November 6, 2008
Here’s a thought experiment, a fantasy to indulge in. A lawyer knocks on your door and announces you have inherited a family estate you didn’t even know about. The only thing standing between you and your landed fortune is proof of identity — which you gladly offer — and the inheritance is yours.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev notes that our sedra’s opening story of Abraham is like that but the other way around. In this case, God knocks on Abraham’s tent flap and announces, “I have taken you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this Land as an inheritance.” But God does not ask Abraham for his driver’s license or passport to prove who he is.
Instead, it is Abraham who asks God for proof: “How do I know I am inheriting it?” Says Rabbi Levi: “We normally inherit from our fathers, so Abraham wants to know if the Land of Israel is a gift not just from God, but something also that his father, Terach, left him.”
Of course it isn’t. How could it be? Abraham abandoned everything his father stood for. Were a lawyer from Ur to show up with news that Terach left Abraham anything, we would be very surprised. And what would he bring anyway, a bunch of idols?
Why does Abraham care? The Land is the Land: a treasure. Take it and run.
Abraham is a ger, the first Jewish convert in history. Apparently, conversion is something to be proud of. But this convert, Abraham, who left a home of rampant idolatry, has not forgotten his father. He expects that even Terach has something to leave him, something tied up somehow in “the Land.”
God takes Abraham seriously. It is God, after all, who employed the noun “inheritance” in the first place. We must imagine God’s joy at finding Abraham attentive enough to notice. So God offers proof — but strange proof. “Your offspring will sojourn in a land that is not theirs. They will be oppressed, enslaved for 400 years, but after that they will leave.” How does that show Abraham that the Land of Israel is connected to his distant father? Obviously, the Land is not Terach’s to give. So what does Abraham inherit from Terach that comes along with the Land, and how does God’s response allude to it?
Before answering that question, we need to know that the Talmud likens Abraham in Ur to the Israelites in Egypt. The issue there is the Mishna’s instructions to begin the Passover narrative at our seder with “an account of Israel’s degradation.”
“What degradation?” the Talmud wonders. Samuel identifies it as Egyptian servitude. Not so, says Rav, his debate opponent. Servitude, for Rav, is the idolatry of Ur. The former is physical, the latter spiritual, but they are similar starts in life: Finding themselves estranged where they were, both Abraham and the Israelites had to trek through a wilderness of uncertainty to get to the place God intended.
Now we understand God’s response to Abraham. God explains that to fully appreciate the gift of their Land, his descendents will first have to be estranged among idolaters, just as Abraham was. Abraham concludes that what Terach bequeathed, unknowingly, was precisely this childhood estrangement, without which he too would never have sought out the Land. God’s gift of the Land really is connected to Terach. Terach’s part of the inheritance was to provide the circumstances that led Abraham to move on and find it.
The Israelites, Abraham’s heirs, will have the same growing up to do. Not being Abraham, they need Moses to lead them, but they too will have to mature sufficiently to choose their inheritance, travel to it, and claim it. Abraham’s experience in Ur and the Israelites’ encounter with Egypt are the spiritual inheritance of every generation. “The Land” need not be real estate. As many hasidic teachers insisted, it is wherever we need to go spiritually if we are to inhabit the place God has in mind for us.
A place in the mind of God requires dissatisfaction and struggle — in Ur, in Egypt, or wherever we are, when doubts assail us and we realize our destiny is something we can choose. By choosing, we become Abraham, and Israel too: Abraham the convert from Ur, Israel the converts at Sinai. We too inherit the opportunity to find the place where God wants us to be, but only if we show the courage to leave behind whatever is holding us back.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York.
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
