Our Trials

Last night I sat with my eight‑year‑old daughter as she prepared for a general‑knowledge challenge: the first five trials of Abraham. She was reciting them the way children recite anything for a quiz: a list, waiting to be memorised.

I asked her to stop. To think. To consider the story of the man who introduced God to the world. When Abraham discovered that there is One God, he felt compelled to tell everyone that we have an Almighty Father in Heaven who created us in His image and wants the best for us. That is why our sages call these events trials. Each one tested the very belief he was giving to humanity.

Right after his discovery, he was condemned to be burnt alive, and saved. Then he was told to leave his birthplace for “the land I will show you”, without a clear destination. When he reached that land, famine forced him to Egypt, where his wife was taken. And finally, the man whose message was kindness was forced into war.

My daughter lit up. The list had become our story. It revealed the inner life of our forefather and how he lived his relationship with our Father in Heaven. Understanding Torah brings a joy that is not merely intellectual but existential. Watching Judaism become an emotion in my children is what I live for.

We teach our three children, at home and at the excellent Jewish day school they attend, that the Judaism we live is not a collection of values we curated for ourselves. It is the Torah we received from God, handed down with exacting fidelity from generation to generation. The rabbis they learn about are not simply rabbis in the modern sense; they are the heirs of our ancestors, guardians of a chain that reaches back to Sinai, and we are their direct descendants. They did not innovate a religion or create a philosophy. They transmitted a heritage because they revered God too deeply to alter His word. Anything that moves away from the word of God stops being eternal, and we want to remain eternal.

She learns this alongside a secular education we very much value and encourage. But the premise of secular learning is different. In secular education, the exercise is to question everything in the absolute, as if the human mind were the final arbiter of truth.

In Torah education, the exercise is to question ourselves: to question the deductions, the interpretations, the assumptions. We challenge our understanding to ensure it aligns with the teachings that go back to Sinai. But we do not presume the liberty to dismantle the parts our limited intellect does not grasp. Judaism is a message God gave us. Our task is to understand it as deeply as we can and apply it faithfully.

The midrash tells us that Abraham’s father, Terach, made idols and that Abraham smashed them. That is what an idol is: a god shaped to your needs, who never asks anything of you. The midrash also explains why he is called Avraham HaIvri, from the other side. The whole world stood on one side, and he stood on the other.

The first monotheist was defined by his refusal to be guided by idols that are nothing more than extensions of the human ego.

In Abraham’s fifth trial, four kings raid the cities of the plain and take his nephew Lot captive. Abraham arms 318 men and pursues them as far as Dan. Some today would call that excessive force.

The man of the open tent, who spent his life teaching that God is good, goes to war. He does not go lightly. Immediately after the battle, God tells him, “Do not fear, Avram.” Rashi explains that Abraham feared he had killed a righteous man among his enemies.

There are Jews today, many of them barely active within their own faith, who nevertheless insist on lecturing us after we have been attacked and slaughtered by cold‑blooded murderers who vowed openly to never stop, siding with those who try to tie our hands and even with those who wish us harm, telling us that Judaism is about avoiding conflict and must be reconciled with every value of the moment.

They do not live by the laws of Torah codified by our sages; instead they elevate an abstract, free‑floating notion of tikkun olam that does not appear in any traditional listing of the 613 commandments. They promote absolute freedom and preach absolute pacifism. But look closely: They are not pacifist at all. They fight constantly, and always against the same target, God‑centered Judaism and the Jewish state on the land that was given to Abraham.

And they hold the democracies they inhabit to a standard of perfection that they never apply to the terrorists they are willing to fight for, finding favour in the worst creeds while demanding that Israel meet an impossible moral calculus. They critique the only Jewish state with ferocity while excusing ideologies that openly despise the very freedoms they claim to defend.

They preach to those so detached from Judaism that they can introduce Hebrew words and use them entirely out of context, in fact use them to promote the opposite of what those words were meant to express. In the Mishnah, tikkun olam is the reason the sages gave for laws that restricted individual behaviour so that society could function. And in Aleinu, its meaning is explicit: l’takken olam b’malchut Shaddai, the yearning to establish the world under the Kingship of God.

Tikkun olam is not a humanistic slogan; it is a declaration that the world must recognise God’s sovereignty. They kept the phrase and reversed its meaning by removing the only One who can establish anything at all. The world can only have a tikkun, any repair, any order, any moral structure, with God at its centre.

They removed the Eternal, and once He is removed, tikkun olam becomes a project of human desire that always expires. Human schemes end; only God’s Kingship endures. Without Him, their repair is nothing but a temporary fashion pretending to be eternal.

Some of them sincerely want to do good. I do not doubt it. But their sincerity is directed at the values they perceive as important, not at the Judaism of our ancestors. Judaism is living by what God commanded. We answer new questions by looking for precedent, because our chain of transmission is precise, and every generation back is one generation closer to Moses and Sinai. Start with what was commanded and arrive at an answer.

Start with the answer and go hunting for a verse, and you are back to creating your own idols.

We know where this leads. The Sadducees rejected the oral tradition and disappeared with the Temple. The modern break began in Hamburg in 1818, with a prayer book that removed the return to Zion. Today the results are measured in Jewish grandchildren. Pew’s 2020 study found that 72 per cent of non‑Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 did not marry a Jew.

King Solomon put it in one line: to everything there is a season, a time for war and a time for peace. Kindness does not cancel the time for war if war is the right response. Abraham did not decide by temperament; he decided by what God asked of him.

A Judaism edited to fit one generation must be edited again for the next, and by the time it is re‑edited, it has already lost the Jews the last edit was made to accommodate.

The only Judaism that survives is the one that was received from the Eternal, our Father in Heaven, and passionately passed on from generation to generation. Sometimes in the history of our people we must stand on the other side of the world as our ancestor did, and we must recognise, as he recognised, that only when we stand with the Almighty do we survive.

May we merit to continue this uninterrupted chain of passionate, divine Judaism for all eternity.