Lech Lecha: Beyond our Kin, Beyond our Ken

In this week’s Torah reading, Lech Lecha, Abraham is suddenly ordered to leave his birthplace, the home of his father. He must go to a land that God will show him (Genesis 12:1). It sounds like he is radically independent of his family connections. He answers only to the call of a higher power?

Let’s slow down and look at the actual Bible text.

The Bible spells out the whole genealogy of Abraham. It goes back to Noah, the second Adam, and Noah’s son Shem (Genesis 11:10–32). The latter is portrayed as a righteous son who honored his father. The 10-generation genealogy—ten is often the number in a chain that separates eras in the Bible—signals the reader that Abraham’s family origins are part of his story. He does not simply veer away from them in the narrative or in his own emotional life.

While midrash—imaginative storytelling by the rabbis spun around the Bible text—tells of an Abraham who smashed his father’s idol (Terah, we are told, was an idol maker; e.g., Genesis Rabbah 38:13), the Bible text explains that Terah set out for Canaan with Abraham. Terah stopped and settled along the way in Haran (Genesis 11:31). Father and son at least shared part of the journey from their ancient homeland to the promised land. We are not told why Terah stopped en route. But perhaps part of the message is that great things happen through the efforts of many generations. Terah did not complete the journey. But he was part of it.

Lot, Abraham’s nephew, completes the journey with Abraham (Genesis 12:4–5). They each have staff who manage their flocks. The senior managers end up quarreling with each other. Abraham is anxious to settle up amicably with Lot. He offers his nephew the choice of the land to the left or to the right, promising to go the opposite way. He accepts Lot’s choice (Genesis 13:8–9).

When Lot is taken captive in a war, Abraham leads a small army of his people to liberate him (Genesis 14:12–16). Abraham even pleads with God not to destroy Lot’s wicked city, even for the sake of ten good people within it (Genesis 18:23–32). God cannot find the requisite number. Then God, remembering Abraham, enables Lot to escape the fiery destruction (Genesis 19:27–29).

Family is so important to Abraham that God in His covenant promises Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky (Genesis 15:5). Sarah, his seemingly barren wife, offers her handmaiden as a second wife for Abraham. Hagar produces a son Ishmael (Genesis 16:1–4, 15). Hagar treats the still childless Sarah disdainfully. Sarah asks to have Hagar and the child sent away. This grieves Abraham. God reassures him that He will look after Hagar and the child in their exile (Genesis 21:10–13).

When Sarah’s son Isaac is born, Abraham instructs his servant Eliezer to find a bride for Isaac among Abraham’s kin. He must not choose among the Canaanites (Genesis 24:2–4).

We can doubt at times that Abraham is as dedicated a husband as he is a son, kinsman and father. In Egypt, he portrays Sarah as his sister, not his wife, lest the Egyptians murder him while acquiring her as a wife (Genesis 12:11–20). Perhaps Abram’s name – father, then Abraham, father of nations (Genesis 17:5) – suggests that in his human relations, he was more intense in his dedication to his descendants than the women who bore them.

In any event, God’s demand in the Akedah (the binding of Isaac) episode — to sacrifice Isaac, “his only son, the son he loved” (Genesis 22:2) – at a time when it would be beyond miraculous if the elderly Sarah could ever bear another child. It was the most devastating loss Abraham could possibly sustain, the potential destruction of not only his most favored son, but of  Abraham’s posterity. Yet Abraham proceeds without quarrel (Genesis 22:1–19). The connectedness of Abraham to family, up, across and down generations, places the potential sacrifice of Isaac in a context that makes Abraham’s compliance incomprehensible. He can’t even argue? He cannot even question?

God’s first command to Abraham was to go to a land that God would show him, which he would give to Abraham’s offspring (Genesis 12:1, 7). Abraham went with part of his existing family – including his wife and his nephew Lot – with the promise of being at the famed head of a vast chain of descendants.

At the Akedah, Abraham separates from his wife and family to take his only legitimate son – on a journey to death, and along with it, the end of the family line. He was on the way to devastating his wife, depriving his kin of a family member, and likely destroying his own posterity forever.

Many Bible stories are built around a chiasmus. A sequence of events moves in one direction, then reverses back to its origin. Examples include: Joseph, who is born in the holy land, is betrayed by his brothers, descends into Egypt, reconciles with his brothers, and at the end of the exodus his body returns to the holy land (Genesis 37–50; Exodus 13:19). And Noah, who enters the ark on dry land, the rains come, the rains relent, Noah returns to dry land (Genesis 7–8). Abram is singled out as the father of many nations and the first in the covenantal line – and he goes up the mount – and then will come down the mountain as a killer of his only covenantal child, the one that he loves, the link to the many generations?

In the tradition, Abraham’s compliance is sometimes extolled as the ultimate act of loyalty. To many commentators, however, if Abraham was prepared to comply, he was all too ready, all too quick, all too methodical. He should have hesitated, protested, argued with God. Maybe in the end, he should have refused. Perhaps God would have been more pleased with a founder who stood up for his son, his potential grandchildren, his potentially devastated wife?

Perhaps Abraham’s all-too-dutiful compliance led God to believe the Israelites had much more to learn. About how God does not demand human sacrifice. About being prepared to challenge even God Himself—as Moses did (Exodus 32:11–14)—to save his son, his posterity, the peoples for whom he was supposed to be the founding figure. Did God decide that the Israelites needed a period of captivity to enhance their understanding of ethics? To witness a leader who can argue with God Himself? To become faithful to God, but also morally as well as physically courageous?

Or….

The Akedah story radiates possible interpretation from the most compact generating point. Eerily, was God testing not only Abraham’s fidelity to God, but his righteousness and courage? Was God hoping for the kind of loyal opposition he would hear from Moses?

Or…

Was Abraham an exemplar not of obedience, but of trust in God? Abraham tells Isaac that the two will not only go up the mount of sacrifice, but come down together (Genesis 22:5). God will provide an animal sacrifice. All of which happens.

We can — should — read the story over and over to find more and more questions, not more and more answers. One thing it teaches us is that there are dilemmas so profound that no human being can ever be confident in the answer. There can be tragic trade-offs that no human being should be called upon to make. But which are sometimes demanded of us.

In the time of the Shoah, community leaders had to make inhuman choices. Do you make some concessions to the enemy, even yielding up the weak, to save others in the hope that rescue will come in time? In the Yad Vashem museum, an exhibit relates this true story. A father asks a rabbi if he can try to save his son from a scheduled execution of hundreds of children. This, if it means some other unidentified child might die. The rabbi does not answer. The father does not intervene. The child perishes.

In modern times, a government of Israel has to decide whether to send some soldiers to their grievous injury or death to rescue hostages. It has to decide how many convicted – and potentially recidivist – terrorists to trade for innocent captives. It has to decide how much to risk in the lives of its current soldiers and civilians to destroy a threat that might take even more lives in the future. In attacking military targets, Israel must minimize collateral harm to its adversary’s civilians, including their human shields; but how far does this limitation go when it costs the lives of Israel’s own soldiers and of its own civilians?

Children, some young, some grown up, are taken hostage in Gaza. Some of their parents demonstrate publicly for the government to do whatever it takes to release them. Other parents publicly agree with the government that the prices are too high to pay. What Abraham, what Sarah, should ever be put to such a choice?

Judaism is largely a successful exercise in providing an architecture, a beauty and order, to an enormous universe and the ordinary terrors of any human life. There is an “app” for almost everything. A birth? A brit milah, a baby naming…a wedding, a chuppah…a death, a levaya, a shiva, a finite period of mourning with prescribed rituals. Judaism gives names, forms, labels like kosher or unkosher, right or wrong, mandatory or optional. These shape the experience of life that might otherwise be experienced as unending existential absurdity and terror.

The apps are compatible.

The rabbinical tradition is to search for and to find a way to make everything in the tradition fit together. Sometimes, through scholarly attention to detail. Sometimes with audacious creative imagination. A commandment in Deuteronomy might seem to clash with another commandment in Leviticus. But we find a way to make all the pieces fit together.

And sometimes there are situations for which there is no app, and we as human beings cannot understand how there possibly could be a sure method to manage a challenge or crisis and live with what we have done or not done.

The Tradition acknowledges that there are questions and situations that go beyond anything we can fully understand. They cannot be managed as part of a coherent system of thought and belief. In the Talmud, we are told there are questions—what happened before Genesis—we should not bother to think about (Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 11b). Even in ancient times, the prophets and the sages asked why the innocent suffer and the wicked prosper. Job was told it is beyond human ken (Job 38–41). The Talmud admits that it is “not for us to know.”

The story of the Akedah does not reassure us that unthinking obedience is what God demands or expects. It unsettles us. It asks us to reflect on the outer limits of what even the most thoughtful, humane and ancient tradition can reckon with. Perhaps we should be satisfied that what our tradition gives us is as much reassurance as is possible for us human beings, in our mixture of matter and consciousness, in our striving for endurance in some form despite our mortality.

In a book published posthumously, The Tale of a Niggun, Elie Wiesel writes a beautifully poetic story about how a rabbi reacts when the Enemy demands that the town yield up ten Jews to save the rest. In the end, the people do not even answer the Enemy. As they perish, they sing a prayer so powerful it reaches to Heaven. Was their decision right? Should the community have considered arranging an escape for some? Attempting a desperate physical resistance, like the Warsaw Ghetto? Asking for ten volunteers to sacrifice themselves? Was leaving this world in solidarity and prayer the only course permitted to them in righteousness?

Judaism is a faith that aims mightily to provide coherence, order, justice and consolation to our experience of the world – and yet is in some ways exceptionally humble. It says we are small people. Our only territorial patrimony is a small land. We have no mission to take over the world. Rather, we are to live up to our own best traditions and beliefs. And so be an inspiration to others. We have spent thousands of years, trying to refine and systematize our system. We bring warmth, enlightenment, coherence to its engagement with a world which is by nature chaotic and often cruel. And we know by Sacred Tradition as well as by raw human experience, that there is only so much of the tree of knowledge that we can even see, let alone touch, let alone hold, let alone taste.

And…

There is a kind of Jewish faith, including among some of the Chassidim, that trusts that everything that happens is enfolded in God’s beneficence, even if the good appears hidden at first (cf. the concept of “gam zu l’tovah,” “this too is for the good,” as elaborated in Chassidic thought, e.g., Tanya, Likkutei Amarim, ch. 26). A tragic death of a child can bring that child to heaven in a purer state; his parents might emerge from the torment with more faith and trust in God, and more commitment to helping others through deeds of kindness; the extended family might become closer as they reach out to support the bereaved.

There is another kind of Jewish faith, the faith of Job, that does not trust that a devastating event is part of a chain of cause-and-effect that will ultimately result in any good that human beings can understand or even experience. It takes consolation that “God’s ways are not our ways” (Isaiah 55:8–9: “כִּ֣י לֹ֤א מַחְשְׁבֹתַי֙ מַחְשְׁבֹתֵיכֶ֔ם וְלֹ֥א דַרְכֵיכֶ֖ם דְּרָכָ֑י נְאֻם־יְהוָֽה׃ כִּ֣י גָבְה֤וּ הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ מִן־הָאָ֔רֶץ כֵּ֛ן גָּבְה֥וּ דְרָכַ֖י מִדַּרְכֵיכֶ֑ם וּמַחְשְׁבֹתַ֖י מִמַּחְשְׁבֹתֵיכֶֽם׃” “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”). From this perspective, you are not assured that from evil and suffering there will always be an ultimate redemption that makes sense in human terms. You are in the end, after all your doubt and anxiety and despair, you are relieved of the desire to understand and find justification; instead you quietly continue to walk with your God as humbly and faithfully as you can.