn't really mean what it's being used to
mean, that significantly weakens the argument. So even if the taivos canard wasn't wrong for other reasons,
and even if we accept the system of knowledge of those who use it, the taivos canard is very weak even by the
rules of that system.
[1]
Translation from Sefaria.org
[2] The
Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. Qedesha:
Temple Prostitute. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/qedesha
