[Avodah] half shekel

[Michael Makovi]

>  Can you imagine the Rabbanim today producing a religious item and
>  putting on it the image of a foreign god? Unheard of, right? And yet
>  that's exactly what we did. Under Roman Law, we had no choice if we
>  wanted to fulfil the Commandment, and so important was it deemed to do
>  so, that we entered the image of a foriegn god into the Holy Temple,
>  an act that only a few generations before sparked the Maccabean
>  Revolt!
>  Eli Turkel

Is it possible that perhaps, part of the leniency was because the coin
wasn't itself an idol, but rather, a memorial to an idol? No one would
ever actually bow down to a coin, AFAIK. They believed that the statue
held a piece of the god's spirit (or something like that), and that
talking to the statue itself (yes, the statue per se) could pull
strings, but I don't know (AFAIK) that they believed such about coins.

When one takes an idol into the Beit haMikdash, there's an obvious
problem. But when you take coins in, no one suspects you of idolatry;
they just think you're taking money into it! Even if the coin has the
god's picture, they figure that if you really wanted to do proper
idolatry, you'd take the statue in, so surely, you must want the coin
and not the picture of the god thereon.

Do I have any basis?

Mikha'el Makovi