The Man Who Made His Own Desires Into a God

There is a phrase in Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 10 that stops you cold: for Hillel the wicked, his own desires are his god. This is not describing the famous Hillel, the sage of the Second Temple period known for the golden rule and for patient teaching. This is describing a different figure, someone the Midrash uses as a type, an exemplar of a particular spiritual deformation that the Psalm is diagnosing.

The claim is more radical than it first appears. The Midrash is not saying that the wicked person ignores God. It is saying that the wicked person has replaced God with something else, and that the replacement is not an idol made of wood or gold but the person's own will. The wicked man has promoted his desires to the status of divine authority. He has made himself the object of his own worship.

What Does Self-Worship Look Like in Practice?

The Midrash continues its analysis with a connected observation: the wicked person praises himself only when his desires are fulfilled. When things go his way, he congratulates himself. When things go against him, he does not acknowledge a higher authority that might be correcting him. He does not repent, reconsider, or pray. He schemes to remove the obstacle.

This pattern, according to Midrash Tehillim, is the functional definition of wickedness. It is not primarily a list of prohibited actions. It is a posture toward the world and toward God, a posture in which the self is the ultimate reference point and all other claims are evaluated solely in terms of whether they serve the self's desires.

The contrast being drawn is with King David, the attributed author of the Psalm. David's psalms are full of self-examination, repentance, and acknowledgment that his own desires had led him badly astray. After the episode with Bathsheba, David did not defend himself or eliminate the prophet who accused him. He said: I have sinned against the Lord (2 Samuel 12:13). The wicked person in Midrash Tehillim's analysis cannot say this sentence, because to say it requires acknowledging an authority above yourself.

Earthly Kings and the Illusion of Unlimited Power

Devarim Rabbah, the midrash on Deuteronomy compiled in fifth and sixth-century Palestine, develops a sustained comparison between earthly kingship and divine kingship that illuminates what Midrash Tehillim is diagnosing. An earthly king, the midrash notes, can command and be obeyed, but he cannot change the weather, the tides, or the hearts of those who pretend to obey him while inwardly resisting. The earthly king's power is the power of force, which is real but limited. It cannot reach the inner life.

The person who has made his desires his god has essentially claimed earthly-king power over himself without the limitations that constrain even earthly kings. He has decided that his inner life is not subject to any authority. But the Midrash's analysis suggests that this decision does not actually make him freer. It makes him smaller, reduced to the size of his own appetites, without the capacity for the self-transcendence that makes human beings capable of genuine relationship with God or with other human beings.

The Wicked Person's Relationship With God According to Psalm 10

Psalm 10 describes the wicked person's inner monologue with unusual specificity. He says in his heart: God will not require it. God has hidden His face, He will never see (Psalm 10:11). The wicked person does not deny God's existence, at least not in this description. He denies God's attentiveness, God's concern, God's investment in the outcome of human action. God exists but does not watch. God might exist but does not care.

Midrash Tehillim reads this as the theological structure of self-worship. If you believe God is not watching, you effectively believe you are the highest authority in your own universe. The desires that you have elevated to divine status operate without any check from above. What you want, you pursue. The Psalm's wicked man is not an atheist in the modern sense; he is a practical atheist, someone who accepts the theoretical existence of God while operating as if God's existence made no practical difference.

What Solomon Knew That the Wicked Man Does Not

The Legends of the Jews preserves a tradition about King Solomon's wisdom that operates as a countertype to the wicked man of Psalm 10. Solomon asked God, at the beginning of his reign, not for wealth or power or long life but for wisdom, the ability to discern between good and evil (1 Kings 3:9). The request itself is the opposite of the wicked man's posture: Solomon acknowledged that good and evil were real categories that existed independently of his preferences, and that distinguishing between them required a gift from God, not merely the exercise of his own desires.

Midrash Tehillim's wicked man cannot make this request because he has already decided that good is whatever his desires tell him is good. He does not need discernment. He has already decided. The wisdom that Solomon spent his reign developing, the capacity to see a situation from a perspective other than his own, is precisely what the wicked man has foreclosed.

The Psalm's Answer to the God Made of Desires

Psalm 10 ends not with despair but with a petition and a declaration: the Lord is king forever and ever, the nations have perished out of his land (Psalm 10:16). The king who rules forever is not the earthly king who can be overthrown, not the wicked man who has promoted his desires to godhood, but the God who sees what the wicked man insists cannot be seen.

The kabbalistic tradition, working with concepts developed in the Zohar and Lurianic texts from thirteenth-century Castile and sixteenth-century Safed respectively, would later describe the ego-self as the primary obstacle to divine encounter, the klipa or husk that must be thinned for the inner light to penetrate. Midrash Tehillim operates without this technical vocabulary but arrives at the same insight through the figure of the wicked man who made his desires his god. What the wicked man worships is a husk. What he ignores is the light. And the Psalm's declaration that God is king forever is the reminder that husks do not last, but the light they cover does.