Abraham the Rebel

Rabbi Melanie Aron

October 19, 2002

Most of the stories we tell about Abraham, both in the Torah and in the Midrash, stress his role as an innovator. Abraham is viewed as the father of the Jewish people, the first monotheist. In the Torah we hear of his setting forth, leaving his homeland, his birthplace, his father's house to begin a new people. The midrashim about Abraham tell of his intellectual discovery of the idea of one God, unity in the multiple appearances of the world. It is Abraham, the midrash tells us, who understood that behind the sun and the moon and the stars, the wind and the storms, there was one power that unites all things into a coherent whole.

We are also told in the Midrash about how revolutionary Abraham's ideas were and about how they were not well received by his father or by his townspeople. In the Midrash we are given the impression that perhaps Abraham left town not just because of God's call but also because of the anger of his neighbors and their resentment and fear of his new ideas- he left just a day ahead of a lynch mob, in at least one of the stories.

As young people especially, I think these stories make Abraham someone with whom we can identify. He was someone whose parents didn't understand him, someone who had his own ideas, and had to set out on his own journey to discover his own truths.

But that isn't exactly the whole story in the Torah.

At the very end of last week's Torah portion, in a paragraph that often gets overlooked, we find the surprising words:

"Terach took his son Abram, his grandson Lot the son of Harran and his daughter in law Sarai the wife of his son Abram and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan; but when they had come as far as Haran, they settled there. The days of Terach came to 205 years and Terach died in Haran.

Why was Terach heading out to Canaan? Why did he leave Ur- the city on the Tigres-Euphrates rivers, in the settled heart of ancient Mesopotamia? Was it the death of his son which prompted him to stay in Haran, in present day Syria and not continue his journey? Or was there some other obstacle which prevented him from being able to move forward and complete the journey to his stated destination?

For me this short paragraph changes my perception of Abraham and his father. Perhaps Abraham learned more from his father than we have previously imagined. The midrash states that it was because of his idolatry that Terach couldn't complete his journey. He became stuck in Haran the place where he had stopped for a temporary rest. Terach couldn't go the distance, but he did succeed in transmitting to Abraham a passion for the journey.

Abraham was able to break through his father's limitations. His thoughts went off in new directions. But he was also building on what he had experienced as a child, a willingness to adventure, to leave the settled areas and head off to new places.

It has happened more than once than an individual who is converting from the religion of their parents to Judaism, will talk to me about how this conversion was in some way part of their father or mother's legacy. At first I was surprised, if the parent wasn't Jewish, how is converting to Judaism their legacy. But people have explained to me, their mother or father taught them to think for themselves, or modeled for them the search for a spiritual home, or told them never to settle for less than what they felt was truly right. In this way, their parents teachings motivated them to go off in this new direction.

When I asked the Hebrew school kids this week whether they thought they would grow up to be like their parents, there were many who insisted that when they grew up they would be nothing like their parents- and every parent hopes that their child will have the opportunity to do things and be things they never could. But I hope you will also see, as you grow older, those lines of continuity in your lives. For it may be in ways your don't understand today, that the teachings of your parents, have laid the ground work for the journeys that you will undertake.