Taking Abraham's Journey

Rosh Hashanah Day 1, 5759 (1998)

Once upon a time, the Bible tells us, there was a man named Abraham. We know very little about his early life. The Bible tells us little more than that he was a child of Terach and that he was born and raised in the city of Ur, then on the edge of the Persian Gulf, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Later on, the family moved upriver to Haran.

The Bible simply tells us that one day, God said to Abraham, "Lech l'cha" - "Get going!" and he did. He went on a journey with his wife and his nephew and off they went.

We don't often ask, "What did he leave behind?" We don't often ask, "What was that world like, the world of Ur and Haran?"

The Bible, after all, doesn't tell us.

The rabbis of the Talmudic period, who, living almost two thousand years after Abraham, knew very little of the civilization out of which he came, tried to figure it out. They told stories - midrashim - attempting to address the question. The most famous of these may be familiar to us from Hebrew School.

In that story, Abraham's father was an idol-maker, and Abraham, on his own, came to the realization that these idols were not really divine. One day, while his father was out of the house, Abraham smashed all of the idols but one, the smallest, and then put the hammer in that idol's hand. When his father came home, he was, of course, shocked and upset to find the idols destroyed, whereupon Abraham (who hadn't heard that story about George Washington and the cherry tree) said, "This idol did it. He smashed all of the others."

When his father rebuked him, saying that that was impossible, Abraham replied, "How then can you worship such idols? If they don't have the power to pick up a hammer, how do they have the power to do anything else?"

According to this midrash, the chief difference between Abraham and the world he left behind was his theology. He was a monotheist; everyone else was a pagan.

Now, for thousands of years, there was really no way for anyone to know any different, for the world Abraham had left behind had long disappeared.

But in the modern period, archeologists discovered the ruins of Sumer, the civilization that flourished in Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, during the time of Abraham. Many clay tablets, with all sorts of information about the land and its culture were found and translated. And thus, over time, we came to know about the society that Abraham left behind.

Some of this knowledge is shared in a recently published book, entitled, "The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels," by Thomas Cahill.

What was Sumer like? Well, they weren’t pumping petroleum from the ground back then but even so, three thousand years ago, this was a wealthy, highly civilized society. Technology had advanced to an astounding degree. According to Dr. Shalom Paul, a JTS Bible scholar with whom I’ve had the opportunity to study, the Sumerians had guilds of physicians and artisans. Doctors performed eye surgery. Potters developed oven-baked pottery. They had a legal system and a banking system. They even had running water and indoor plumbing.

This is the world Abraham left behind.

Think how astounding that is: for a man growing up in the most civilized region of the world to leave it for the wilderness. Here is how Thomas Cahill puts it:

"Vayyelekh Avram" ("Avram went") [are] two of the boldest words in all literature. They signal a complete departure from everything that has gone before in the long evolution of culture and sensibility. Out of Sumer, civilized repository of the predictable, comes a man who does not know where he is going but goes forth into the unknown wilderness.

Why did he do it? What might have given him the sense that this was what he had to do? Was it that argument with his father over his idols?

Well, according to Cahill, Sumer was not just wealthy, it was materialistic. Moreover, it was "intensely competitive" and litigious. [Cahill, p.24]. It was a society "full of contentiousness and aggression, in which the 'good' man -- the ideal -- was imagined as ambitious in the extreme, animated by a drive for worldly prestige, victory, success, with scant regard to what we would think of as ethical norms. This was also a society that despised poverty."

Maybe this portrait of Sumerian society – which admittedly could be exaggerated -- has something to do with Abraham's decision. Maybe Sumer's values, more than its theology, inspired Abraham's journey.

Thinking back to that critical moment when Abraham left the civilized world of his day behind can be troubling to us here today. After all, can’t those same words used to describe Sumer be used to describe today’s secular culture? Ours is a litigious society, and it is one that rewards ambition; one in which there are vast disparities between the wealthy and the poor.

This poses, I think, a real challenge to all of us, namely:

To what extent are we truly Abraham's descendants? To what extent are we following in Abraham's footsteps? And to what extent are we living in the world he left behind, the world he rejected?

This is an uncomfortable question to ask because frankly we're doing both. We are both committed to living in Sumer and at the same time engaged in our own journeys as Jews.

On the one hand, we live and work or study in this great land we call America. This is our home. We're loyal to America -- and rightfully so. America has been good to us -- and good for us. It's a place where Jews have long felt welcome and protected. None of us, I'd venture to say, would want to leave this land, or the culture which flourishes here, for an insulated ghetto in which we could seal ourselves off from its influences. Moreover, we embrace many of America’s values. We cherish the political and economic freedom that is ours because we live here.

On the other hand, as Jews, we regularly choose to leave this world in which we live and in which we feel so comfortable. After all, we're here today, in shul. We’re not at work. We’re not at school. We’re here, living by the rhythm of the Jewish calendar. Within the society in which we live, Judaism represents a kind of counter-culture to which we are drawn.

Why are we here? What brings us to seek out one another as Jews and gather in such large numbers?

There are, I'm sure, many reasons, but one of them, I submit, is a sense that, when it comes to values and guiding principles, we realize that we do have to leave the Sumer in which we live, and look elsewhere, beyond our culture, to find them.

As Jews, many of us hesitate to embrace the full range of what the American moral climate offers. Incidentally, it’s a feeling that’s affected the general population as well at this moment in history. A recent survey [reported in The New York Times on September 8, 1998] stated that the greatest concern for most Americans today is not the economy, it is the absence of moral values in our society. In America today there is an expanding set of disappointments: in our national leadership, in the press, in the traditional sources of stability and reassurance in our society.

We Americans are so thirsty for exemplars of integrity that about the only place we could find it this summer was in Busch stadium or Wrigley Field. Now don't get me wrong: those two home-run hitters deserve a lot of credit for their hard work and their great accomplishments, and for their menschlichkeit. I'm not knocking that at all. But that we can't find moral leadership anywhere else? That's pretty sad.

The lesson of Lech L'cha is that, if we're looking for spiritual and moral strength, we may have to leave town, so to speak. We're not going to find what we’re looking for in Sumer. To find the values that can sustain us, we may have to go outside of American culture, reaching into our tradition and its wellsprings of insight.

The journey that Abraham took is our model. Along the way, he and his descendants created a moral environment very different from that of the world they left behind.

That environment is one that holds us responsible, not only for ourselves, but for one another. An environment that frowns on standing idly by while another suffers. An environment governed by a moral covenant. An environment that demands that we treat every human being, having been created in the image of God, with respect, and that demands that we hesitate to judge others unless and until we find ourselves in their places.

Hillel summed up the Jewish way of life by saying, "What is hurtful to you, don’t do to others." I prefer the statement of the prophet Micah, who said: "What does the Lord require of you? Only to do justice, to love lovingkindness, and to walk humbly with your God."

Justice is clearly at the cornerstone of a Jewish way of life. One of the first things that Abraham does after he goes forth on his journey is to argue with God on behave of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah. "Will you condemn the innocent along with the guilty?" he asks. "Hashofet kol ha'aretz lo ya'aseh mishpat?" "Will the judge of the world not behave justly?" It is unthinkable that a Sumerian worshipper would talk that way to his deity. Our duty is not only to do the right thing but also to call God to task when he seems not to be fulfilling his part of the bargain. We dare not take injustice of any kind for granted.

Hesed, lovingkindness is also important. Abraham is again a model for us. He is known for his hospitality. He opened his tent on all sides to receive guests, and so must we. We’re taught not to be harsh or cruel but kind and gentle. When we name babies in synagogue, we don’t pray that they should grow up to be successful, make a lot of money and be able eventually to support their parents – even though that might be nice -- instead, we pray that they should grow up to live a life of good deeds. That is how we judge success.

Finally, we come to humility or modesty (tzniut). In our society, ambition is rewarded; but in a Jewish society, it is viewed with suspicion. The rabbis say: fame follows those who flee from it, but those who pursue it are lost (Pirkei Avot). That’s not the rule in big law firms or in government or in Hollywood. Modesty doesn’t get you on T.V. It doesn’t make you famous. It may, in fact, prevent you from becoming famous.

These are some of the values -- there are others, of course -- which we can distill from our tradition. Some of us may have forgotten them or never learned them in the first place. That might mean that the first stage on our journey is to learn what it means to be Jewish, to first become (rather than assume that we already are) worthy descendants of Abraham.

Unlike Abraham, we don't literally have to go anywhere to fulfill our Jewish mission. We don't have to get on any boats or planes and leave this land. On the other hand, maybe our job is more complex: to live Jewish lives, to raise Jewish families, in the midst of the congenial, the economically and politically free, yet non-Jewish world in which we live. It is not only complex, it is difficult. Because in order to fulfill our mission, we have to make important choices about who we are and what we stand for.

Early in the summer I got a phone call from a man on Cape Cod. His son and daughter-in-law had just had a baby. Although his daughter-in-law was not Jewish, the couple wanted to convert their child and raise her as a Jew. Since there was no mikvah in their home-town, they were wondering if I could set up a bet din in our area. "Fine," I said. "Have your son give me a call and we'll arrange to meet." "Well," the man said, "that might not be so easy. You see, they live in China!"

Well, five years ago, it might have been a challenge, but in the age of e-mail, it was really not so difficult! I managed to correspond with the couple and set it all up.

There was something about that experience that was awe-inspiring. If you want to be shaken up and realize suddenly just how precious our legacy is, talk to people who've flown thousands of miles to confirm their child's identification as a Jew. Would any of us travel half-way around the globe to confirm our child's Jewish identity? To confirm our own?

In a sense, I'm saying that we have to do just that. Not physically, but culturally. To be true heirs to Abraham, we have to learn about, embrace, and take with us a culture, a religious civilization, that in many ways is alien to the society in which we live. We have to travel on a journey, like our desert nomad ancestors, learning a language very foreign from English, studying a literature not usually taught in our schools, even committing ourselves to eating habits and dress habits that differ from the others among whom we live.

It's a long trip, and it’s not always an easy one, but it's worth it. For in the process, we gain a moral compass, a set of rights and wrongs, a set of do's and don't's, that is precious and sustaining. Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf puts it this way: to be a Jew is to walk along a road, picking up jewels as we go along. The jewels represent mitzvot. Some are too heavy for us to pick up at a given time; we might have to come back later to pick them up. But all are precious. All are worthwhile.

When God told Abraham to go forth, he promised him many things: you'll be successful, you'll be a great nation, and so forth. But he also gave him a charge. His last words to him were: "U't'hi brachah" -- "And be a blessing."

What does it mean to "be a blessing?" It means, of course, to bring good things to ourselves and to our families.

But it means more than this. It means to share our Judaism with others, with everyone among whom we happen to live. We have a wonderful tradition that's priceless. That is what Thomas Cahill recognized when he wrote of the "gifts" of the Jews.

That's our charge as we follow in Abraham's footsteps. To be Hebrews -- "Ivrim" -- literally, people who come from someplace else, and who are headed in a different direction from everyone else.

Let us continue on our journey, constantly learning how to live lives of meaning and value. And let us be a blessing to all around us.

The End.