Why Worshipping the Sun Would Be Logical and Wrong

The argument starts with a reasonable question: if something does good in the world, why shouldn't we worship it?

The Letter and Its Dangerous Logic

The exchange is preserved in The Wars of God, a medieval kabbalistic work, in a passage titled Eve and the Lawgiver. It preserves letters between Jewish scholars debating how a person should relate to the intermediaries through which God acts. One side argued that the divine emanations, the Sefirot, contain both judgment and mercy and encompass everything, so focusing devotion on them is appropriate. The Emanator desires to manifest His actions through these instruments. Therefore direct your prayers toward the instruments, not the source.

The responding scholar did not dismiss this position. He understood its logic. Then he proceeded to destroy it.

The Sun Performs More Good Than Most Angels

If we should worship that which acts on God's behalf, he wrote, then consider the sun. The sun performs more good actions than almost anything in creation: it illuminates the earth, warms the soil, causes vegetation to grow, drives the seasons that make agriculture possible. If “acting on God's behalf” is the criterion for receiving worship, the sun qualifies. So does the moon. So do the stars. The earth produces food at God's direction. The water carries life from one place to another at God's direction. Scripture itself says “He makes winds His messengers, flaming fire His ministers” (Psalm 104:4). Should we pray to the fire?

The scholar presses the argument to its conclusion without mercy. The wind blows because God directs it. The earth yields because God commands it. Every agent in the created order is doing exactly what God wants it to do, more faithfully than any human being manages. By the logic of his correspondent, every one of them deserves worship. And that, of course, is precisely where the argument collapses under its own weight.

What the Sefirot Are Not

The Sefirot, the ten divine emanations through which the infinite En Sof (אֵין סוֹף) makes Himself knowable, are not sun and wind and water. They are something closer to the structure of God's own inner life, the forms through which the unknowable becomes approachable. But the scholar's point stands precisely because it cuts against the elevation of any intermediate, no matter how exalted. The Almighty commanded us to serve Him alone and warned against worshipping any other beside Him. This commandment was not issued before the universe had agents. It was issued in full awareness that God acts through intermediaries constantly, and precisely because God acts through them, they cannot receive what belongs to God alone.

The Voice at Sinai

The scholar takes the argument to its most grounded moment. “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2-3). This was spoken in the desert, during the Exodus, before the entire assembly of Israel. Not privately to a philosopher. Not encoded in mystical language requiring a specialist to decode. Out loud, in the wilderness, to everyone who had just crossed the sea. And then again through the prophet Isaiah: “I am the Lord; that is My name! And My glory I will not give to another” (Isaiah 42:8). The divine name and the divine glory are bound together. Distributing the glory to intermediaries, however exalted, is the one thing God explicitly refuses to allow.

The danger the scholar was describing is not theoretical. It is the precise error the Torah associates with the worst collapses in Israel's history: the moment when proximity to the divine becomes indistinguishable from worship of something other than the divine. The golden calf was made by people who had stood at Sinai. They did not think they were abandoning God. They thought they were building an appropriate intermediary to represent Him while Moses was absent. The catastrophe was not malice. It was a failure of the exact distinction this medieval scholar was trying to preserve.

The Scholar's Final Question

“You and I,” the scholar wrote to his correspondent, “stood before the Creator, who made us, and He did not desire that we worship any other, even though He has appointed agents to perform certain actions. Why should we not heed His voice and go worship that which He did not command us to worship?”

It is a question framed as rhetorical. The scholar already knows the answer. But the framing matters: you and I stood at Sinai. He is addressing his correspondent as someone who was present at the founding moment of the covenant, because according to rabbinic tradition, every Jewish soul that ever would exist was present at Sinai when the oath was sworn. The prohibition was not issued to strangers. It was issued to people who were there.

What You Are Permitted to Admire

The world is full of agents. The heavenly court is populated with powers that serve God's purposes with a precision and faithfulness no human approaches. They illuminate, they warm, they carry messages, they execute judgment. They are real. They are impressive. They are not what you pray to.

The question is still alive. Every time a tradition begins to treat a mediating figure, however sacred, however genuinely powerful, as the proper object of devotion, it is standing in the same place this scholar's correspondent was standing. The sun is genuinely magnificent. It does enormous good. That is exactly why the Torah had to say, out loud, in the wilderness, to everyone: not the sun.