Shekel. From the root to weigh. The Torah’s name for currency reminds us how the concept has evolved from the concrete to the abstract. It starts as something of value that is literally weighed – as Avraham weighed out the pieces of silver to Efron. Coinage is later introduced, which still bears weight in gold or silver, yet the value is augmented via the government entity who stamps its face on the coin. Coins and then paper bills no longer have intrinsic value, and reflect more mobile currency that can be traded in for the corresponding silver or gold. Bills later move off the gold standard and represent nothing but themselves. Today, coinage and paper money are rapidly disappearing, the Israeli shekel is little more than bits of computer code.
Historians tell a similar story of societies evolving from imagining divinity as stones and clay, to precious metals to representations and finally to abstractions. Rambam accounts for the spread of avodah zara in the reverse: narrating how religious worship devolved from Adam interacting with a purely abstract G-d to a crude form that assigns power to inert mass.
Believers have long been challenged to develop a real and concrete relationship with an abstract G-d. Yet the evolution of the shekel is evidence that modern society has little trouble organizing itself around an abstraction. What would it take for G-d to be as real to us as the shekel?
