Moses Mendelssohn, Idolatry, and Baseball Cards

Reminiscing about his childhood enthusiasm for collecting baseball cards, Abraham Socher notes that he and his friends imbued these objects with an almost-metaphysical connection to the players depicted upon them. In this way, a card was not unlike an idol that, “in representing the god, . . . becomes a conduit for its power.” The connection puts Socher in mind of the 18th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn’s theory of idolatry, which connects the phenomenon to the development of writing itself with the help of a speculative history in which primitive man discovered how to express himself through ever-greater abstraction:

[F]irst, [according to Mendelssohn], “images of the things” replaced the things themselves; then, “for the sake of brevity,” came rapidly sketched outlines and, finally, further stylized hieroglyphics. Such abstraction made knowledge and its transmission possible, but “as always happens in things human, what wisdom builds up in one place, folly readily seeks to tear down in another.” In its progress from the thing itself to the abstract symbol, the sign became opaque, and this led to a new kind of religious error.

“The great multitude,” Mendelssohn writes, “saw the signs not as mere signs, but believed them to be the things themselves.” Hieroglyphics made this both better and worse. They were plainly not faithful images of the thing they represented. [But] the very mystery of an abstract glyph which could almost magically summon up its referent led to “all sorts of inventions and fables,” which were then, according to Mendelssohn, encouraged by . . . manipulative priests.

An idol, then, is a symbol whose referential function has been lost, misunderstood, or deliberately mystified.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Baseball, Idolatry, Moses Mendelssohn

To Stop Attacks from Yemen, Cut It Off from Iran

On March 6, Yemen’s Houthi rebels managed to kill three sailors and force the remainder to abandon ship when they attacked another vessel. Not long thereafter, top Houthi and Hamas figures met to coordinate their efforts. Then, on Friday, the Houthis fired a missile at a commercial vessel, which was damaged but able to continue its journey. American forces also shot down one of the group’s drones yesterday.

Seth Cropsey argues that Washington needs a new approach, focused directly on the Houthis’ sponsors in Tehran:

Houthi disruption to maritime traffic in the region has continued nearly unabated for months, despite multiple rounds of U.S. and allied strikes to degrade Houthi capacity. The result should be a shift in policy from the Biden administration to one of blockade that cuts off the Houthis from their Iranian masters, and thereby erodes the threat. This would impose costs on both Iran and its proxy, neither of which will stand down once the war in Gaza ends.

Yet this would demand a coherent alliance-management policy vis-a-vis the Middle East, the first step of which would be a shift from focus on the Gaza War to the totality of the threat from Iran.

Read more at RealClear Defense

More about: Gaza War 2023, Iran, U.S. Foreign policy, Yemen