Rabbi Arthur Waskow, "Israel, Hillel, and Idolatry," TheShalomCenter.org, 12/16/13
What is idolatry? Worshipping any being – person, object, institution, community – as if it were Divine. “Carving it out” and “bowing down to it” as the Ten Commandments describe and forbid. (Exod. 20: 4). Not only “carving out” a physical object, a statue, but carving out from the One Great Flow of Life a piece that must not be criticized, not be questioned. A piece not only to be loved and honored for its usefulness and beauty, not only to be seen as a temporary aspect in service to that Unity — but treated as an Ultimate, Unchangeable good.
Rabbi Harold Schulweis
“The objects of idolatrous adorations, the Rabbis warned, were not in themselves evil. Stars, moon, trees, sun are not unholy. It is the worship of portions of creation as if they were the whole of creation that eclipses the unity of God’s world and profanes it. When institutions or ideologies arrogate to themselves exclusive truth and dismiss all others as aberrations, the plentitude and grandeur of Judaism are impoverished.
(Moment magazine, September, 1985)
Rabbi Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion: A Companion, published by Oxford University Press.
The Hasidic master, Shneur Zalman of Liady [1745-1813] sees idolatry not as a denial of God but as an attempt at insubordination. Man desires to have a little corner of life apart from God’s all‑embracing power, and the idols he sets up are his means of effecting the separation between God and that part of life man wishes to call completely his own. Hence, for the Rabbis, pride is equivalent to idolatry because both commit the same offence of insubordination.
“Pride is truly equivalent to idolatry. For the main root principle of idolatry consists in man’s acknowledgement of something existing in its own right apart and separate from God’s holiness, and does not involve a complete denial of God” (Tanya, chapter 22).