Presented at Temple Beth El in Madison, Wisconsin, on Saturday, November 9, 2024.
Nachman Syrkin, the great theoretician and leader of socialist Zionism, wrote in 1898 that “tension has always existed between the Jews and the world around them. In the modern age this tension has assumed the guise of anti-Semitism.” Syrkin’s contemporary, the German sociologist Max Weber, took this idea a step further and suggested that all religions of salvation, including but not limited to Judaism, come into tension with the world. If pushed far enough, these tensions lead to what Weber called religious rejection or abnegation of the world. World rejection can take one of two forms. Believers may flee from the world, or they may work in the world to master it or change it. Let’s explore some of the religious rejections of the world that appear in this week’s portion.
Get thee out. Our portion begins with Abraham’s flight from the world of his birth—from his social surroundings, his family, and country. “And the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your land [Get thee out of thy country] and your birthplace [your city] and your father’s house to the land I will show you.’” Drawing on midrashim, Maimonides suggests that Abraham had already rejected this world before he fled from it, and it was precisely his rejection which made the flight necessary. Having “perceived that there was one God,” Maimonides writes, Abraham “began to debate and argue with his neighbors” and smashed their idols. When the king persecuted Abraham and tried to kill him, God instructed Abraham to flee.
Take and get out! The opening verse sets a pattern for the rest of the portion (and, arguably, for Jewish history: Abraham’s flight from Ur Kasdim prefigures generations of Jews whom persecution has forced to flee their homes). When Abraham is driven by famine to go down to Egypt, he worries that the Egyptians will kill him to take possession of his beautiful wife (Gen. 12:12). So Abraham asks Sarah to pretend that they are not married. A smitten Pharaoh takes Sarah into his house, the Lord afflicts him with plagues, and a now very angry Pharaoh summons Abraham to rebuke him. “Why did you not tell me she was your wife? Now, here is your wife. Take her and get out!” (Gen. 12:18–19). Pharaoh uses the same verb that the Lord used: קַח וָלֵךְ (literally, “Take and go!”). Once again, Abraham takes flight from a hostile and corrupt world.
Separate yourself. When Abraham returns to Canaan, Abraham asks Lot to part ways with him. This is not exactly a flight from the world, but it is an attempt to avoid conflict by separating himself once again from the world. “And Abram said to Lot, ‘Pray, let there be no contention between you and me, between your herdsmen and mine, for we are kinsmen. Is not all the land before you? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me’” (Gen. 13:8–9). We might call this Abraham’s partition plan.
What was the source of conflict between Abraham and Lot?
1) A quarrel over pasturage. Nachmanides explains it this way.
2) Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit: “Our sages of old … did not regard the quarrel between the shepherds … as merely an economic or political one. The Torah devotes space to this quarrel for a deeper reason. Their strife symbolized the opposition between the world of Abraham and between one who wished to be a part of it but did not whole-heartedly share the moral principles and outlook of the Patriarch.” As evidence, she points to a verse in next week’s portion: “he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice” (Gen. 18:19). In addition, according to two midrashim, “the shepherds quarreled over the violation of the prohibition against robbery.” Lastly, Leibowitz invokes Rashi’s commentary on the phrase, “And Lot journeyed East (מִקֶּדֶם)” (Gen. 13:11). Rashi writes, “he journeyed away from the Primal Being of the world saying, neither Abraham nor his God!” Rashi reads מִקֶּדֶם as מִקְדַם “from the One who is of old” or “from the One who is first.”
Circumcision. There is another way in which Abraham separates himself from the world in this week’s portion. The Lord tells him, “This is My covenant, which you shall keep, between Me and you and your seed after you: every male among you must be circumcised” (Gen. 17:10). Abraham follows this instruction to the letter, circumcising himself and every male in his household “on the very day as God had spoken to him” (Gen. 17:23–24). Circumcision, as Sigmund Freud points out, is “among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate.” Anyone who refused the custom, the Lord tells Abraham, “shall be cut off from his folk” (Gen. 17:14).
World mastery. Finally, we see a different kind of world-rejection when Lot is taken captive. “When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he mustered his retainers, born into his household, numbering three hundred and eighteen, and went in pursuit as far as Dan. At night, he and his servants deployed against them and defeated them; and he pursued them as far as Hobah, which is north of Damascus. He brought back all the possessions; he also brought back his kinsman Lot and his possessions, and the women and the rest of the people” (Gen. 14:14–15, 16). This time, Abraham does not flee or separate himself to avoid conflict, nor does he meekly accept the world’s injustice for granted. Instead, he acts decisively to master and change an unjust world. This kind of struggle is a reaction to the world that Jewish socialists and Zionists also embraced in the modern era.
After Abraham redeems Lot from his captors, the Lord tells Abraham, “Fear not ... I am your shield” (Gen. 15:1). What did Abraham have to fear at this point? After all, he had just defeated four mighty kings.Particularism and universalism. As different as these examples of world-rejection are—uprooting himself and fleeing Ur Kasdim and Egypt, separating from his nephew Lot, circumcising his household, and setting out to master and change an unjust and threatening world—there is a common theme that unites them. What characterizes them, in the words of the Israeli Bible scholar Nehama Leibowitz, is “an extreme particularism, placing a barrier between Abraham and the rest of the world.” This is consistent with the Lord setting Abraham and his descendants apart for special blessing, reward, and protection. “I will make you a great nation,” the Lord promises Abraham. “And I will bless those who bless you, and those who damn you I will curse” (Gen. 12:2–3). According to a midrash, God bestowed these special blessings on Abraham and his descendants after the failures of other men.
1) Political, realistic considerations. According to one interpretation given in the Talmud, Abraham said: “Perhaps the sons of those kings I slew will gather together an army and make war against me” (Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, p. 137). Abraham feared, in other words, that the victory itself might contain the germs of the next war.
2) Ethical motives. In the Talmud, “R. Levi said: It was because Abram was apprehensive and said: Perhaps there was among the people I killed one righteous or God-fearing man.” According to Rashi, Abraham was concerned over all the lives, both the innocent and the wicked. He was troubled by “war itself which necessitated so much bloodshed.”
3) Religious motivation. Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit: Abraham was “afraid that the abundance of favors he had received at the hand of God” was out of balance; “he had received more than he was due. “His deeds could never hope to catch up with the bounties showered on him from Above.”
But world-rejection, whether in the form of flight from the world or mastery of the world, is not the only theme we find in this week’s portion. The portion also contains the theme of a generous and world-affirming universalism: “and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). “In other words,” Nehama Leibowitz comments, “Abraham, as he left for the promised land, was to be considered the only glimmer of light wandering through a world of thick darkness, eventually spreading, illuminating the whole of mankind, enveloping the whole world with its glow.” This “theme of all-embracing blessings,” she adds, recurs no less than five times “in the history of the patriarchs.”
Regarding Abraham: “Abraham shall surely become a great and might nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him” (Gen. 18:18).
After the binding of Isaac: “And in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 22:18).
To Isaac: “And in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 26:4).
To Jacob in his dream: “And in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 28:14).
Nachman Syrkin invoked these same two themes, particularism and universalism. “From the very beginning of their encounter,” he wrote, “tension has always existed between the Jews and the world around them. In the modern age this tension has assumed the guise of anti-Semitism…. How did the Jews react to the world?” The Jew, he suggested, “possessed … a weekday and a Sabbath soul.” The Jew’s weekday soul, he wrote, moved him to grit his teeth, curse the enemy, and dream of “the vengeance of heaven and earth.” But the Jew’s Sabbath soul raised him to a “higher and more humane” level. “From his crown of pain, glory emanated to the world which cursed him; out of the sensitivity born of suffering, he prayed to his God for the very mankind which cast him out.”
What is the relationship between these two themes of particularism and universalism? How can they be reconciled?
Leibowitz: “This [all-embracing blessing] … is looking far ahead into the distant future, to the ultimate goal of human history, the first step toward which we see unfolded in this sidra, with the uprooting and separating of Abraham from all that was near and dear.” Particularism is a precondition for universalism—because without it, the Jewish people have no blessings to share and might not even exist to share them—and universalism completes particularism.
In an address entitled “The Jew in the World,” delivered in 1934, Martin Buber suggested that Abraham’s Covenant with God “summoned” Abraham and his descendants to “enter world history” as the “first real attempt” at ethical community, as a prototype and model for the nations. For this reason, Buber insisted, Jewry must not “disintegrate into small particles” or lose its reality in the world; it is vitally necessary for Israel to preserve and assert itself in the world as a unique community, a “community sui generis.” But it is equally important to understand that self-preservation and self-assertion are means, “mere prerequisites,” to a higher end. To mistake means for ends, Buber argued, is to make “an idol of the people.” The ultimate end is that in and through the people Israel, “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”
