Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah begins with Abraham’s divine election: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing,” God tells him. But as many commentators, both ancient and contemporary, have asked: Why is Abraham the one who’s blessed and charged with a sacred directive? What makes him special? In last week’s parshah, the text explains that Noah was singled out for survival because he was “a righteous man, blameless in his age,” yet here there’s no such explanation. A number of commentaries attempt to fill this gap by narrating how Abraham, brought up in a deeply idolatrous society, came to recognize and worship the one true God. Beyond modeling how one might enter into relationship with the divine, they offer a way of understanding what it takes to break from the prevailing norms of one’s society.

Maimonides gives one famous account of Abraham’s awakening, which he imagines grew out of the young patriarch’s own reasoning and solitary study. As soon as Abraham was weaned, Maimonides explains, he began contemplating the heavenly spheres, pondering how they could revolve without anyone to control them. “There was no teacher and no one to inform him,” Maimonides writes, because Abraham “was sunken in Ur Casdim amidst the foolish idolaters—his father and mother and all the people [around him] were idolaters, and he worshiped with them.” Yet despite his environs, little Abraham’s “heart wandered and he began to understand, until he grasped the truth, and understood the path of righteousness through his accurate comprehension.” Maimonides, ever the rationalist, believes that even amidst a hegemonic culture of wrongdoing, it was possible for Abraham to perceive the truth through the power of philosophical logic. Crucially, this was a long process: Maimonides states that even though Abraham began questioning as a young child, he didn’t become fully “aware of his Creator” until the age of 40. The Divrei Yirmiyahu, a commentator on Maimonides, notes that it was particularly hard for Abraham’s contemporaries to arrive at monotheism through their own contemplation because idolatry offered an alternative explanation of the universe. (This resonates with what we know from our own world: We see that while all people are capable of understanding that every human being deserves life and dignity, it is harder to intuitively arrive at this view if one is raised within a supremacist society that insists otherwise.) In this telling, the path of righteousness is self-evident—if only it is not obscured by society’s false gods.

Another account, from a midrash in Breshit Rabbah, is so famous that many mistake it for part of the biblical text. In this imagined history, Abraham’s father, Terah, was an idol merchant, and whenever potential customers would come to the family’s store, Abraham would dissuade them from making a purchase, mocking the idols’ ineptitude. One day, he smashed all but the largest idol and put a club in that idol’s hand. When his father returned, Abraham claimed that the idol had gotten angry and shattered the rest. Terah’s response of fury and disbelief serves as proof that he does not, in fact, believe the idols he worships are capable of such material action. A midrash in Sefer HaYashar provides background to this story, explaining how Abraham himself lost faith in the idols: We’re told that as a child, he noticed that the idols never consumed the food he offered them; once this aroused sufficient doubt, “the spirit of God” rested upon him. In contrast to Maimonides’s narrative, in which contemplation reveals the self-evident truth, this narrative shows how someone can come to doubt the systems and ideologies in which they’re enmeshed by observing their fallibility.

But as the midrash in Breshit Rabbah highlights, disillusionment doesn’t necessarily lead to rejection. That story ends with Terah, despite his implicit admission that idols are powerless, turning Abraham over to the evil ruler Nimrod, who casts him into a furnace as punishment for his religious defiance. (Miraculously, Abraham emerges unharmed.) Just as in our world, while there are people who sincerely believe the mythologies and propaganda of their society, there are also others who are too bought into the system to abandon it even when they realize it’s built on treacherous foundations. The fact that Terah betrays his own son to defend the lie to which he has committed his life is a chilling reminder of the power of hegemony over truth.

A final midrash presents a radically different vision of Abraham’s path to recognizing God, told through a parable: “This is analogous to one who was passing from place to place, and saw a burning building [birah doleket]. He said: ‘Is it possible that this building has no one in charge of it?’ The owner of the building looked out at him and said: ‘I am the owner of the building.’ So, because Abraham our patriarch had been saying: ‘Is it possible that this world is without someone in charge?,’ the Holy Blessed One looked at him and said to him: ‘I am the owner of the world.’” “Birah doleket,” rendered above as “burning building,” is often translated as “a lit-up palace”; according to this translation, Abraham, in Maimonidean fashion, recognizes that order and beauty must come from something greater. But as the midrash scholar Paul Mandel points out, although “birah” in later Hebrew means “palace,” in early Rabbinic Hebrew, it was used to refer to a large, unstable tenement building. Moreover, “doleket” simply does not mean “beautifully lit-up” and is never used this way in Hebrew; rather, it refers to something being consumed by fire.

If we read the story through the lens of this translation, the narrative changes dramatically: Abraham sees a fragile world in flames and wonders how there could be no one to tend to such horror; God peers out from the top story, announcing ownership of a world that it is burning with God trapped inside, and which God desperately needs help in tending to. In this model, realization of the order of things comes not through grasping some fundamental truth that lies beyond the strictures of one’s society, but through recognizing devastation. Abraham comes to understand that the world he walks through every day, the one everyone around him passes through so nonchalantly, is a world in flames. It’s also a recognition that even if only some in this society are responsible for igniting the fire, the rest are happy to let it burn—and that salvaging any world worth living in can only be done by first putting out the fire.

Breaking free of any hegemonic ideology is a daunting task. The rabbis, in explaining Abraham’s origin story, nonetheless insist that being raised and conditioned in a corrupt society neither guarantees nor excuses one’s own corruption. Maimonides, in his description of what happened following Abraham’s epiphany, also adds an important addendum: “When he recognized and knew God, he began to formulate replies to the inhabitants of Ur Kasdim and debate with them, telling them that they were not following a proper path. He broke their idols and began to teach the people that it is fitting to serve only the God of the world.” Recognition alone is not enough; discovering a moral truth—or, inversely, recognizing prevailing moral corruption—comes with the attendant obligation to move one’s society. If we wish to walk in the ways of Abraham, we must learn from the model of the great original iconoclast: to examine our world with clear eyes, to recognize the falsehoods and the flames, and to bring others along with us on the journey forward.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.