Adath Jeshurun

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from Can­tor Lipp

Avram is tak­ing care of his dad’s idol shop. He’s a teenager. Can you imag­ine Avram as a teenager? Well, it’s about time.

What kind of idol shop, you ask? To help farm­ers with rain, young men find the right woman for mar­riage, herders to ward off wolves from their sheep. You need it, Terach’s got it.

When his dad comes back from doing an errand, all the idols but one are smashed to smithereens and lit­ter­ing the floor. Oh, except for one, that is. One lone idol stands unmo­lested with a stick in his hand.

“What the hell hap­pened?” Ter­ach asks Avram.

(It reminds me of my five year old self strug­gling to help my mother unload the gro­ceries from the car after she had told me not to. Inevitably, the bag falls from my hands and numer­ous glass con­tain­ers are bro­ken. My mother asked me what hap­pened and I told her the cat did it. Well, I was five!)

Avram is far more gutsy than I.

“The idols started fight­ing amongst them­selves,” he said. “Then one of them, this one with the big stick, hit them all until they lay smashed on the floor.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot,” asks Ter­ach? “These idols can’t move — they’re made of clay!”

“Then how do you have the gall to sell these use­less sculp­tures to peo­ple and defraud them of their hard earned money?”

This is a great midrash. Some peo­ple think it’s actu­ally in the Torah. It’s not. But it does attempt to answer a ques­tion the Torah will not: Why did God choose Avram to be the prog­en­i­tor of the Jew­ish nation of today? The answer, accord­ing to the midrash, is that Avram demon­strated an early proac­tive monothe­is­tic streak.

A long time ago, when I became inter­ested as an adult in the study of Torah, the fol­low­ing verses jumped out at me: God says, “Shall I hide from Avra­ham what I’m about to do since Abra­ham is to become a great and pop­u­lous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless him? For I have sin­gled him out that he may instruct his chil­dren and his pos­ter­ity to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right, in order that the Lord may bring about for Abra­ham what He has promised him.”

This was the first time I had read in the Torah of God’s self-reflection, the part of God’s image that has pre­sum­ably been trans­ferred to us, the part of God that most obvi­ously sep­a­rates us from the rest of God’s con­scious crea­tures. Even more so, in the con­ver­sa­tion that pro­ceeds from this self-reflection, Abra­ham chal­leng­ing the jus­tice of God’s impend­ing decree against Sodom and Gomor­rah, God sim­ply con­tin­ues speak­ing out loud, as it were. When the dia­logue con­tin­ues, we are never told, And God said to Abra­ham as in ear­lier con­ver­sa­tions, just God said, imply­ing a sig­nif­i­cant Divine-human intimacy.

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I was teach­ing Melton the midrash with which I began.

It occurred to me to ask a dif­fer­ent ques­tion: Why cast Avram as the lonely monothe­ist of his age? 10 gen­er­a­tions after Noah is it not likely that more than one descen­dant would remem­ber the flood was caused by God and that any other divine beings would be, at best, woe­fully over­val­ued? And why assume Avram is the only good or just per­son? After all, God saved Noah, who was good and, accord­ing to the post-deluvian his­tory recorded, one son was pre­sum­ably good (Shem), one bad (Ham) and one neu­tral (Japeth). It seems likely to me that God approached many of the good and just monothe­is­tic descen­dants of Noah and said to them: Go to the place that I will show you.

One said, I won’t leave my fam­ily. Another said, I make a good liv­ing here. Another said, I’m scared. Another said, Where are you send­ing me? Another asked for guar­an­tees of descen­dants, land, money. Avram didn’t say any­thing — he just went and took his wife Sarai and nephew Lot with him.

Avram was not only a good, just monothe­ist; he was a risk taker, open to pos­si­bil­i­ties, open to a future he could not con­trol. He may well have been an icon­o­clast as the older midrash sug­gests, but more impor­tantly he was will­ing to fol­low the Divine voice where it would lead him. Once he got there, he had no com­punc­tion about ask­ing ques­tions and chal­leng­ing that divine pres­ence as we see fol­low­ing God’s self dis­clo­sure. But he had to be will­ing to enter into the rela­tion­ship with­out pre-conditions.

Shab­bat is a moment of our week when we are asked to con­sider the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the roads open to us that we have not yet trav­elled, to imag­ine, to dream. Let’s remind our­selves that Abra­ham isn’t the only one on a road to a place that God will lead us, to a place we do not yet know.