No
idols means
that this is a text-only site. No graven images permitted.
Straining for VR, the Web has initiated, along with its sister screen media - television and film - an entire culture of the visual, the sensory, a return to the pictographic after a long era of alephtav and alphabet. This new culture, some of it not yet invented, is best inspected and perhaps even understood from within the tradition of the alephtav, which purges itself of idols and idolatry, those false screens.
Therefore, to get tangled in this web means following Abraham's lead, smashing the idols, leaving Ur of the Chaldees, the land of idolatry, and setting out for a Promised Land filled with temptation but free of service to idols. This web hopes to initiate a journey, to return to the land of the covenant, in a rejection of totalized meanings, singularities, unambiguous interpretations and final answers. It means putting faith in motion, in ceaseless change, in action, in interrogation.
Interrogation: But didn't there grow out of the alephtav a tradition of letter-worship, namely kabbalah? The Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia provided a method for meditating on the letters of the Tetragrammaton in order to achieve a higher spiritual state. Wasn't this a form of idolatry?
Answer: Even the Hebrew letters themselves invite multiple interpretations and hint at depths and never-ending meanings. That's why Gregor Cantor chose the aleph as the symbol of infinity. And, for instance, why the tav itself means "sign." The aleph and tav together mean, among many other permutations, "infinite sign."
Interrogation: Doesn't the intensive use of graphically designed letter elements in this web, as cheesy as they are, strive to achieve a kind of imagism if not an imagology? Aren't there visual metaphors here, even in the icon at the top of this page? Answer: Maybe so. For the exception that proves the rule, see The Hidden Question.
