No need to demythologize Avraham. The Torah does it for us (Vayera)

For most of us, Sefer Bereishit (Genesis) is a trove of “Bible stories” which we absorb unquestioningly as young children – and which we remember as such with barely a second thought.

We are by and large guilty of uncritical Torah reading – if we read at all. And I would suggest that Parshat Vayera is perhaps our greatest transgression in this regard. Most of us only remember Avraham’s unsuccessful plea to spare Sodom and its subsequent obliteration; followed by the miraculous birth of Yitzhak; and culminating in Avraham passing God’s ‘ultimate’ test with flying colors as he hastens to comply with the request to offer up Isaac as a whole burnt offering.

But we are no longer six and seven years old, and there is a lot more to Vayera than these simplistic cartoons, and, indeed, much more within these narratives themselves.

Parshat Vayera is riddled with nuances, problems, conflicts and questionable actions that should have us clamoring for clarification. In fact, this is what commentators have attempted from the Sages of the Talmud to their contemporary descendants (like one for whom an entire Jerusalem street is named). Yet in every one of these instances we are served up a triple scoop of gobbledygook as phony as a Beverly Hills face lift.

Yes, we are told that, for example, Avraham and Sarah did not conceive until they were borderline centenarians because they were so holy and modest that they had never consummated their marriage. Indeed, Avraham was clueless regarding Sarah’s beauty as he had never actually looked at her (he must have been a Gerer hassid). Or that Avraham was running a yeshiva in his tent, and would stop wayfarers in the hope of recruiting to them to his own little Slabodka. Pathetically, most of the questions they seek to answer with such flights of dismal fancy are “klotz kashes”, imbecilic from the get go.

I, too, have questions that I’d like to deal with. So let me share some of these with you. As always, I am receptive to intelligent answers (and by these I do not mean credibility-defying legends that only further remove us from any sense of reality):

1. God had already told Avraham in the previous parsha,  Lekh Lekha, that he would have a son with Sarah. So,
   a) Why was there a need for the messengers to repeat what God had already told him? Is an angel’s word better than God’s promise? (Speaking of which, it is an angel which stays Avraham’s hand at the moment of Isaac’s imminent slaughter, while it was God Himself who had requested the offering.)
   b) Why did the annunciation by the three messengers come as a surprise to Sarah? Didn’t Avraham communicate with his wife? Surely, he had shared the good news before the arrival of these strangers?
   c) Why was Sarah rebuked for laughing (18:!3), when Avraham had reacted the very same way, just a few verses earlier?
2. Why do God, and his emissaries, have to keep telling Avraham that he will become a great and powerful nation (18:18). He must surely know this by now.  After all he heard this from God Himself — over and over and over again. And this promise had twice been sealed by covenant.  Why the constant need for repetition?
3. Avraham is forever lauded for his readiness to bargain with the Almighty in order to spare Sodom. Yet, when he runs out of statistical justification, and the verdict is no longer subject to appeal, it never occurs to Avraham to plead for the safety of his nephew Lot. Indeed, Lot is rescued on his own merit (See Rashi on 19:29). Why is it that Avraham seems to care more for the world at large than for a blood relative – who certainly appears worthy of being spared?
4. When trying to protect his ‘guests’ from being raped by the Sodomites, Lot offers his daughters instead (19:8), claiming they are virgins. And yet these daughters were married as we see in verse 12. And, indeed why did Lot offer his daughters when he could have offered his sons-in-law who were Sodomites themselves and present under his roof? After all the mob was clamoring for male victims, not female ones.
5. Having escaped by the skin of their teeth to a remote and desolate place, Lot and his daughters believe the entire world has been destroyed and they are the only survivors. Hence the daughters’ decision to become pregnant by their father. However, for this they need wine in order to intoxicate Lot as he would likely spurn their seductions if he were sober – further proof of his core decency. But where did the wine come from? The angels had grabbed Lot and his wife and daughters – there was no time to pack any luggage, let alone wine. So, what was the source of this alcohol?
6. We tend to make short shrift of Lot, and yet Avraham’s nephew is very similar to Noah  — a righteous man relative to the universe of utter degeneracy in which he lived. Like Noah, Lot and his family are the sole survivors following a punitive cataclysm. Like Noah, Lot experiences a debacle with his offspring involving inebriation and conduct unbecoming. Surely these similarities are not coincidental. Perhaps Lot deserves a bit more recognition than we give him?
7. Avraham departs from Elonei Mamrei for Grar following the annihilation of Sodom. Rashi tells us it was because the traffic stopped as no one was traveling to Sodom. The implication is that he no longer had the opportunity to host wayfarers (or recruit new students for his yeshiva). But then, when he had been able to host wayfarers why did he not use his persuasive powers to prevent them from continuing their journeys to this city of sin? Indeed, why did he not prevent Lot from settling there? INDEED when Avraham separated from Lot (13:9)  he gave his nephew the choice to go either right or left, while he, Avraham, would take the remaining choice. Had Lot selected option ‘B’ it could easily have been Avraham who settled in Sodom!
8. When going to Grar, Avraham does a repeat of his actions vis a vis Sarah when they went to Egypt. For him it is a given that she would be taken and compromised by the local monarch. This doesn’t appear to faze him. All he asks is that she dissemble regarding her status as his wife, claiming they are siblings, so that he should not be murdered. Was the absence of wayfarers in Elonei Mamre sufficient justification for Avraham to uproot himself and subject his wife to the indignity and moral outrage of droit de seigneur? Yes, the practice of hahnasat orhim (hospitality for strangers) is highly commendable, but surely not at the cost of having one’s beloved wife raped by a pagan king.
9. Avraham is never reticent about challenging, second-guessing or outright ignoring God’s preferences. Despite the Almighty having brought him to Canaan, Avraham decamps to Egypt because there was a famine in the land. Did all the Canaanites flee to Egypt or just the one man who God Himself had instructed to build his home there? Upon returning from Egypt, God asks Avraham to wander the length and breadth of Canaan, yet Abraham has other plans. When God decides to destroy Sodom, Avraham attempts to dissuade Him.

And yet, when it comes to the Akedah (God’s apparent request that Avraham sacrifice Yitzhak) our Patriarch hastens to do God’s bidding without so much as a request for clarification. All along he had been a lone voice preaching against human sacrifice and other abominations, yet, when asked to engage in such an atrocity himself, he refrains from even the most modest protest? At the very least he could remind God of his repeated promises and covenants to make him into a great nation from his only child with Sarah. Surely, he can question God’s credibility when it comes to ironclad covenants?

As well, this is the second time we know of that Avraham abstains from sharing vital information with Sarah – the first when God tells him they will have a child, and now when God asks him to sacrifice that child.

How can we accept the Akedah as the consummate story of Avraham’s spiritual heroism and submission to God’s will? Were such an event to occur today we would consider it the ultimate abomination – and yet our tradition considers this the most glorious act of faith ever.

Rather than grapple with these questions individually, I suggest that we recalibrate the viewfinder through which we tend to see Avraham. Indeed, most of these questions can be mooted if we abandon our need to see Avraham through a lens of human perfection.

Unfortunately, Jewish tradition since the debut of the Talmud seeks a degree of perfection in our heroes that the Torah seems to deliberately deflect. The “warts and all” narratives that we find in the Torah are re-construed through midrashic legerdemain, and medieval and contemporary commentary to have, if anything, an opposite meaning. We are conditioned to believe that the literal text is meaningless as such. And that the human failings of our heroes – be they the patriarchs, prophets, kings, scribes, or even contemporary rabbinic leadership – have to be airbrushed into an absurd perfection and infallibility rather than accepted at face value.

Clearly Avraham was a man of his times. To have been born into the pagan wasteland of ancient Mesopotamia, surrounded by idolatry, murder, child sacrifice, sodomy and internecine savagery, and be able to unilaterally come to the realization of one supreme, invisible God is an astonishing breakthrough. To have arrived at an understanding of the beauty and life-enhancing value of lovingkindness toward strangers, in a climate in which the norm was one of suspicion and ruthless exploitation of the transient and sojourner, is a breathtaking achievement in its own right.

How dare we expect more of Avraham? Why should he be expected to finish the job that he had only begun? Why do we need to place him on a pedestal so high that subsequent generations, in their consuming inadequacy, can only retreat from his greatness rather than augment it?

Avraham was our progenitor. He made a discovery that dwarfs those of Pythagoras, Galileo and Einstein. He set in motion the ability of humankind to civilize itself and develop a moral and ethical value system that is rooted in the awareness of, and belief in, a single dominant Creator.

He gave us the reason and the impetus to then go beyond where he left things off – to sit on the shoulders of this giant so that we could see things he could not yet see, and do things he could not yet do.

To say this is not to diminish Avraham’s greatness.  He was the spiritual big bang.  But a lot had to happen after that, and did.

This is why redemption did not occur in Avraham’s day. Perfection for our world is not instantly achieved. There is an evolutionary process that must build on such a breakthrough, and this is our challenge in every generation.

After Avraham, there ensued large periods of expansion and contraction, and smaller instances of ebb and flow that saw his descendants ascending to new heights and plummeting to new lows. At our best, we surely made Avraham proud as any father would be seeing his children going beyond him as they expand his legacy. At our worst, he surely mourned as his descendants became victims of historical snags or their own ineptitude and collective amnesia.

Yet ultimately, we – all the generations past, present and future – hope to make it from point A to point Z, by building on Avraham’s breakthroughs, which are absolutely necessary but hardly sufficient. By seeing our ancestor both for what he was and for what he was not, we can be inspired to do our best. However, to view him as the personification of perfection leaves us with no place to go except, perhaps, establish more yeshivas and avoid recognizing the beauty of our wives.