This week’s alumni Dvar Torah is by Benzion Chinn
This essay should be read as a dialectic between Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option and Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s Not in God’s Name. Dreher is a Christian who openly urges his Christian readers to behave more like Orthodox Jews by focusing on creating small enclaves for their children instead of trying to influence the larger society. Sacks offers a reading of Genesis that subverts its particularism in favor of universalism.
Abraham is paradoxically both a universalist and a particularist. His character is universalist, but his story is quite particular. One can read the Abraham narrative as the tragically necessary process by which Abraham the universalist is forced to become the father of a particular nation.
Abraham’s universalist character becomes evident by contrasting him with Noah. Noah builds an Ark, while Abraham pitches a tent. Noah’s Ark represents complete indifference to or rejection of humanity. Noah brings his family inside and allows G-d to shut the door in silence, leaving everyone outside to die. By contrast, Abraham’s tent is open. Everyone is welcome, even idolaters. Where Noah accepted the Flood in silence, Abraham challenges God over Sodom.
Yet it is Noah who becomes the father of generic humanity, while it is not Avraham’s destiny to bring Godliness to the entire world. Instead, God consistently orders him to place barriers between himself and the rest of humanity, even while promising that all the nations of the world would be blessed through him. Abraham obeys the commands but resists their implications.
The first command Abraham receives is to leave his father’s house and travel to Canaan, essentially separating himself from his idolatrous family and giving up on them. (This is explicit in Joshua’s version of the story, which we recite in the Passover Seder.) He obeys the command but resists its implications by allowing Lot to come with him, and by taking with him the “souls” that he acquired in Haran. He still assumes that his task is to save them. God then forces Abraham to part ways with Lot. Abraham hesitates, and later comes to Lot’s rescue when he is captured by the four kings.
Our parshah ends with God commanding Abraham to make his family physically different from the people around them. Circumcision was an ultimate social barrier. In next week’s parsahah, Abraham is forced by God to listen to Sarah and expel Ishmael even though Ishmael was circumcised.
Why would Abraham agree to pursue actions that contradicted his fundamental nature of openness? Always hanging in front of Abraham is the desire for children; it is the MacGuffin that defines his narrative. God repeatedly promises him children. Leave Haran and you will have children. Enter into the treaty of parts after leaving Lot one final time and you will have children. Circumcise yourself and you will have a child.
What is so valuable about children? People all the way back to Adam had children. Abraham eventually has Ishmael with Hagar. What is unique in what Abraham is being offered in Isaac?
Isaac represents the promise of spiritual continuity, something that had not existed before. While belief in God may have gone back to Adam, there were no guarantees that it would be passed to the next generation. Abraham had to learn about God from square one all by himself. This was the fundamental failure of the generations from Adam until Abraham.
What is the price of Isaac, of spiritual continuity? Abraham does not want to hear it, but it is placing barriers between himself and the world. Abraham has to choose between converting thousands and having an impact on his generation only to be forgotten afterward, or being able to raise one child, Isaac, and build a tradition that will last forever.
While having Isaac becoming Abraham’s spiritual heir is going to require the expulsion of Ishmael and eventually the akeda, it is not a coincidence that the critical downpayment that Abraham needs in order to bring Isaac into the world is the ritual of circumcision. It is easy to attack circumcision. Go read chapters 2-4 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Abraham circumcising his flesh does not make him more righteous before God. Abraham already had faith. It is clearly more important to be circumcised of the heart. If anything, circumcision of the flesh presents what economists call moral hazard in that one might believe that he is also circumcised of the heart. Above all else, circumcision creates the categories of circumcised and uncircumcised, placing a barrier between people.
Abraham’s great contribution to the world was not that he had faith. Noah had faith. Abraham’s importance lies in the fact that he managed to pass that faith on, and to do that he needed circumcision. It is the great virtue of ritual that, as opposed to intellectual belief, it can be passed on to future generations. Ritual can do this because it serves as a living vehicle for faith. All this is made possible because ritual creates an identity of us the believers separated from the unbelievers. It is the very fact that ritual creates barriers that allow it to serve as a vehicle to transmit faith to another generation. Without it, we are left with Noah, a man whose righteousness consisted of one generation with no continuity.
Perhaps it is Abraham’s virtue that he never consents to being a particularist and never gives up on his earthly family. Abraham has many children and becomes the father of many nations even if it is only Isaac that carries the covenant. If Abraham was Noah and could willingly, maybe even happily, turn his back on the world, the nation of Israel could never have amounted to more than a cult. The fact that our founding as a particularist nation was at the hands of a universalist who never truly embraced particularism in his heart has kept us morally grounded. If we are going to be particularists let it be out of tragic necessity and not out of hatred of the world. Let us always remember that the nations of the world are our brothers and sisters.
Benzion N. Chinn (SBM 2003) lives in Pasadena, CA with his wife, Miriam, and his two children, Kalman and Moshe Eli. He works as an academic and special needs tutor. In his spare time, he pontificates on religion, politics, and sci-fi/fantasy (everything he is not supposed to talk about at the dinner table) over at izgad.blogspot.com.
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