1 Now the LORD said unto Abram: 'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee. 2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and be thou a blessing. [Genesis 12]
The rest of the portion chronicles the wanderings of Abraham up through Abraham's and Ishmael's circumcision. This includes a sojourn into Egypt where Abraham deceives Pharaoh, a lightning raid on the enemies of Sodom and Gomorra when Lot gets into a hostage situation, Ishmael's birth, and a really strange sacrifice.
A few weeks ago, I began attending a group discussion on Jewish theology. We are using a book edited by R. Elliot Cosgrove Jewish Theology in our Time an anthology of rabbis from my and younger generations as the starting point. Across the spectrum of Jewish thought, these authors presented ideas I was familiar with and which describe much of my own theology. Many ideas are not new at all, but showed how influenced the authors of these essays were by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the 18th and early 19th century Hasidic masters. Among the members of the class, there were strong objections to much of the material, and a complaint that these Rabbis' theology wasn't authentically Jewish. Apparently, in much of the group, only Maimonides is Jewish.
The group went on bashing the beliefs of the young rabbis, discrediting their credentials while continuing to compare them to the their ideal image of the intellectual Maimonides. I felt very alone in that room. I agreed with many of those contributing Rabbis in the book, At the same time, I understood where the rest of the class were coming from: a world that was different than the one I grew up in, even if it was in the same country. Rationality made Judaism special in their minds, compared to the far less rational Christians around them. For them, Maimonides is the pinnacle of rationality and intellectualism. But Jeremy Gordon, the Rabbi of New London Synagogue, England Shares my concern about Maimonides when writing his essay in the book:
I am not that interested in dogmatic assertions that allow me to test who is and is not a proper Jewish theologian. None of these theological endeavors seems to help me be better: A better husband,father or rabbi. They don't even seem to help me understand the world with more accuracy or insight (More Theos less Ology, 51)
I believe like many of these rabbis' essays that the logic and rationalism that Maimonides uses fails when talking about theology. It is an import and reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle and not what the tradition uses to work out theological problems. Instead, it is Aggadah, stories and midrash which provides the medium for such discussions. Yet I was seemingly alone in that, and so alone I was afraid to respond in the discussion, short of defending the credentials of the contributing Rabbis to the book.
I sometime fear others will take me for crazy for asking for wisdom and guidance from God, because I very often get an answer from God. God would give the wisdom in signs. I've done that myself so many times I take it for granted but never thought that I was crazy. I talk to God all the time, then look for God's responses in a street signs, songs on the radio and even the occasional fortune cookie. Yet, I'm uncomfortable talking to others in my synagogue about praying and finding wonders, who probably would find it irrational, and believe me crazy. I know that many think I'm crazy that heartfelt prayer for me does not happen in the Big Synagogue. For me, it needs something smaller, warmer and more personal. Yet the older generations in liberal communities seem to have a hard time understanding that. The older generation was interested in rationality, and my spiritual life has so much more richness than mere thinking. I wrote in my notes for the theology class a summary of one article:
We don't find God's wonder's until we shut up and listen. the Shema does not read "Proclaim oh Israel!", But "Hear oh Israel!"Yet in much of my life I find few who do keep still and quiet long enough to actually hear -- they are too busy talking.
Abram was told by God to Lech Leha, to go for himself, in doing so he became Abraham. Many know the Midrash of Abram Smashing the Idols, but few know the rest of the story. Terah, Abram's Father, took Abram to be executed for this act. After Abram was thrown live into a sacrificial fire pit, [Genesis R. XXXVII:13] it was then that God said "Lech lecha."[ibid, XXXIX:2] Breaking some pottery or a few assets of a merchant wasn't the issue, thinking differently than everyone else was. The thinking of the people of Abram's time was so rigid, Abram's father Terah wanted to see his son die than change his view, and Abram was willing to be sacrificed for his.
There are different generations, and they are influenced by different things. The generations of liberal Jews older than me were influenced by a need for rationalism, a continued fear of anti-semitism, the Shoah, and the joy of the establishment of the state of Israel. The generations younger than me are influenced by different things, those issues which influenced the older generations are now in the past far enough to be not be significant in their lives.
The way I read the situation, the older generations want and seek a prime mover, and are often puzzled by its absence in horrific events while demanding their free will. The younger generation wants a prime lover, the most moved mover, and is often puzzled in how to keep or even start such a relationship. Neither is wrong or even inaccurate, just different based on different life experiences.
In every older generation there will be mavericks. It is often these mavericks who inform the next generation as its teachers. My own education was at the feet of students of Abraham Joshua Heschel.. A majority of the baby boomer generation may remember Heschel for Selma and his views on Vietnam. My generation and younger generations will remember him more for God in Search of Man, which was panned by the Jewish community at its publication. It's clear to me that many of the young rabbis in Cosgrove's book remember Heschel for his theology than his social justice stands, though both are important.
As Midrash and the text tell us, Abraham the patriarch was a maverick. He was aware that a statue, a pocket sized clay figure, a tree or a hill was not a god. There was something more than the wind and the sun, and that something more was God. The older generation of his time, including his own father, could not make that conceptual leap, and so they set out to destroy him.
Abraham left that world to define himself and his family in the mind shift to monotheism. We celebrate his iconoclasm, all while being fallible human beings and clinging to idols of the mind, the assumptions we hold so dear. It may be assumptions of our generation, gender, sexual orientation or social status. We hold them so dear they become idols. When the rabbis of the Talmud would challenge a statement, very often they would phrase their challenge "how is this derived?" Understanding why a rule was written the way it was came before rejecting it on seemingly logical grounds. Once understood, it could be accepted or rejected. But understanding came first, and even in rejection tolerance for a community's view remained. I find so little of that in our world, and that class was only the latest and last example. Most people would rather defend their idols of assumptions, than even listen or understand to the the assumptions of another.
It's hard to make a mind shift. One of the hardest is to remove the assumptions that our assumptions are facts. We need to examine them, to continually challenge ourselves to say "how is this derived?" In some cases, like the Rabbis of the Gemara, we may continue to believe or we may see how we are faulty in our thinking. Like Abram, we may learn to lech lecha, to move on to a different way of thinking, away from the prejudices and faulty assumptions of our kindred and ancestors' house.
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