Abraham’s Choice--Lech L'cha

Abraham’s Choice

D’var Torah for Parashat Lech L’cha

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

At the family table, when we do all take the time to get together—siblings, spouses, children—the stories of how we all got here soon becomes the gist of the conversation.  Some of us can reach back in memory or even personal experience and recall long-gone relatives, remnants of another generation and another land.  Some of us are only just beginning on our path, brash confidence and trepidation mingling within us and making us anxious about our future.

Lech L’cha (Genesis 12:1-17:27) is the beginning of our story.  It’s the beginning of the Hebrew People; it is the start of every family’s journey.

What was there before?  Before Abram got the call from God to leave his father’s home and country and head off toward some mysterious, as yet undefined goal?

Perhaps there was nothing.  A cultural void.  Or maybe it was as things were before Creation began—chaos.  Maybe there was no family or society, only individuals who somehow found themselves on the same path, just as others found their soulmates on different paths.  Maybe there was war, pestilence, or famine.  Perhaps there was persecution.

But in any case, as Abram (not yet renamed Abraham) gazed about his native land, he realized that where he stood at that moment was no longer where he needed to be.  In following God’s call, he could have ventured forth on his own, leaving behind everything and everyone he knew.  But Abram was the very model of responsibility.  He had family, possessions, servants to take care of.  In his custody was an orphan boy—the son of his brother Haran.  He couldn’t leave them. 

And so, urged by a call that only he heard—Lech l’cha, “go for yourself”—Abram, his wife Sarai and nephew Lot separated from the rest of the family and set out for a new land, to discover and build for all posterity a New World.

Many adventures befall Abram in this new home, once he gets there.  There are challenges he never expected, including a war at which Lot, his nephew, is captured and sold into slavery.  Acting quickly and heroically, Abram redeems Lot and comes back victorious, having freed also all the other captives and all the possessions that were seized in the war.  Almost home again, at a major crossing of the roads, he is met by two important leaders:  the king of Sodom, whose city’s population and riches had been freed by Abram, and Melchizedek, the high priest of a God worshipped in a city called Salem.

“Take the gold and give me the people,” offers the king of Sodom.  But Abram knows that this is a trick.  The gold is blood money, ill-gotten gains of an immoral industry.  He refuses even one cent of it.

The other person who comes out to greet Abram is high priest of a faith and belief system that mirror Abram’s.  Melchizedek offers Abram not material wealth, but a blessing from the Almighty, a supreme God who is Creator of heaven and earth.

The choice is a no-brainer for Abram.  Offering a tithe to Melchizedek, Abram makes his first political alliance in the New Land.

The symbolism of this choice is hard to misread.  Melchizedek represents not only holiness, but also the values of just and righteous leadership.  The city where he serves, Salem, is destined to be the geographical intersection where all these forces converge.  As he did when he began his journey, so now, too, in making alliances, Abram stakes his future on God’s promise.  He has faith.

Making the right choice is easy for men like Abraham.  He just follows his instincts.  He is confident that he will get there if he selects the right door, the right path.  Unlike most of us, who consider over and over which path we should take, Abraham simply knew what to do.

That’s what makes the upcoming elections such a difficult one for so many of us.  We’re bombarded by ads; cynicism has taught us not to trust our leaders; to read sinister meanings behind self-righteous words.  Worldly experience has made it all too clear to us that politics is all about alliances and that your choice, no matter how right it seems to be, isn’t always going to win.  So much depends on who supports which candidate, what groups have endorsed him or her and will demand their payback come the morning after the polls close. 

For most of us, it’s complicated.  The issues are not always clear-cut.  There are ups and downs to every initiative and proposition.  By this point in the process, we’ve either made our minds up or are still in the “undecided” category, holding out for just a little longer.  Either way, we wish the election were over already.  There’s just too much tension involved in making choices that matter, choices not between what flavor ice cream we would like next, but choices that might determine the very course of our life, that might shift our political alliances, that might test our moral compass.  Why, in this year’s election, there’s even a choice to be made about the way in which our lives might end, given half a chance.

But there’s a lesson to be learned from old Father Abraham.  As easy as it might be to just let things be, to leave well enough alone, we can’t go back in time to a generation that no longer exists.  We need to look forward into the future and get on the path that will lead us to it.

Abraham’s lesson is not that life decisions come easily to him, but rather, that he made them.  It’s no simple matter to move a thousand miles away when you’re already old and established—and Abraham, according to the Torah, was 75 when he did just that.  Nor is it easy to turn back a fortune when it is handed to you on a silver platter.  Abraham wasn’t blessed by God for simply existing, but rather for the choices that he made.  Moreover, Abraham also has a huge lesson for us in how he reached his conclusions.  It’s is in the moral compass that he followed in making these decisions.  He first chose to leave his homeland because what he saw all around him was wrong—and he understood that he was powerless to change things there.  He chose again when he took his entire family—one could say, his entire community—with him, including his wife, an orphan and even the servants who depended on him for their daily bread.  And once again he chose morally when he elected to ally himself with Melchizedek and not the king of Sodom. 

Abraham’s choices were determined by his values of justice and compassion, of freedom and faith.

That’s the big lesson of Lech L’cha.  It’s to go forward, never to remain complacent, and all along the road, to bring righteousness, justice and compassion into this world.  It may not be easy, but that’s the worthy choice.

©2012 by Boaz D. Heilman

Behind Closed Doors Are Secrets Deeply Held

Behind Closed Doors Are Secrets Deeply Held

D’var Torah for Parashat Noach

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

The story of the Tower of Babel comes almost as an afterthought to the story of Noah and the Flood.  In a long portion comprising nearly six chapters (Genesis 6:9—11:21), the story of the unfinished tower doesn’t come until chapter 11.  Its characters are faceless and nameless; there is no central hero.  Moreover, the sin of the builders of the Tower of Babel is much more difficult to understand than that of either Noah or his generation.

Scholars of the Bible as literature might even add that the story of Babel is a later addition, and that it is a not-so-sly critique of the Babylonian Empire (whose dominance had just been overturned by the Persians).

Yet there are also many similarities between the two stories—enough to justify them both being included this one portion.  Both involve the building of a great structure:  Noah’s ark has the dimensions of a football field; the Tower of Babel was to be part of a larger city.  The tower itself, probably a ziggurat, was meant to be with its “top in the heavens.” 

In both stories, God “sees” what happens down below on earth, and in both, God intervenes. 

Yet the stories are not parallel; nor does the Tower story come to offer commentary on Noah.  That becomes clear when we look at the sins of humanity in the Noah story.  The portion plainly describes the wrongdoings of Noah’s generation as violence and bloodshed.  Noah himself is also criticized.  He fails to stand up to God or question God’s overzealous punishment—the complete destruction of all life—in fact, the undoing of all Creation.  In the story of Tower of Babel, on the other hand, the wrongdoing of the people is much less clear.  Whatever it is that they do, however, seems to stem from their speaking only one language. 

So what’s wrong with that?

Early rabbinic commentary (first century) explains that the Tower of Babel represents an act of defiance against God.

Other sources tell that, as the work of building the tower progressed, people lost their humanity and became heartless to one another.  They acted without mercy or compassion to the weak and ill; they did not let women in labor leave their work; and, when a valuable stone fell from the top of the tower and killed a workman on the ground, they bewailed not the loss of life, but rather the work that hoisting the stone all the way up to the top again entailed.

And yet one more interpretation:  that the “one language and one speech” that all human beings spoke then doesn’t refer to an actual idiom or dialect, but rather is symbolic of a single way of looking at the world.  Lacking the perspective and objectivity of different thinking, this “one language and one speech” (11:1) could prove crushing to imagination and creativity.  It would be contrary to God’s intentions for humanity, the complete opposite of free will.  The Tower of Babel thus represents not only an act of insolence toward God, but also a tyrannical and cynical effort to crush the human spirit.

The downfall of tyranny is in its very effort to impose a single way of looking at things.

A clue to the reason why both these stories are part of this portion is in the central feature of both:  The building—the construction—of some huge structure, some edifice meant to save humanity (in fact, all life) from destruction.  The Ark and the Tower represent humanity’s need to preserve something—anything!—from the death and annihilation that seemed to overtake everything else that existed.

Both structures were begun out of baser motives—selfishness in Noah’s case; arrogance in the case of the Babylonians.  But they don’t end up in the same place, and that’s because of the lesson that Noah learns, a lesson that the Babylonians failed to learn.

Told to save himself, his wife, three sons and their wives, and a few select pairs of all animal, bird and insect, Noah doesn’t protest.  He does exactly as God had told him to.  One wonders if he would have acted with the same composure if he were told to abandon his family along with the rest of humanity, to let his sons drown with everyone else in the world.

Yet, during the period that he has to endure holed up inside the Ark (sealed in by God, with no control mechanism to steer or stay the boat), Noah learns a valuable lesson.  He discovers compassion.  When he does finally open the window (how symbolic!), he gazes with desperate hope for the dove that he had sent out.  When it arrives, storm-tossed, frightened and exhausted, Noah reaches out and, with great compassion, draws the bird back inside, to the warm, dry protection of his beating heart.

Not so the builders of the Tower of Babel.  They wept when the stone fell—not for the life lost, but for the effort wasted.  Their hearts remained stony, cold, impenetrable. 

It is a lesson that will be repeated often through the Torah, because it is so worthy.  Later on, Pharaoh’s heart will be similarly “hardened,” when he fails to feel the suffering of his slaves.  Moses, on the other hand, will be chosen to lead the Israelites to freedom and the Promised Land because he does feel their pain.  Compassion is the key to the human heart.  A closed heart is a dark one.  It belongs to one who does not love, who is lonely and who will be lost.  A heart that is open and receptive, on the other hand, has no dark secrets; it is inviting and loving.  It is a true shelter.

©2012 by Boaz D. Heilman

A Seventh Part of Creation--B'reishit

A Seventh Part of Creation

D’var Torah for Parashat B’reishit (Genesis 1:1—6:8)

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Creation myths abound in human culture.

Unlike other creation myths, however, Genesis doesn’t pretend to explain how matter was created—or, for that matter, how God happened to become God.  Those are questions which the human mind simply isn’t equipped to answer.  Our cumulative knowledge is only now beginning to probe the mysteries of Creation—and what preceded it.

The book of Genesis is a collection of creation myths meant to explain the universe the way it appeared to people who lived around 1500 BCE, without benefit of Galileo or Copernicus, Darwin or Einstein.   The question of why things are (the way they are) is as old as humanity itself.  Genesis begins not with a direct answer, but rather with a veiled question. 

There are two ways to interpret Gen. 1:1.  First is the version of the verse that we’ve all memorized as, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

Rashi, however, a tenth century rabbi and commentator, offers another explanation:  B’reishit:  Not at the exact moment, but a rather more approximate “at the beginning of God’s creation.”   As God’s work of creating heaven and earth begins, matter already exists.  It doesn’t matter how that came to be—that’s not the point of this lesson.  Certainly we are given to understand that  there was water already, since God’s spirit was “hovering over the water.”  There was also darkness—a void of light; and most abundantly, there was chaos.  In short, a true tohu va-vohu, a scrambling, tumbling existence without boundaries, rules or relationships. 

At the moment that Genesis picks up, God’s work consists not exactly of creating, but rather separating, establishing order and setting up rules.  The moment is illuminated by a light that God releases—lets be rather than creates.  The darkness is crushing, devastating.  It offers no chance for existence, life, or hope.  Space for all these has to be made to appear, and God does so by making room, by limiting the overwhelming darkness and setting it bounds, thus enabling light to exist.

Similarly, God separates the water, that primordial medium that bore the potential of life, and allows dry earth to appear—earth in which the seed of life might take root, where the potential might become real.

Separation, bringing order, establishing boundaries—that is the work of God’s creation, a process, however, that God leaves unfinished.  And it is here that we can find the first answer that the Torah ever offers.  The question it comes to answer, however, is not how God created the world, but why it seems so imperfect.

Understandably, limited gods can only do so much.  Mesopotamian myths tell that the gods created human beings so they could till the earth and bring them food—necessary for the gods’ existence as it is for us humans.  These are limited, needful creatures—divine, perhaps, in the sense that they are metaphysical, beyond the realm of the merely physical, extending into the unseen realms that surround our own existence—but limited nonetheless, and dependent on human beings for their existence.

Our God, on the other hand, is perfect—or so we expect.  How then, to explain the imperfection of the world?  How, or why, would a perfect God stop with an imperfect world, one in which there is pain, illness, death, unfairness and, sometimes, even blatant injustice?

This is the vital question, the one that the Torah would have us focus on.  What is the reason for the suffering?  Is there some divine plan we cannot understand?  Or is it all in vain, all this questioning and exploring, probing and investigating?

For whatever reason, the human mind will simply not accept option two.  We can think, therefore we think.  Because we can ask the question, we have to have an answer.  So therefore there has to be some reason or purpose for it all, difficult as it might be to comprehend or accept.

The rest of the Torah stems from this one question, as it steers us toward a particular way of thinking about and understanding this universe.  There IS a reason, and there IS a purpose. 

Again taking its cue from the Mesopotamian myths, the book of Genesis has God giving Adam—and all humanity through him—reason and purpose:  to till this earth, to tend to this garden and enable it to reach its potential.  However, whereas in the ancient myths the food gathered from tilling the ground was meant to serve the gods (with human beings getting the leftovers), Genesis offers a new way of viewing our tasks.  We are to take care of this earth not for the sake of the gods—or even for God’s sake—but for its own sake and for the sake of all its inhabitants. 

Why would a perfect God create an imperfect world?  So that we—arguably its most intelligent tenant—could pursue the goal of improving it.  Understanding it is crucial; learning the rules by which the earth exists helps us live with—and surmount—its demands and requirements.  It’s tricky business, considering the extent of our imagination and powers.  We have to ponder the balance between creation and destruction—both of which are within our powers.  Maintaining the balance, weighing the options, clarifying and shedding light on the chaos, and separating the right from the wrong—these are the chores that the Torah places on us.

The Torah teaches us that we humans have the image of God implanted within us (revolutionary thinking in itself).  How to be Godlike in doing our part in the ongoing work of Creation is an on-going lesson, one that takes constant reflection and practice.  But we have a lot of time—a seventh part of all Creation.  God worked for six parts; now it’s our turn.  It’s a true gift—as long as we don’t misuse it.  Its power is truly enormous, its reach is vast.  Its consequences are vital.  We pray that our part of Creation, the one we sanctify and call Shabbat, will reach its goal of shalom, of peace.

Shabbat shalom.

©2012 by Boaz D. Heilman

An Eternal Blessing: V'zot Ha-bracha

An Eternal Blessing

D’var Torah for Parashat V’zot Habracha

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

As Moses stands on the top of Mount Nebo, he knows he has reached the end of his road.  From this mountaintop—the last he will ever climb—he has looked over the Promised Land and seen it from end to end.  Elated by what he sees, no matter what mixed feelings he might have harbored in his heart a moment ago, knowing that he himself will not enter the Land with his people, Moses turns to the people and blesses them one last time. 

Along with the terrain of Israel, he has also seen the future of his people, and it is a blessed one.  He knows he must be leaving them, but he is not abandoning them.  He has given them God’s word—the Torah, and he knows that from that moment on, for as long as they carry that Law with them, Israel will be blessed by God.

In Deuteronomy chapter 33:2, Moses declares that with God’s right arm, God has brought the Israelites “a fiery law.”  It was Moses who first transmitted God’s words to us.  It was he who transformed the awesome “fire” of the law into a torch with which to illuminate humanity.  It is the mitzvot—God’s sacred Commandments—which, now and for the many millennia to come, will light up our darkest nights.  Indeed, from that moment on, for centuries, Jews have been studying these laws and interpreting them for the times and lands in which they lived.   We acknowledge Moses’s role in giving them the Torah:  “Torah tziva lanu Moshe” (“Moses commanded the torah for us, a heritage of the Congregation of Jacob”)—Deut. 33:4. 

It is this knowledge—that, on every Simchat Torah for thousands of years, the Children of Israel will be chanting this very verse as they march around their shuls, temple and sanctuaries carrying  Torahs, flags, apples and candles—which consoles Moses at these last moments of his life.  He has done his job, and done it well.  Now someone else must pick up the torch and light up the future with it.

In wonderful counterpoint to the first Song of Moses (known as the Song of the Sea, sung by Moses and Miriam immediately following the parting of the Red Sea), Moses, his soul elated and jubilant, calls out “mi chamocha ‘am”, “Who is like you, O people whose salvation is through Adonai!”  Mi chamocha—who is like you:  Not God, but rather, O people!  The light of God has been ignited inside our souls and will burn forever more, making us a unique people in all history.

For all western civilization throughout the ages, it has been the Torah which elevated our people, and through us, all humanity.  Its stories have moved us, exalted us, given us purpose and meaning.  Its commandments have shaped our identity, tradition and history.  It is this future which Moses sees from the peak of Mount Nebo.  It is no longer with fear, frustration or anger with which he can face his own ending, but rather with confidence and certainty.  For this ending brings with it a whole new beginning.

V’zot hab’racha—“This Is the Blessing”—is the last portion in the Torah (Deut. 33:1-34:12).  It is read this week, but on Simchat Torah, its last few words will be immediately followed by the chanting of the first few verses of the book of Genesis.  At that moment, we will begin the Torah once again, for all its stories, legends, morals and lessons.  It is indeed a never ending blessing, for which we are truly and eternally grateful.

Chazak chazak v’nit-chazek—be strong, be of strength and courage, and we shall all be strengthened.

©2012 by Boaz D. Heilman