I will briefly outline several interesting theological models that have emerged out of the Abraham story.
Mamonides, Hilkhot Avoda Zarah - Perek Alefh
After he was weaned, while still an infant, his mind began to reflect. By day and by night he was thinking and wondering: “How is it possible that this (celestial) sphere should continuously be guiding the world and have no one to guide it and cause it to turn round; for it cannot be that it turns round of itself.” He had no teacher, no one to instruct him in aught. He was submerged, in Ur of the Chaldees, among silly idolaters. His father and mother and the entire population worshipped idols, and he worshipped with them. But his mind was busily working and reflecting till he had attained the way of truth, apprehended the correct line of thought and knew that there is One God, that He guides the celestial Sphere and created everything, and that among all that exist, there is no God beside Him. He realized that the whole world was in error, and that what had occasioned their error was that they worshipped the stars and the images, so that the truth perished from their minds. Abraham was forty years old when he recognized his Creator. Having attained this knowledge, he began to refute the inhabitants of Ur of the Chaldees, arguing with them and saying to them, “The course you are following is not the way of Truth.” He broke the images and commenced to instruct the people that it was not right to serve any one but the God of the Universe, to Whom alone it was proper to bow down, offer up sacrifices and make libations, so that all human creatures might, in the future, know Him, and that it was proper to destroy and shatter all the images, so that the people might not err like those who taught that there was no god but these images. When he had prevailed over them with his arguments, the king (of the country) sought to slay him. He was miraculously saved, and emigrated to Haran. He then began to proclaim to the whole world with great power and to instruct the people that the entire Universe had but one Creator and that Him it was right to worship. He went from city to city and kingdom to kingdom, calling and gathering together the inhabitants till he arrived in the land of Canaan. There, too, he proclaimed his message, as it is said, “And he called there on the name of the Lord, God of the Universe (Gen. 21:33). When the people flocked to him and questioned him regarding his assertions, he would instruct each one according to his capacity till he had brought him to the way of truth, and thus thousands and tens of thousands joined him. These were the persons referred to in the phrase, “men of the house of Abraham.” He implanted in their hearts this great doctrine, composed books on it, and taught it to Isaac, his son.” (Hyamson Translation)
Abraham is the Maimonidian hero. It is important to notice the following aspects in Maimonides’ treatment. Abraham initiates the movement towards God. Out of his own reflective process he is able to arrive at the truth of God’s presence. The process does not grow from a reflection on history but rather from the nature of existence. Abraham’s ability to think beyond his own experience is shown in the conflict between what he does and what he thinks. His thought process goes beyond his experiential process. Reflection is not justification but rather critical. The truth about God’s existence doesn’t leave Abraham with neutral information. The truth he finds forces Abraham to encounter his civilization. This truth has profound social and political implications. Just as he, Abraham, cannot remain neutral with his truth, so too his environment does not respond calmly to this information. The centrality of this truth, its total existential implications, is something Maimonides is very aware of.
It is essential to be aware that in Maimonides’ treatment, Abraham cannot remain alone in his truth. The truth he knows must be communicated. His very encounter with God must be shared. Abraham’s truth moves him to the other. Furthermore, Abraham can make his position intelligible and reasonable. He can appeal to the reasonable faculty in man. He can be understood. This is crucial in Maimonides’ theological model.
How different is the Kirkegaardian model that is developed in his book Fear and Trembling! To both Kirkegaard and Maimonides, Abraham is a lonely figure. Abraham, to Maimonides, faces a world alone and the Kirkegaardian Abraham is alone on the mountain with his son Isaac. This is the only similarity. But as we reflect further, they part very radically. To Kirkegaard, the loneliness is a permanent feature; to Maimonides it is only a temporary aspect in the “faith experience.”
To Maimonides, Abraham is lonely because he is opposed to his environment on the basis of his convictions. To Kirkegaard, Abraham is lonely because his very actions are totally incomprehensible. Abraham is the lonely man of faith who makes the infinite resignation, who lives in the paradox, whose very action and total commitment make it impossible for him to communicate what he feels. He can’t even communicate to Isaac. The man of faith is alone in his infinite resignation. He is the single one. Whereas to Maimonides it is not the existential act of faith that creates loneliness, it is rather the environmental ignorance that creates the loneliness of the man of faith. Faith by its very nature doesn’t create the lonely figure, it is rather idolatry that makes the man of faith alone. Maimonides constructs his model out of the Midrashic Abraham. To Maimonides, Abraham is the philosopher in search of the truth. Abraham is the philosophical iconoclast.
Kirkegaard uses the Akedah as the central model of the man of faith. He who holds a knife to slaughter his son must remain alone. Let us leave these two models and see how another model was constructed out of the covenant moment in Abraham’s life and from his encounter with God on behalf of the people of Sodom.
Out of the covenant and Sodom, the emphasis is upon mutuality. Man confronts God, argues with God, demands things from God, battles with God, and demands from him that He act not in a way that defeats His own principle of justice. Man wins out of this encounter that God will not only act by justice but equally as well by chesed.
Eric Fromm, in his book You Shall be as Gods, chapter 2, loves to choose this experience as the true indication of the break with authoritarian religion in Biblical experience. Here man comes of age. Man doesn’t feel himself to be insignificant, worthless, helpless before the total authority figure of the God of the flood. He doesn’t submit without a battle. He questions his God, his God must make sense to him. God is bound by his own principles, he cannot act arbitrarily. I am not concerned now with evaluating critically these different models in detail. I throw them out just for the sake of indicating how different moves are made and different emphases stressed as a result of focusing on specific events in the life of Abraham. To Maimonides and to the religious humanist tradition, the man of faith is not a lonely figure - it is not indigenous to the faith experience that he remains a single one, incomprehensible in his movements. On the contrary, the man of faith talks, the man of faith can communicate, the man of faith can reason, the man, of faith can support his position, the man of faith acts within history, the man of faith is found in the battleground of social justice.
On the contrary, as opposed to Kirkegaard, he is duty bound to do this if he genuinely encounters God. There is an urgency to communicate as one reads the Maimonidian treatment of Abraham. Equally as well from the Frommian position, he must communicate, he must be concerned; God demands from him a love for man, a going out into the social. Must the Akedah model become the exclusive model of religious experience? If it does, then the man of faith must remain a lonely figure. “The single one” is incomprehensible, pushed on to a movement of action which he himself cannot understand and to the world he appears absurd, his actions meaningless and often unethical. The emphasis upon chukim as the ultimate in religious commitment to the exclusion of mishpatim and adot indicates a preference for the Akedah model above all others. I don’t believe that one is forced to have to select one exclusive model. I think we all function with many models and there are different moments in life when different models operate for the individual. There are times when faith consists of the “leap of the alone to the Alone,” where our loneliness is essential, where our need to make ourselves understood to others is not crucial. At other times, one must go out to history, go out to the social world and protest at the injustices of the world. God then is in the marketplace and my own single “I” is grounded in the social “we.” At other times, the commitment to God demands the iconaclastic posture of rejecting the false gods that pervade the culture. To communicate, to teach students, to inspire people, to be concerned about their indifference to Torah. It is important to realize that one cannot achieve wholeness with one faith model. The multiplicity and complexity of life demand the right to allow for varieted models of the God encounter. Those who claim exclusiveness of mode distort the richness of the whole faith experience and become indifferent and blind to many aspects of life that cannot fit their model.
Rashi was equally as well sensitive to the change in the faith posture of Abraham as a result of the covenant experience. Rashi remarks that before the covenant, before the Brit milah, Abraham could not stand before the Shechinah. When he encounters God, Abraham falls upon his face, Rashi writes, “because before he was circumcised he did not have the strength to stand on his feet because the Holy Spirit stood over him.” A different Abraham emerges as a result of the covenant. An Abraham who is able, according to the Midrash, to say to God, “Please do not go, I must welcome some poor strangers who are standing outside my door.” An Abraham whose intimacy with God enables him to speak as one does to a personal friend who would understand and not insist on social amenities. The Sodom encounter is only a continuation of this Midrashic theme. Covenant man does not experience God in a way that makes him feel insignificant, unworthy. The theme of mutuality, of the significance of human actions, of God’s need for man grows out of the covenant experience. I would like now to indicate how the covenant experience influences the way Abraham moves toward the stranger, toward the “other.” As a result of the covenant, all men can feel to Abraham that he is their father. He can become their father if they share in his faith commitment and his destiny in history.
The ger (convert) is maivi vi-koreh, the ger can say, “the God of my fathers.” His kinship with Abraham is not born from blood but rather from sharing in the destiny and mission of Abraham. A very profound negation of blood identity emerges out of the covenant. The covenant is not a tribalistic move. The particularistic aspect of the covenant is not a separation from universal man, a separation that can never be bridged, but rather a separation grounded in the conflict of value, in a conflict regarding one’s ultimate concern. Those who share in a common vision, who participate in a common destiny can experience a common brotherhood. Therefore, it is not paradoxical that in the very separatistic move of the covenant the possibility of a universal brotherhood of man emerges. The “other” becomes my potential brother as a result of the covenant. The covenant is a self-transcending experience. Your identity is no longer a biological one. You define yourself not on the basis of birth alone but above all on the basis of your standing in the presence of God, on the basis of your commitment.
Abraham’s hakhnasat orchim grows out of this covenant. He moves toward the stranger, towards the “other” who stands outside his tent, to people whom he doesn’t know, to people he is in no way related to through blood. He suffers pain at other people’s hunger. His own ability to transcend his biological pain is made possible because his identity is now covenental. One must not forget that in Sodom, Abraham is not only praying for the righteous, he is equally as well identified with the wicked, those who are so far away from his own life style.
The statement by the rabbis that say little and do much was explained by the commentaries to be revealed in the life of Abraham. Abraham says little but does a great deal. Abraham’s life was not lived in language, he was not caught up in words, he did not need language to indicate to himself how he felt. His feelings were real not because he was able to verbalize them, but because he was able to act upon them. The man who is called on to act, the man who experiences life within a covenant, achieves authenticity through being freed from the paralysis of verbalization, from the paralysis of living in language and not in action. “How can I act?” is the crucial question of covenant man. Abraham does not teach hakhnasat orchim through language; he knows that Ishmael can only feel towards the stranger if he learns to act. This is beautifully shown in Rashi’s comment on the story. It is through exposure to action that man learns to transcend the prison of language. It is not the place here to focus on the entire approach of Judaism to mitzvot, but one can say in closing that the whole shyness of the Jew to theologize, his preference for the mitzvah, for the action that grows out of the encounter, is in some way deeply related to the covenant mode of living with God.
Rabbbi David Hartman is lecturer in religion at George Williams University and rabbi of the Jewish Commnity Center of Cote St. Luc, Montreal.
YAVNEH STUDIES IN PARASHAT HASHAVUA, edited by Joel B. Wolowelsky, was a 1969-72 project of YAVNEH: THE RELIGIOUS JEWISH STUDENTS ASSOCIATION. The bios here are as they were at the time of the original publication. For a history of YAVNEH, see Benny Kraut, The Greening of American Orthodox Judaism: Yavneh in the 1960s (Cincinnti: Hebrew Union College Press, 2011).