Lekh Lekha (Midrash)

Abraham the Iconoclast

Parshat Lekh Lekha introduces us to the personality of Abraham, the father and founder of the faith of Judaism. Perhaps the central and most familiar role in which all of us were first introduced to Abraham as young children is that of the great iconoclast and “discoverer “ of monotheism. Yet strangely, he does not actually appear in this role in any of the biblical narratives about his life. The Torah account begins, following a brief genealogy, with the call to Abraham to leave his family and homeland and set forth to the unknown land. We read of Abraham and God speaking with one another, on more than one occasion; we see him practicing God’s ways —lovingkindness and righteousness; and he undergoes several dramatic and spiritually weighty encounters with God: the Covenant between the Pieces, circumcision, the argument with God on behalf of Sodom and, finally, the great test of the Binding of Isaac. But nowhere are we explicitly told that Abraham discovered God’s Unity, His exclusivity, or that he rejected idols or uncovered the error of idolatry.

Thus, this subject serves as a prime example of the central interpretive role played by the midrash: the role of Abraham as iconoclast, so familiar to us, is based upon the midrash. I bring below a midrash which well exemplifies this idea; although it bears upon the central theme of Lekh Lekha, in the midrash it in fact appears at the very end of Seder Noah. This passage will doubtless be familiar to many readers from their earliest childhood—but it may be understood on a level of sophistication far beyond that comprehended by small children. Unlike the midrashim presented the past two weeks, this one does not involve intricate exegesis of verses from other biblical books, nor a multiplicity of options and opinions, but is told as a straightforward narrative. Genesis Rabbah 38.13:

“And Haran died before the face of Terah his father” (Gen 11:28). R. Hiyya the grandson of Rav Adda from Yaffo said: Terah was an idol maker. Once he went to a certain place, and left Abraham to sell in his place. A person would come and wish to buy. [Abraham] asked him: How old are you? And he would reply: I am fifty or sixty years old. And he would say: Woe to that man who is sixty years old and wishes to bow to something that is one day old! And he would be embarrassed and go away.

Abraham is shown here having already developed a definite attitude as to the folly and stupidity of the worship of idols. The man’s reaction is interesting: he does not argue with Abraham; as soon as the error of idolatry is pointed out to him, using a very simple argument, he displays a kind of natural embarrassment and leaves without making his purchase.

One time a certain woman came along carrying a dish of fine flour. She said to him: Come and offer this to them. He went and took a rod and broke all the statues, and placed the rod in the hand of the largest one of them.

Terah’s idol shop was not only a workshop or place of business where people came to buy the “merchandise” on display, but also served as a kind of cultic center, to which pious pagans brought offerings.

When his father returned, he said to him: Who did this to them? He said, I cannot lie to you. A certain woman came carrying a dish of fine flour, and said to me: Go offer this to them. I offered it to them: this one said, I will eat first; and that one said, I will eat first. The largest among them got up, took the rod, and broke the others. He [his father] answered him: Why are you making a fool out of me! Do these know [how to do anything]! He replied: Let your ears hear what your mouth says!

The striking thing here is Abraham’s use of reason, of intelligence, to demonstrate the falsehood of idols. He sets up a little tableau in which the smaller idols have all been supposedly broken by the biggest idol in a fit of anger, in order to bring his father to a conclusion that he already knows: that the idols he made with his own hands are really powerless: “Let your ears hear what your mouth says!” (This is also interesting didactically; the role of the teacher is not to teach tell his pupils anything new, but to make clear and evident to them what they already know in a vague and incoherent way—the famous “Socratic method.”) This is consistent with a basic feature of Abraham’s personality: he arrived at his own knowledge of God, not through means of any revelation or epiphany, but by means of logical thinking. Another well-known midrash, which I cannot bring here in full, similarly sees Abraham’s discovery as based on reasoning: He compares the world, with its grandeur and beauty, but also its corruption and evil, to a castle that is on fire, and says to himself, “It is inconceivable that that the castle has no lord”—concluding from this that there must be a God (Gen. Rab. 39.1). In a passage to be discussed below, Maimonides depicts Abraham in similar fashion, waxing lyrical there about how he gradually arrived at the fundamental religious truths through a process of constant questioning, thinking and reflection. But let us first return to our midrash:

He [Terah] took him [Abraham] and turned him over to Nimrod. He [Nimrod] said to him: Come, let us bow to the fire. Abraham said to him: Why not bow to the water, which quenches the fire! Nimrod said: Then let us worship the water. He replied: If so, then let us bow to the cloud that carries the water! He said: Let us worship the cloud! He said: But if so, then we should worship the wind, that disperses the cloud! And he said to him: Let us bow to the wind! He said: Let us then worship the human being, who retains the wind [i.e., the breath that he holds within himself]. He said to him: You are playing to me with words. I do not bow to any save for the fire! I shall throw you into it, and let your God come, to whom you bow, and save you from it!

Here, Abraham again uses logical argumentation, a reductio ad absurdum, to show his interlocutor the ridiculous and arbitrary nature of pagan worship of any one element of nature. In the end, Nimrod, who doubtless feels that not only his belief, but more important his royal authority and dignity, is being threatened, falls back upon his original “faith,” and throws Abraham into the “sacred” fire, from which he is rescued by God. If I remember correctly, fire worship was the original faith of pagan Mesopotamia, traces of which may be seen in the fire rituals of Zoroastrianism (which by the time of the Sages was the predominant religion there). Perhaps, too, there is an echo here of a folk etymology of the place name, Ur Kasdim (Ur=fire). In the end, Abraham’s powerful arguments convinced neither Terah nor Nimrod; idol worship evidently exerted too powerful a hold over them emotionally for them to be convinced by reason; it would be interesting to know more as to exactly what this was.

Haran stood there, and he was divided [in his mind]. He said to himself: In either case [I am safe]: If Abraham is victorious I will say: I belong to Abraham. And if Nimrod is victorious, I will say: I belong to Nimrod. Once Abraham had gone down to the fiery furnace and been saved, he was asked: On whose side are you? He said: I am for Abraham. So they took him and threw him into the fire, and his innards melted, and he was taken out and died in presence of his father Terah. Of this it is said: “And Haran died before Terah his father.”

This final section is actually the exegetical pretext for the entire passage: Haran’s death, which is stated explicitly in verse 28, with the unusual phrase “before Terah his father” (explained here), is quoted at both the beginning and end of this midrash.

Why was Haran punished? There is something arrogant in the way he is portrayed here. First, because he was a classical “fence sitter,” a blatant opportunist, who either had no convictions or, what comes to the same thing, did not have the courage to express them when it really mattered. Second, according to the traditional midrash commentary Matanot Kehunah, he “relied on a miracle.” Abraham was saved by God, because he was His beloved friend, who had the courage and daring to preach the message of the one God in a world steeped in paganism. But God does not suspend the natural laws that He created except under exceptional circumstances. Haran was a Johnny-come-lately camp follower, who thought he would reap the benefits of Abraham’s struggle without taking any risks; for him, fire was still hot and destructive.

A central point that emerges from this midrash is the central, positive role played by the intellect in establishing Abraham’s faith in the one God. Indeed, it seems to me that Judaism generally sees the exercise of human intellect and understanding of the world in a positive light. We have never been plagued by that religious mentality that says, “Credo qua absurdum est” (“I believe because it is absurd”), and that measures religiosity by the ability to suspend ones own critical intellectual judgments in favor of preconceived, authoritative religious dogma, however improbable it may.

This week, I had the pleasure of attending several sessions of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and of the 70th birthday of its founder and guiding light, theologian David Hartman. At the keynote address on the day devoted to Hartman’s thought, Moshe Halbertal spoke of the roots of modern atheism, taking as paradigmatic the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach. Unlike what is often asserted (e.g., by Guttmann, Scholem, Strauss, and others), he saw its roots not in the questioning of religion’s truth claims (by biblical criticism, evolutionary theory, and the like), but more in a kind of rejection of and antagonism toward religion, rooted in the negative image of the religious human being: that is, the idea that the essence of religion is for man to surrender his impulses, his will, his very vitality to God, and that the religious human being can only gain validation through his submission to God. It was this surrender of human dignity, of moral autonomy and conscience, and of intellectual integrity demanded by religion that, more than anything else, offended modern man. Halbertal continued that a central theme in Hartman’s thought is the creation of an alternative model, which eradicates this sharp dichotomy between the theocentric and anthropocentric values. And indeed, a careful reading of the classical expressions of Jewish faith, whether the Tanakh, the Talmud, or the Siddur, reveal that these are not necessarily antagonistic to what might be called humanistic values. One suspects that the denigration of man as such found in much of medieval Mussar (and in contemporary yeshiva ideology), is influenced more than a little by Christianity.

Reflections on Idolatry

Turning from the biography of Abraham himself, there are several problems in understanding the Jewish opposition to idolatry. Basically, the operative assumption seems to be that idolatry is identical to iconic fetishism: that is, belief in the literal divinity of the statue, the “graven image” or “molten image” spoken of in the Bible. Yet Yehezkel Kaufmann has already noted that the cultural gap between Israel and the nations was so great that they didn’t even really understand what the idolaters wanted or how the pagans thought. The making of images, statues, totems, etc., whether in the Ancient Near East, or in modern or near-modern times—in Hindu India, in the religions of native Americans or the Pacific Islands, in the animism of pre-Christian and pre-Islamic Africa or the voodoo of the Caribbean—is in fact rooted in and the representation of a symbolic, mythical world.

A related question: on a deeper theological level, idolatry is in fact impossible, because if there is in fact one God who created and rules the cosmos, any act of worship is ipso facto directed towards Him; the only real difference lies in the name by which He is addressed. Note Malachi‘s famous comment: “in every place incense is offered to my name” (Mal 1:11), even though the incense spoken of there was offered on “pagan” altars! (I heard this insight from a Jewish devotee of Sufism, in the name of one of the Sufi masters, but I see nothing in it which fundamentally contradicts Jewish God teaching. Ironically, my friend asserts, Islam started as an attempt to assert the universality of God; Muhammed saw his teaching as incorporating the teachings of Moses and Jesus and all the true prophets. Islamic zealotry is a falling away from this pristine monotheistic message.)

My own (unresolved) question, then, is: What is the contemporary meaning of idolatry? That is, what would constitute a vital, meaningful, significant definition of avodah zarah: not just as a dead letter, or as something that refers to people or forces that only exist in remote outposts of civilization? Surely, if the ban on idolatry is so central to Judaism—the first and most central of all the negative commandments of the Torah—then it must be intended to apply to cultural phenomena that are still very much alive today. Perhaps the unbridled pursuit of wealth and fame and pleasure, which are dominant motifs of our own age?

Interestingly, in the opening chapter of Hilkhot Avodat Kokhavim u-Mazalot> (“Laws of Worship of Stars and Constellations”), Maimonides relates a lengthy story explaining the origins and significance of idolatry. This passage, which occupies the entire chapter, is essentially a midrash on this subject: it contains no actual laws, and derives only very partially from Rabbinic sources (note the general silence of the “armor bearers” here, especially on the first two halakhot, save for Migdal Oz’s laconic comment that Maimonides “gathers this material from midrashim, and put it together in his own correct understanding”). Due to the length of this passage, I cannot translate it here, but will attempt to summarize it, quoting only one or two particularly salient passages.

Essentially, he says that the entire idea of idolatry was a mistake made by mankind gradual, in degrees. First, in the days of Enosh (Adam’s grandson), people began to say that they could honor God indirectly by paying homage to those celestial bodies that serve God closely, in the exalted celestial realm. In the next stage, they began to make temples and to create plastic images to represent these stars; finally, they forgot why they had started this whole process, and “prophets” began to demand that people worship these as separate, autonomous entities. The turning point came with Abraham, who began at an early age to reflect and ponder, “and he did not have any teacher nor anyone to instruct him, for he was sunk in Ur Kasdim among the foolish idolaters… until he realized that there was one God who moves the sphere and He created all, and that there is no God apart from Him. And he knew that the entire world erred… and at the age of forty years Abraham came to know his Creator.” After challenging Terah and Nimrod, as related in the midrash, he left his home and began to teach his new message, and won over thousands of proselytes.

We see here two important points. First, a new definition of idolatry: it is no longer portrayed as gross fetishism, but as a sophisticated, one might even say over- sophisticated, symbolic system; one that began with knowledge of the one true God, but added to His worship all kinds of secondary, derivative divinities, who over time became independent objects of adoration (as in the Hindu system, in which there is a riot of divinities, under the aegis of the supreme Krishna). It is this multiplicity in unity, if you wish, that is the root of the problem, and which must be avoided as a grievous error, according to Maimonides. (Interestingly, this perception is also brought as a halakhic definition of idolatry in 2.1: “even though the worshipper knows that there is one God, and he worships this created thing in the manner of the generation of Enosh…”) Secondly, the central role of the human intellect in attaining knowledge of God: Abraham came to know His Creator, not through revelation or prophecy, but through his own hours upon hours of hard thinking.

What Is—and is not—Man?

I would like to conclude with a certain emotional reaction that I consider germane to our subject. I recently saw Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey on videotape, for the first time (I couldn’t let the present year pass by without seeing how it was envisioned back then). Beyond the typical Hollywood story-line and the special effects and the drama, I was left with the overwhelming impression that the central message of this film was intended as a paean to the human being. The opening scene with the earliest human forbears, the large apes, discovering the use of tools; the quick fade to the space ship, with the triumphant, majestic, noble theme music playing in the background; the victory of the last surviving space explorer over the renegade computer Hal; the concluding scene, showing a baby with a huge skull and bright, inquisitive eyes—all these seemed intended to convey the idea that man, with his wonderfully creative and fertile brain, is the greatest thing in the cosmos. The implicit ideology is one familiar to many of us: that the human being’s noblest endeavor is to extend the range of his knowledge, of which space exploration is the highest fruition. This, to my mind, was the dominant religion of the twentieth century: human collective self worship. Might this be called a modern paganism?

This may be contrasted to the Jewish idea which, while certainly celebrating man’s power and dignity—“You have made him little less than God, and crowned him with glory and honor; given him dominion over the works of Your hand, and placed all things beneath his feet…” (Ps 8:5-6)—ultimately sees religious consciousness and the humility it brings in its wake as of equal or greater importance: “You have separated man from the beginning and taught him to stand before You” (Neilah prayer, Yom Kippur).