A Palace In Flames

There are three primary explanations. The first is Avraham the Iconoclast, the breaker of idols. This is based on a speech by Moshe’s successor, Yehoshua, towards the end of the book that bears his name. It is a passage given prominence in the Haggadah on Seder night: “Long ago your ancestors, including Terach the father of Avraham and Nachor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshipped other G-ds” (Yehoshua 24:2). Avraham’s father Terach was an idol worshipper. According to the Midrash, he made and sold idols. One day Avraham smashed all the idols and left, leaving the stick with which he did so in the hand of the biggest idol. When his father returned and queried who had broken his G-ds, Avraham blamed the biggest idol. “Are you making fun of me?” demanded his father. “Idols cannot do anything.” “In that case,” asked the young Avraham, “why do you worship them?”

On this view, Avraham was the first person to challenge the idols of the age. There is something profound about this insight. Jews, believers or otherwise, have often been iconoclasts. Some of the most revolutionary thinkers – certainly in the modern age – have been Jews. They had the courage to challenge the received wisdom, think new thoughts and see the world in unprecedented ways, from Einstein in physics to Freud in psychoanalysis to Schoenberg in music, to Marx in economics, and Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in behavioral economics. It is as if, deep in our cultural intellectual DNA, we had internalized what the Sages said about Avraham ha’Ivri, “the Hebrew,” that it meant he was on one side and all the rest of the world on the other.

The second view is set out by Rambam in the Mishnah Torah: Avraham the Philosopher. In an age when people had lapsed from humanity’s original faith in one G-d into idolatry, one person stood against the trend, the young Avraham, still a child: “As soon as this mighty man was weaned he began to busy his mind … He wondered: How is it possible that this planet should continuously be in motion and have no mover? … He had no teacher, no one to instruct him … until he attained the way of truth … and knew that there is One G-d … When Avraham was forty years old he recognized his Creator.” According to this, Avraham was the first Aristotelian, the first metaphysician, the first person to think his way through to G-d as the force that moves the sun and all the stars.

This is strange, given the fact that there is very little philosophy in Tanach, with the exception of wisdom books like Mishlei, Kohelet and Iyov. Rambam’s Avraham can sometimes look more like Rambam than Avraham. Yet of all people, Friedrich Nietzsche, who did not like Judaism very much, wrote the following:

Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making people think more logically and for establishing cleanlier intellectual habits… Wherever Jews have won influence they have taught men to make finer distinctions, more rigorous inferences, and to write in a more luminous and cleanly fashion; their task was ever to bring a people “to listen to raison.”

The explanation he gave is fascinating. He said that only in the arena of reason did Jews face a level playing field. Everywhere else, they encountered race and class prejudice. “Nothing,” he wrote, “is more democratic than logic.” So Jews became logicians, and according to Rambam, it began with Avraham.

However there is a third view, set out in the Midrash on the opening verse of our parsha:

“The L-rd said to Abram: Leave your land, your birthplace and your father’s house . . .” To what may this be compared? To a man who was travelling from place to place when he saw a palace in flames. He wondered, “Is it possible that the palace lacks an owner?” The owner of the palace looked out and said, “I am the owner of the palace.” So Avraham our father said, “Is it possible that the world lacks a ruler?” The Holy One, blessed be He, looked out and said to him, “I am the ruler, the Sovereign of the universe.”

This is an enigmatic Midrash. It is far from obvious what it means. In my book A Letter in the Scroll, I argued that Avraham was struck by the contradiction between the order of the universe – the palace – and the disorder of humanity – the flames. How, in a world created by a good G-d, could there be so much evil? If someone takes the trouble to build a palace, do they leave it to the flames? If someone takes the trouble to create a universe, does He leave it to be disfigured by His own creations? On this reading, what moved Avraham was not philosophical harmony but moral discord. For Avraham, faith began in cognitive dissonance. There is only one way of resolving this dissonance: by protesting evil and fighting it.

That is the poignant meaning of the Midrash when it says that the owner of the palace looked out and said, “I am the owner of the palace.” It is as if G-d were saying to Avraham: I need you to help Me to put out the flames.

How could that possibly be so? G-d is all-powerful. Human beings are all too powerless. How could G-d be saying to Avraham, I need you to help Me put out the flames?

The answer is that evil exists because G-d gave humans the gift of freedom. Without freedom, we would not disobey G-d’s laws. But at the same time, we would be no more than robots, programmed to do whatever our Creator designed us to do. Freedom and its misuse are the theme of Adam and Chava, Kayin and Hevel, and the generation of the Flood.

Why did G-d not intervene? Why did He not stop the first humans eating the forbidden fruit, or prevent Kayin from killing Hevel? Why did the owner of the palace not put out the flames?

Because, by giving us freedom, He bound Himself from intervening in the human situation. If He stopped us every time we were about to do wrong, we would have no freedom. We would never mature, never learn from our errors, never become G-d’s image. We exist as free agents only because of G-d’s tzimtzum, His self-limitation. That is why, within the terms with which He created humankind, He cannot put out the flames of human evil.

He needs our help. That is why He chose Avraham. Avraham was the first person in recorded history to protest the injustice of the world in the name of G-d, rather than accept it in the name of G-d. Avraham was the man who said: “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justly?” Where Noach accepted, Avraham did not. Avraham is the man of whom G-d said, “I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” Avraham was the father of a nation, a faith, a civilization, marked throughout the ages by what Albert Einstein called “an almost fanatical love of justice.”

I believe that Avraham is the father of faith, not as acceptance but as protest – protest at the flames that threaten the palace, the evil that threatens G-d’s gracious world. We fight those flames by acts of justice and compassion that deny evil its victory and bring the world that is a little closer to the world that ought to be.

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