So, let's begin: pagan religion. The fundamental idea of pagan religion.
That God is subject to the will of the tzadik.
In pagan religion there's a fluid boundary between the divine, the human, and the natural worlds. They blur into one another because they all emerge ultimately from the same primordial world stuff.
Discerning the will of the God is really of little use, because even his will can be thwarted or overthrown by a tzadik.
The pagan cult, is a system of rites. So the pagan cult, is a system of rites that involves a manipulation of substances — again, tefilin, candles, and so on — that are believed to have some kind of inherent power, There's always an element of magic in the pagan cult. It's seeking through these rituals and manipulations of certain substances to, again, let loose certain powers, set into motion certain forces, that will coerce God to be propitiated, for example, or calmed or to act favorably or to vindicate the devotees, and so on.
The fundamental idea of Torah, which permeates the entire Torah in his view, is a radically new idea of a God who is himself the source of all being — not subject to a tzadik .
He doesn't have in the Bible a female consort, a Shechina .
Nature isn't God himself. He's not identified with it. He's wholly other. He isn't kin to humans in any way either. So there is no blurring, no soft boundary between humans and the divine.
Magic in the Torah is represented as useless. It's pointless. There's no metadivine realm to tap into. Power doesn't inhere in any stuff in the natural world. So the world is sort of de-divinized.
Power, or Divinity isn't understood as a material thing or something that inheres in material substances. God can't be manipulated or coerced by tefilin or words or rituals. They have no power and cannot be used in that way, and so magic is sin. Magic is sin or rebellion against God because it's predicated on a whole mistaken notion of God having limited power.
There are magical conceptions throughout the Torah . But because God willed them .
There's no ritual or incantation, or material substance that can coerce a revelation from God. So, we will see things that look like magic and divination and oracles and dreams and prophecy in the pagan world and in ancient Israel. But the similarity is a similarity in form only. And it's a superficial, formal, external similarity. Each of these phenomena he says is transformed by the basic Israelite idea of one supreme transcendent God whose will is absolute and all of these things relate to the direct word and will of God. They aren't recourse to a separate secret lore or body of knowledge or interpretive craft that calls upon forces or powers that transcend God or are independent of God.
Now since God is himself the transcendent source of all being and since he is good, in a monotheistic system there are no evil agents that constitute a realm that opposes God as an equal rival. No divine evil agents. Again, in the pagan worldview the primordial womb spawns all sorts of beings, all kinds of divinities, good and evil that are in equal strength. They're sort of locked in this cosmic struggle. But in the Torah worldview, if God is the source of all being, then they're can't be a realm of supernatural beings that do battle with him. There's no room for a divine antagonist of the one supreme God, which is leading us down here to this point: that sin and evil are demythologized in the Torah.
There's nothing inherently supernatural about sin. It's not a force or a power built into the universe. In Torah evil is transferred from the metaphysical realm (built into the physical structure of the universe) to the moral realm. I've put it up here for you. Evil is a moral and not a metaphysical reality. It doesn't have a concrete independent existence. And that means that human beings and only human beings are the potential source of evil in the world. Responsibility for evil lies in the hands of human beings. In the Torah, no one will ever say the devil made me do it. There is no devil in the Hebrew Bible.
Evil is a moral and not a metaphysical reality
