Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  This unresolvable tension, I later realized, has existed since the birth of Judaism. Born in exile, surrounded by hostile populations, Judaism has always had tense relations with others. How Jews have responded to this struggle has defined their identity throughout history. It has also defined how they viewed their founding father.

  Alexander the Great conquered Palestine in 333 B.C.E. and introduced a period of colonization that would subvert the Jews for the rest of antiquity—first to the Greeks, ultimately to the Romans. As they would for centuries, some Jews wanted to assimilate with their occupiers; others wanted to remain apart. Both camps turned to Abraham as their model.

  For elite Jews, eager to fit into Greek and Roman life, Abraham became a symbol that Jews were deep down just like everyone else. Josephus, for example, ignored circumcision (too Jewish!) and stressed that a non-Jew like Abraham was at the heart of history. Philo underscored Abraham’s role as a purveyor of science to the entire Mediterranean. This was Abraham as Father of Everyone.

  Yet by far the more dramatic trend of the times took Abraham in the opposite direction. For besieged Jews, Abraham became their exclusive father who was chosen by God to pass on his blessing to them alone. They looked to Abraham to explain their plight. Just as Abraham says in Genesis 23 that he is “a stranger and a sojourner,” so his descendants were strangers and sojourners under imperial rule. If they were forced to live with a bunker mentality, Jews wanted Abraham in their bunker. Forget his role as a blessing to all nations; we need him to bless ours.

  The rise of Christianity and the Roman sacking of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. only accelerated the process by which Jews became more isolated—and more possessive of their biblical forefathers. In the absence of land or central Temple, being Jewish meant visiting a synagogue, observing law, reading Torah, and studying midrash. In this environment, beginning in the centuries after Christ and continuing for the next millennium, Abraham became an important tool to boost the morale of beleaguered Jews and help them withstand the pressure to convert. He became a political figure fighting for the preservation of Israel. But since Israel didn’t exist during Abraham’s life, the rabbis had to make some adjustments. The first sleight of hand they performed was to remove him from the restrictive confines of history and make him a timeless figure, a sort of guardian angel for Jews.

  Suddenly, the rabbis write in their commentaries, Abraham was the reason God created the world. “But for thee I had not created the orb of the sun,” God says in one midrash. “But for thee I had not created the moon.” He was the protector of the afterlife. “In the Hereafter Abraham will sit at the entrance to the Underworld, and permit no circumcised Israelite to descend therein.” He even sits next to God in eternity. Rabbi Judan tells a midrash that in the time-to-come, God will seat the messiah on his right and Abraham on his left. “Why am I on the left?” Abraham asks. “Because I am on your right,” God says. Binyomin Cohen would be thrilled: Abraham has become so exalted that God now sits on Abraham’s right!

  But the rabbis didn’t stop at making Abraham semidivine; they also made him the ideal human: they made him the first Jew. This is actually trickier than making him God’s left-hand man. Since the model Jew was one who observed Mosaic law, Abraham must now observe Mosaic law. Doing so would appear problematic, however, because Moses arrives some seven hundred years after Abraham. But the rabbis found an intriguing hook. In Genesis 26, God says that Abraham obeyed “my commandments, my laws, and my teachings.”

  Bingo! The rabbis interpreted this line to mean that Abraham knew and obeyed the laws before anyone else. In fact, he invented the laws. In the rabbinic portrayal that emerged during this period, Abraham speaks Hebrew. He sits in a learned academy studying midrash. He prays, tithes, observes the laws of purity, travels to the site of the Temple, even teaches grace after meals. He is the first to institute morning prayer and the first to prescribe using prayer shawls.

  Abraham, the aging wanderer from Mesopotamia, the noble warrior who struggles with Sarah and Hagar over his heir, who expresses his religiosity by building altars and nearly sacrificing his son, now becomes a synagogue rabbi, keeping kosher, wearing a kippah, reading the Torah, and, no doubt, giving sermons that put his congregants to sleep.

  Nearly every aspect of Jewish life now finds its origin in Abraham. The rabbis even discovered a way to credit him with inventing Passover, a holiday that on its surface celebrates the liberation of Abraham’s descendants from slavery. Not anymore. When God’s messengers come to visit on their way to Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham rushes to meet them, he drips blood since he has been circumcised only three days earlier. As a reward, God allows his descendants to evoke his righteousness by placing blood on their doorposts during Passover.

  By the Middle Ages, Abraham had become so powerful he was nearly a saint. He prices every cow that’s sold, ensures that kosher wine is cheaper, and saves the ships at sea from storms. A precious stone suspended from his neck brings immediate cure to anyone who beholds it; after his death the stone was suspended from the sun. In fact, Abraham may not have died at all; worms did not destroy his body once it was placed in the ground.

  If these traits sound familiar, they are. Abraham had become a savior, a celestial figure who embodies divinity on earth, represents humans in the afterlife, and contains, in the deeds of his life, the scripture of God’s intention. The Jewish notion of Abraham had become remarkably similar to the Christian notion of Jesus, in which Christ is the logos, the word and the law. Indeed, the two notions developed during the same period and no doubt influenced each other.

  For Jews, under assault by Christians (and now Muslims as well), Abraham had become the redeemer, a sort of historical messiah before the actual messiah arrives. To be sure, not all rabbis maintained that Abraham was the exclusive protector of Jews. Numerous midrashim claimed that, because Abraham was circumcised at ninety-nine, he was essentially a convert and continued to welcome non-Jews into God’s realm.

  But the dominant strand of Judaism by the Middle Ages held that Abraham was no longer the figure who expressed God’s universal blessing to humankind. Now he was a figure who sent his blessing exclusively to the descendants of Isaac. Abraham had become the singular possession of the Jews. The descendants of Ishmael, meanwhile, were cast aside. The text had been outstripped; the commentaries now reigned.

  AS A READER, as a citizen—and especially as a Jew—I was shocked to read about this collective, willful appropriation of Abraham. What happened to the kind, avuncular Abraham I learned about in Bar Mitzvah class? What happened to the universal, judicious Abraham who passes his blessing on to Ishmael and Isaac and who is called by God to be a blessing to “all the families of the earth”? More important, what should I do with this new Super Abraham now that I had learned about him?

  To answer that question I went to see Rabbi David Rosen, the former chief rabbi of Ireland, one of Jerusalem’s most prominent citizens, and the director of interreligious relations for the American Jewish Committee. Rabbi Rosen is an urbane man with a neatly trimmed dark beard and mellifluous speaking style that’s one part Cambridge don, one part UN negotia tor, one part Voice of God. Had he been alive in the time of Abraham, he would have been sent to mediate between Sarah and Hagar.

  As a religion, Judaism considers this process of reconfiguring the Bible healthy, he noted. “What the rabbis are trying to do is reinforce the antiquity of the moral code they inherited. They see a danger that somebody might come along in the Jewish community and say, ‘Look, Abraham didn’t keep kosher and God says he’s okay. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if I don’t do these things.’ ”

  They utilize the text as an educational tool, Rabbi Rosen added, in an effort to say that Abraham had divine inspiration and did these things even before God told them to Moses. “Of course from a historical point of view it’s quite ridiculous. But I don’t look at it in a scientific way. I look at what they did and see they have an important moral message they want to con
vey.”

  But as healthy as this approach may be, it lays the foundation for many of the problems the religions would face in the future. “There are dangers in this process,” Rabbi Rosen agreed. “The sages themselves in the Talmud say that the day on which the oral law was written down is like the day the golden calf was made. They participated in this process, yet they say it was a terrible thing. Why? They are saying that the moment you write down the oral law you’re also doing something a little bit obscene. You’re taking something that’s dynamic—the Torah—and you’re making it rigid. You’re taking the text and using it as pretext for your own ideas.”

  An even greater problem is that the rabbis subtly undermined the validity of the text by giving their own commentaries equal weight. This circumstance created what Rabbi Rosen called “anarchy” because the rabbis validated the idea of reinterpretation. Once Jewish commentators open the door by decoupling Abraham from his surroundings and recasting him in their image, Christian commentators come storming through, followed closely by Muslim commentators. If Abraham can become the First Jew, he can just as easily become the First Christian and the First Muslim. Soon the religions would be at war over their supposedly common heritage.

  And suddenly the carefully balanced message of the Abraham story—that God cares for all his children—a tradition that existed for hundreds of years before the religions themselves existed, was put in jeopardy by the inheritors of that tradition. Abraham was a valuable catch. Control him, you control access to God. As a result, he became an irresistible invitation for identity theft: Steal me, I’m yours! Jews have no one to blame for this process but themselves. They initiated it, and they ultimately would pay a stiff price for it.

  “You’re dealing with a human problem,” Rabbi Rosen said. “All good things can be prostituted. The question is, What is your motive? Medieval Christians prostituted biblical texts for their own purposes. Later, Muslims did the same. Even some rabbis today are doing this to promote Jewish nationalism. Everybody wants Abraham to be their exclusive father.”

  But how many believers today—Jews, Christians, or Muslims—actually understand this process? Certainly the religions themselves don’t want to advertise that their view of Abraham evolved over time, and often in reaction to external forces. For me, just learning about this struggle for Abraham’s identity—of which I had little knowledge despite countless hours of religious education as a child, decades of mainstream practice, and years of adult study—was disturbing, and a bit revolting.

  My immediate reaction was to tune out all the commentaries. If you’re going to tell me that Abraham is your exclusive domain when the text is clearly sending a different message, then I don’t want to hear it. I’ll stamp my feet, put my hands over my ears, and stick to the text.

  “Your dilemma is a fascinating one,” Rabbi Rosen said, his voice revealing a mix of bemusement and curiosity. “It will be interesting to see how you resolve this.”

  To do that, I’ll even ask a more grown-up question: Why not reject the rabbis and their hoodwinks? Why not disclaim what began at Qumran?

  THE SUN WAS just dipping behind the cliffs by the time we reached the farthest spot from the settlement, near Cave Eleven. The orange and red in the rocks’ striations had grown richer as the day passed, the loneliness of the setting more acute.

  The presence of so many caves in the hills reminded me of a similar arrangement in the Sinai, where early Christian monks came to live in the wilderness near the place Moses received the Ten Commandments. “In many ways, what happened here resembled what would happen later in Christianity with hermits who went into the desert,” Hanan Eschel explained. “These believers left everything behind—no family, no personal belongings—and came here to serve God.”

  We settled onto a rock overlooking the Dead Sea. For something so grand and historic, the Dead Sea is always remarkably quiet. Maybe salt silences, or at least absorbs, sound.

  I mentioned my growing frustration with the entire process of midrash. What the interpreters did might be ingenious, I said to Eschel, but it also created enormous problems.

  “They didn’t think about this,” he said. “They were sure that what they were doing was important. They were trying to learn from history, and they didn’t worry about the implications.”

  “But we know the implications,” I said, “and the feeling I get—and I don’t mean to be childish about it—is anger. Their innocent process soon spins out of control.”

  “I don’t think that you’re right. I think this is what makes Scripture interesting. The only other way would be to abandon the Bible. The world changed, and if you wanted to stay connected to other generations you had to have some way to change the text. If you couldn’t write commentaries, the text would just freeze and be unimportant.”

  “But where do I put my allegiance?” I asked. I mentioned the rule in American baseball where a tie goes to the runner. “If there’s a disagreement between the text and the commentaries, what do I do? Do I go with the text, do I go with the interpreters? Or do I just do my own interpretation?”

  “The first thing you do is to realize that these interpreters were brilliant,” he said. “They heard the text in a very creative way. And when you try to get into their minds, and understand what bothered them, you get a better sense of the text. The most important thing I tell my students is never underestimate those people, because the minute you think, Well, I’m smarter, then you won’t understand what they were doing. And they knew what they were doing.

  “And what they were doing is just what we’re doing today,” he continued. “They’re trying to learn about what happened in Jerusalem, say, or Paris by looking at a verse in Scripture. It’s a very old tradition. People in Qumran were doing the same thing. They were reading the Bible as applying both to the time of Abraham and to their time.”

  I mentioned that Jewish tradition holds that halakah, the oral law, is obligatory, but that hagadah, the interpretations of the narratives, are not. Even the rabbis said that often the hagadah contradict reason. “You don’t seem threatened by the contradiction,” I said.

  “Good interpretation doesn’t contradict. It’s very hard to take the text and make it say the opposite of what it says. If you said Abraham went from Shechem to Harran, instead of the other way around, as Genesis says, it would be very hard. Sometimes they did radical exegesis, but the usual way was to add something.”

  “So as a practical matter, what you’re saying is that you can read these various interpretations, enjoy them, but in the end you have to find your own meaning in the story.”

  “Right. But it will be an eclectic work. Every once in a while you’ll think, Wow! This was so brilliant it must be what the author of the Bible was thinking about. So you’ll take that idea, you’ll throw in an idea from over here, and ultimately emphasize the things you’re interested in. You’ll do what a long list of people before you have done, but you’ll do it today, in a world after September 11, and what happened then will affect how you read Genesis.”

  “So what is the message of Genesis after September 11?”

  He looked out at the sea for a second. The sky was becoming as orange as the stones. He was a remarkably relaxed man. The climb, the conversation, my petulance had done little to alter his serene confidence.

  “If you ask me, it’s a question of modesty,” he said. “Why do religious people act the way they act? It’s because of a lack of modesty. It’s what happened in Jerusalem with Christian cults planning to blow up the Temple Mount to make way for the messiah. It’s what happened in Israel with the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he made peace with the Palestinians. Some people read the text and suffer from a lack of modesty. They really believed they had all the answers. I know that I don’t have all the answers. I am trying to understand the text and the commentaries, and I know that somebody else will have more insights than I will.”

  He continued, “I think the same thing has happened with Isla
m. The Koran says that the people who believe in Muhammad should rule the world, yet they found out that the world is not functioning the way it’s written in Scripture. It can’t be a mistake in theology, so it must be a mistake in history—and this mistake must be temporary. The minute you get this notion in your head, you’re allowed to change it. You’re allowed to act for God.

  “What I’m trying to do, especially in this part of the world, is to teach people to be more modest. To explain to them that they don’t have all the answers. If you’ll be modest, you’ll probably understand the text better, and there’s much less chance that you’ll do awful things in the name of God.”

  “So can you find a basis in the Abraham story for modesty?”

  He smiled. “The whole story is about modesty. Leave your family, leave what you know. Think of when God tells Abraham to follow what Sarah says in regard to Ishmael. We know Abraham felt bad about this; he had to send Ishmael away. But he knew he didn’t understand everything.

  “You can take the story of Abraham and teach people they don’t have all the answers, because we are Abraham—just like all those commentators said—and we don’t have all the answers. We don’t know our destination. And we certainly don’t know everything about God.”

  6

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  CHRISTIANS

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  THOUGH IT’S NOT YET 10:30 in the morning, the bishop of Jerusalem pours me a snifter of brandy. Then he brews me a cup of tea. Then he shows me a trick with his food. We are sitting in his crowded kitchen in the Old City, a few steps from the Holy Sepulcher, and he’s fussing around like a talkative aunt. He takes a dried fig from a bowl, splits it in two, places a walnut in the middle of the flesh, then sandwiches the whole thing together and pops it into my mouth. “Isn’t that fabulous!” he says. “I learned that from a monk in Lebanon.”