Right and Just

RightIn last week’s Torah reading, God chooses Avraham to lead the Chosen People. We were, therefore, busy figuring out what Avraham ‘had’ that God ‘admired’. We, basically, decided that Avraham had ‘Charismatic CHESED’. His ‘kindness’ was so attractive that others flocked to him to either receive that CHESED or emulate it. That was the character trait required to launch God’s Chosen People. This week’s Torah reading informs us how to keep the ‘Avraham project’ going.

The central verse to this enterprise is:

For I have known (YA’DATIVE) him as My own, so that he may teach and command his children and the sons of his house after him to keep the way of the Lord and to do what is just and righteous, so that the Lord may bring Abraham what He has promised him (Breishit 18:19).

So, God announces that Avraham along with his progeny and followers will represent the Creator in our world, and that is appropriate because they represent justice and righteousness. There are two issues in this announcement which I will try to explain. The first is: How do we parse this term YA’DATIVE?

A check around different Bible translations yields: chosen, acknowledged, formed a relationship, made Myself known, made a special relationship, picked, settled on him, singled him out. In other words, this term YA’DATIVE (related to the word YADAH, ‘know’) is about a relationship which is profound and intimate. In Hebrew, we describe friends and acquaintances as those we MAKIR (recognize). The Torah often uses the term YADA for the relationship between husband and wife. Rashi emphasizes that God is telling us that Avraham is ‘loved’.

So, step one in the formation of this eternal, covenantal relationship between God and Avraham is a deep and abiding closeness between the two parties. God recognizes something remarkable in the psyche of Avraham; Avraham loves God and wants to spread the news of monotheism in a polytheistic environment.

Next, God states that Avraham ticks off another box on the righteousness worksheet: he exhibits TZ’DAKA and MISHPAT, ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice’. According to the Chizkuni, this is important in this context, to make sure that unless they followed their father’s or master’s tradition, they might wind up just as the people of Sodom would in short order. Avraham has the recipe for avoiding fire and brimstone. 

Rav Steinzaltz commented that pointing out Avraham’s credentials is important because:

God’s purpose would be realized through Abraham, as he was chosen to be the father of the nation that would receive numerous blessings and inherit the land of Canaan. Since Canaan was promised to Avraham’s descendants, it was fitting that Avraham be informed of God’s plans for the land.

Ahh, so Avraham has to be in the ‘loop’. Rav Sacks actually suggested that, ‘In context, this meant that God was inviting Avraham to pray on behalf of the people of Sodom, even though He knew that they were wicked and sinners.’ Even ‘sinners’ require advocates, everyone has the right to counsel in God’s court.

But what’s the difference between TZ’DAKA and MISHPAT? Without overly belaboring the issue, these two terms are often found together and maybe form a unity of ‘righteous justice’. Or they could be two phenomena, the first more spiritual and the second more judicial. In any case, when used together they represent humanity’s effort to emulate God and be moral, ethical human beings, for which Avraham is the paradigm.

The Rambam in his introduction to the Laws of Idolatry informs us that this is the way of God in which the forefathers walked. It is emulating the divine attributes to the point of being able to model one’s behavior after God’’s actions. The focus is not only on actions, but on cultivating virtuous dispositions. 

The Piasezcna Rebbe, in his Chovot HaTalmidim, explains this process as our main pedagogic goal:

God stated, ‘For I have known him, that he will instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the Lord.’ Every generation in Israel is a link in the chain of our legacy, the beginning of which is bound to Abraham, and the end of which is our Mashiach. A generation receives its Torah, its faith and its fear from the generation that preceded it; then uses them to serve God, and passes them on to the next generation. ‘That he may instruct his children,’ is the essence of our survival. 

God is informing us, in this verse, that Avraham is the one to represent God down here because of this trait. And it’s not something that we should just practice in the privacy of our home or Jewish community. It is meant to affect all humanity. Rav Yehuda Amital saw this as the mission statement for the Jewish State:

Jewish nationalism has a universalistic moral orientation. Maimonides writes that Abraham’s goal was ‘to found a nation that would know God and serve Him.’ This goal derives from Abraham’s trait of CHESED, from the desire to do good to all, for this nation would convey to mankind ‘the way of God, to do righteousness and justice’. This universal mission creates national responsibilities; as Rav Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook taught, in order to redeem humanity from its suffering, it is necessary for this nation to forge a distinctively Jewish polity with all the accoutrements of government and culture that will thereby demonstrate that not only pious individuals, but whole nations as well, can live by the light of the divine idea. 

Rav Amital (himself a holocaust survivor) was aghast at the idea that a Jewish State or Zionism was a ‘practical response to anti-Semitism’. Instead he declared:

Promoting a universal ethical vision must be the essence of Zionism, not only to save it from the moral hazards of violent chauvinism but precisely because the ethical message is itself the divine word that Israel is charged with spreading in the world. 

Our verse is more than a ‘mission statement’. It is a road map for Jewish purpose, destiny and survival. Okay, ‘Let’s get started!’ Go kind, follow righteousness, pursue justice, and then you’ll find your destination, a redeemed world, speedily in our days!