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Friday, March 29, 2024

The Path of Abraham

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Rabbi David Bibi is the Rabbi of the Sephardic Congregation of Long Beach and has taught in many community Synagogues. He has written and edited a weekly newsletter “Shabbat Shalom from Cyberspace” for 19 years, and can be reached at DavidBibi@gmail.com.
Rabbi David Bibi is the Rabbi of the Sephardic Congregation of Long Beach and has taught in many community Synagogues. He has written and edited a weekly newsletter “Shabbat Shalom from Cyberspace” for 19 years, and can be reached at [email protected].
My daughter Aryana had just returned home from a learning program in Israel. It was the summer between her junior and senior years in high school. She wanted to change high schools. She had nothing against her old school. She just felt that a new school for senior year would be beneficial. She would be leaving a more modern school, a few minutes from home; a school she had attended for more than a dozen years for an all-girls school located seventy miles away. We met with the principals and they obviously wanted her to stay as she was a tremendous influence, not only on her own grade, but on all the others as well.

They posed the following argument. Leaving for an all-girls seminary type school, which one might classify as Haredi light, was akin to being Noah who locked himself and his family in the ark. There one was protected from the outside world rejecting multiculturalism and seeing themselves as a group apart.  In contrast if she stayed in the world of Torah Umaddah ( Torah Umadda is typically defined as “Torah and secular knowledge” and is a philosophy which combines the secular world and Judaism) doing outreach she would be like Abraham who set his tent in the center of the cross-road with doors open to each side. As Abraham she could change the world, but as Noah she could only flee from the world.

Chantelle and I watched as Aryana pondered the question. Thoughtfully she responded that she was committed to one day follow in the footsteps of Abraham, but to become Abraham one had to be first willing to lock themselves in the ark or in the Yeshiva and grow. To become Abraham, she felt she first had to live like Noah. ( And today six years later, she really has become an Abraham).

As individuals, we take on different roles as we travel the road of life. What’s true for the individual is true for the nation as a whole.

These are the journeys of the Children of Israel who left Egypt as a nation under the leadership of Moshe and Aharon. (Bamidbar 33:1) What is the reason for these forty-two stops in the desert?

There is a mystical concept that the purpose of these forty-two encampments was for Benai Yisrael to gather the sparks of holiness which were trapped in the desert. And the same concept helps to explain why we went from The Holy Land to Assyria, Babylonia, Rome, North Africa, Spain, France, England, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, India, The Americas, Australia and New Zealand. When G-d told Abraham, Ufaratzta yama va’kedma va’tzafona va’negba — And you shall break through (spread out) to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south, I doubt Abraham could even imagine the extent of how that blessing would play out over the next 3700 years. The Jewish people have been on a journey and we continue on that journey gathering sparks and spreading holiness wherever we pass.

And as we travel through time and space we too take on different roles. We take on the role of Noah. We take on the role of Abraham and sadly we take on the role of Lot.

As he sets to leave office as the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Rabbi Jonathan Saks has written an amazing pamphlet that everyone should take the opportunity to read entitled, “A JUDAISM ENGAGED WITH THE WORLD”.

In it he writes of, “Three models of the religious life”.  I quote:

“… In place of assimilation and segregation we need to argue, the case for a judaism that engages with the world. The case is not new. It is set out at the dawn of our history in three striking biblical portraits of Noah, Abraham and his nephew Lot.

“Noah is the only person in Tanakh called a tzaddik, “righteous.” Yet Noah’s righteousness was turned inward. He had no influence on his contemporaries. His was the way of segregation. Hassidim used to call Noah a ‘tzadik im peltz – a righteous man in a fur coat.’ There are two ways of keeping warm on a cold day. You can wear a fur coat or light a fire. Wear a fur coat and you warm only yourself. Light a fire and you warm others. Jews are supposed to light a fire.

“Lot chose the way of assimilation. He tried to merge into the society, Sodom, in which he had chosen to live. His daughters married local men. We see Lot at the beginning of Genesis 19 sitting at the city gate, implying as Rashi says that he had been appointed a judge. Superficially he seemed to have been accepted. He was soon to discover otherwise. Having welcomed strangers into his house, he found himself surrounded by an angry mob demanding that he hand them over. When he refuses, the mob say, “‘This one came here as an immigrant, and now all of a sudden, he has set himself up as a judge!” – Perhaps the first anti-Semitic remark in history. When the angels urge him to leave, he delays, fatefully trapped by his own ambivalence as to his real identity. Only when the angels drag him and his daughters out are their lives saved.

“Noah and Lot, the exemplars respectively of segregation and assimilation, are not happy precedents. Abraham is different. In Genesis 14 he fights a battle on behalf of the cities of the plain and liberates the people taken hostage. In Genesis 18 he mounts one of the most audacious prayers in history on behalf of the people of Sodom (‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’). He fights for his neighbors and prays for them but he does not become like them. He lives out the principle that has been the Jewish imperative ever since: Be true to your faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith.

“What is the result? When Abraham comes before the Hittites to buy a plot of land in which to bury Sarah, they say to him: ‘You arc a prince of G-d in our midst.’ That is the first instance, and the classic example, of Kiddush haShem in the Torah.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch drew attention to the phrase Abraham used in his prayer to God to save the city. Perhaps, says Abraham, there are fifty, even ten, tzaddikim betoch ha-ir, ‘righteous people within the city.’ There is a difference, says Hirsch, between a tzaddik and a tzaddik in the city. Those who are righteous by separating themselves from the city can save themselves but not others. The challenge is to be righteous within the city, involved in the life of one’s contemporaries, working for the good of all. That is the way of Abraham, to live one’s faith while engaging with the world.

“Abraham’s always was the road less travelled. The sages say that he was called ha-lvri, “the Hebrew,” because “he was on one side while the rest of the world was on the other.” Judaism is a countercultural faith, and Jews have often been iconoclasts, willing to challenge the idols of the age.

“The assimilationist-segregationist divide in Jewish life today looks less like the way of Abraham, more like the ways respectively of Lot and Noah.”

Rabbi Sacks goes on in his 31 page final message to explain a third path – You can go to his website, Google the title or email me and I’ll send you a copy.

We see that to survive after the Holocaust when the world and when most of the Jewish people saw the end of observant Jewry, it was by creating an insular world, it was through locking ourselves in the Yeshiva and separating ourselves from the outside which allowed us to survive and thrive to the point where we have more people learning today than at any point in our 2000 years of exile. But with the rejection of the outside world come the abundant problems that we are facing today. And while we fortified ourselves with Torah within our fortresses, we saw more and more of our brothers disappear through assimilation and intermarriage. We cannot forget that if Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh LaZeh – if we are all responsible for each other, we need to do something.

On our path we’ve followed the path of Noah out of necessity, and sadly too many of us have followed the path of Lot out of rejection, but there comes the day when we need to follow the path of Abraham. Don’t you think that day has arrived?

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