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IN HA'ARETZ and in earlier correspondence, I pointedly used the provocative word idolatry. Though there is no better English translation of the Hebrew term avodah zarah, I have come to realize that Christians who read that Judaism regards incarnationist theology as idolatrous—even if only for Jews—see this as an offensive assertion that they worship the icons themselves as gods. Since neither Christians nor Lubavitch hasidim do this, I will henceforth use the Hebrew term, except, of course, in quotations from material written before I made this decision.
I have already noted that the literal meaning of avodah zarah is foreign worship, but this cannot serve as either a useful definition or a routine translation. Islam, for example, with a conception of God essentially identical to that of Judaism, is not avodah zarah, though its mode of worship is certainly foreign to Judaism. The best definition I can muster is ‘the formal recognition or worship as God of an entity that is in fact not God’. For Jews, any human being is such an entity. Even the generic worship of the Creator God with the intention of including one of these entities is avodah zarah when practised by a Jew, though there is surely a major distinction between paganstyle polytheism and avodah zarah in a monotheistic mode. A detailed discussion of the evidence for this position, which I have relegated to Appendices II and III, would unduly burden the reader at this point, when it is time to resume our narrative.
Within days of my article's appearance, Ha'aretz published a brief response entitled ‘Al tige'u bimeshih. ai’ (literally, ‘Do Not Touch My Anointed Ones’, a reference to Psalm 105: 15) by Rabbi Gedalyah Axelrod, one of the signatories of the ruling requiring belief in the Rebbe's messiahship and the head of a rabbinic court in Haifa. He described the quotations about the Rebbe's divinity as ‘anomalous comments which should not have been made’, arguing that ‘these exceptions are being taken care of by Chabad rabbis everywhere by means of education and guidance’. As for the messianist ruling,
I would like to make one thing absolutely clear to David Berger and to everyone else.
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