By Rabbi Avraham Fischer for the Orthodox Union.
UPON ENTERING THE LAND, Moshe instructs the people of Israel, not only to serve Hashem exclusively, and to avoid any contact with idolatry, but to eradicate any vestige of idolatry:
These are the statutes and the judgments, which you will observe to do in the land which Hashem, the G-d of your fathers, has given you to inherit, all the days that you live upon the earth. You shall utterly destroy all the places in which the nations that you are about to dispossess worshipped their gods, upon the high mountains and upon the hills and under every leafy tree. And you shall topple their altars, and you shall shatter their pillars, and their asherahs you shall burn in fire, and the images of their gods shall you cut down; and you shall destroy their names from that place. You shall not do so to Hashem, your G-d. But at the place which Hashem, your G-d, will choose from all your tribes to put His Name there, to His habitation shall you seek and there shall you come (Devarim 12:1-5).
THE VERSE "You shall not do so to Hashem, your G-d" comes as a surprising transition in this passage. Rashi, based on the Sifrei (Re'eh 7), presents three different ways of understanding the function of this verse, "You shall not do so":
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