In late 2015, an 18 year-old Australian Internet model, named Essena O’Neill, quit Instagram, leaving behind her half million followers and growing financial success. Her celebrity had not fulfilled her dreams, but driven her to despair. In a “farewell” video post, she lamented that her life had become synonymous with a carefully constructed image of a life:

“Everything I was doing was edited and contrived and to get more views…Social media, especially how I used it, isn’t real. It’s contrived images and edited clips ranked against each other. It’s a system based on social approval, likes, validation in views, success in followers. It’s perfectly orchestrated self-absorbed judgement. . . . I met people that are far more successful online than I am, and they are just as miserable and lonely and scared and lost. We all are.”

The anxiety fueled by her success might seem ironic, but it is actually an old story. Hollywood of the forties and fifties was littered with stars—Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe come to mind–whom the public adored but found themselves miserable and captive to their celebrity. The difference now is that anyone can become a star, and ordinary people have their images “go viral.” As Timothy Wu explain in his excellent 2016 book The Attention Merchants, “for most of human history, the proliferation of the individual likeness was the sole prerogative of the illustrious, whether it was the face of the emperor on a Roman coin or the face of Garbo on the silver screen…Apart from 'WANTED' posters, the image of most common people would never be widely propagated…

With the arrival of the smartphone and Instagram, however, much of the power of a great film studio was now in every hand attached to a heart yearning for fame; not only could one create an image to rival those of the old icons of glamour, but one could put it on a platform where millions might potentially see it. Perhaps a century of the ascendant self…when wedded to the magic of technology serving not the state or even the corporation but the individual ego, perhaps it could reach no other logical endpoint, but the self as its own object of worship.”

Judaism has always been concerned with the effect of the image, especially if we substitute similitudes for reality, and convince ourselves that those images fashioned by human hands, are actually god-like. One well known rabbinic story about the patriarch Abraham sharply denotes the problem with worshipping something you made yesterday. The rabbis of the Midrash narrate that one day, Abraham’s father Terach, who apparently sold idols for a living, put his son in charge of the store. Asked by a customer to present an offering to one of the idols, Abraham instead seized a stick, broke all the idols, and placed the stick in the hand of the biggest of them. When Terach returned to the chaos in his shop, Abraham calmly reported that a fight had broken out among the idols and the biggest one had simply smashed all the others.

In a stunning denouement to the Midrash, an outraged Terach feels he has been mocked: “Are you making fun of me?” he confronts his son. “Do they [the idols] then have any knowledge?” To which Abraham retorts: “Do your ears hear what your lips are saying?” The ludicrousness of the situation, that a man constructs and then sells objects to be worshipped that he fully understands are powerless and have no actual substance, but are simply an empty icon, perfectly mirrors our contemporary dilemma of worshipping the images we ourselves construct.

We tend to be subtly patronizing when hear of ancient pagan practices of bowing down to gods of wood and stone, without realizing that we have perfectly duplicated the exact same error of substitution of the image for reality. And our idolatries aren’t just limited to hewing out some icons for our small clan or tribe; they are proliferated globally through the enormous engines of technology, harnessed in the service of our gods.

In Jewish terms, one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is “what do I worship?” Faced with this challenge, many people will find themselves hard pressed to think of an answer, because they have interpreted the question as a “religious” one, and do not see themselves as devout synagogue attendees or church goers. But that is to perhaps take the question too literally.

To find out what you have begun to worship, even in a mild way, ask yourself the following: “What images do I spend the most time looking at on a daily and weekly basis? Aside from life necessities, on what do I spend the most money? What person or persons—not a family member or a friend or a teacher/work colleague—do I seem to talk about incessantly? Do I find that I am envious of others or constructed a fantasy about who is happier/more successful than me? Am I inordinately preoccupied with lives that are not my own? And then fill in the blank: “I cannot live without _____.”

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is infamous for his statement that “God is dead,” but he also pointed out our irresistible urge to fill that void, when he noted all of the potential deities waiting in the wings: “And how many new gods are still possible!” he writes in The Will to Power. Those possibilities have borne fruit in our time, and the “death of god” has been replaced, with a vengeance, by the spread of all of our new icons of celebrity and the good life. As Kurt Vonnegut Jr. presciently noted many years ago, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.“