Episode #12 The Chosen People

In this episode, Rabbi Reinman describes Ur Kasdim, the city in which Abraham grew up, and follows him on his journey to Harran.

Chapter Twelve

The Chosen People

Deep in antiquity, the Imperial Quadrant was in the process of emerging in the region of the world known as the Middle East. Villages and towns formed small states for economic cooperation and common defense. Governments in these ministates collected taxes, built irrigation systems and promoted local industries such as textiles, metalwork, pottery and construction projects. They also built walled central cities to serve as administrative centers and places of refuge in case of war. The heads of the governments of the city-states ruled as hereditary kings.

Eventually, one of the city-states among a group emerged as the most powerful among them and organized the rest of the city-states into a single empire under its own leadership. The king of that city-state became the emperor. Empires arose in the fertile Nile valley of Egypt and in Mesopotamia in the land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The Egyptian empire was fairly stable for thousands of years, but the Mesopotamian empires were constantly in flux. Imperial power passed from Sumerians to Akkadian to Babylonians to Assyrians to Persians.

The important Sumerian city of Ur, where Abraham grew up, was a port on the Persian Gulf and a center of industry and commerce. It was also the site of the greatest pagan temple in the Sumerian empire, known as the Ziggurat of Ur. The Ziggurat was a huge rectangular pyramid made of mud bricks with a flat top. A staircase led to the terrace atop the pyramid and to a smaller pyramid that sat there. Another staircase led to a higher terrace on which there stood the temple to the pagan god. The structure was two hundred feet by one hundred and fifty feet at the base and rose to a height of one hundred feet, a ten-story building.

The temple was at the heart of Sumerian civilization. The kings ruled in the name of the god race, and when a king was very powerful, he would declare himself a god. This was really not so bizarre. As we explained in the previous chapter, the gods were like overgrown, invisible and immortal humans with special powers. If a king achieved extraordinary  power, he could claim to be closer to the god race than to the human race. In later years, Alexander the Great would declare himself a god, and the Romans deified some of their emperors.

The culture of the city and the empire was rooted in the pagan worship. The customs, the festivals, the music and the literature were all expressions of the pagan worship. Most important of all, the entire economy depended on the pagan cult, which generated numerous jobs, such as priests, priestesses, merchants and laborers of all kinds. The need of the temple for a constant flow of goods and services drove a powerful economic engine.

Abraham was born about two thousand years before the common era to the House of Terach, an aristocratic family whose wealth derived from the manufacture of household pagan idols. Abraham was raised a pagan and initiated into the pagan cult. In his heart, however, he was a truth seeker, and his faith in the pagan gods was not very strong.

At the age of forty,[1] Abraham had an epiphany, described by the Midrashic parable previously discussed in Chapter 3. A man walking from one town to another saw a palace ablaze with light. “Is it possible,” he said, “that this palace has no master?” Abraham recognized the existence of the infinite, which is represented by the darkness. He saw a glittering finite world in the midst of infinite, and he understood that there was an unknowable Creator who had brought into existence from a state of non-existence. Abraham had understood the significance of the light in the darkness, and ultimately, he himself became a light in the darkness. God spoke to him and said, “I am the Master.” But not right away. It would be decades before God rewarded Abraham with the gift of prophecy.

Abraham had come to the realization that the god race didn’t exist, that there was only One God, the Creator, the Infinite who encompassed all existence. He also understood that the purpose of creation was that the entire world should recognize Him, as discussed in Chapter 4, that the painting should recognize the Painter.

The pagan world in which he lived, however, was as from that purpose as possible. Therefore, he took it upon himself to set things right. He smashed the idols wherever he could. The human race, he declared, should cast off the shackles of the god race. A human being was not an inferior creature struggling to survive in the shadow of the god race. He represented the highest form of life on the face of the earth, a glorious creature deeply imbued with the divine spirit. A moral code governed his behavior; he had no right to squander his existence on wanton and promiscuous pursuits. He had a purpose in life and a destiny, and he stood at the pinna­cle of creation.

With his imposing presence, his immense charisma and his blazing passion, he mesmerized his ever-increasing crowds. His message became the talk of Ur. Could it be that the god race didn’t exist? Could it be that the Ziggurat was a waste of blood, sweat and money?

In ancient Ur, Abraham was more than a religious reformer. He was an iconoclast, a revolutionary who threatened to undermine the authority of the king and the imperial government, who threatened to topple the entire structure of society and destroy its economy. Moreover, it would bring an end to the promiscuous lifestyle people enjoyed under the indifferent gaze of the god race. Under the stern gaze of a moral God, people wore a heavy mantle of responsibility along with their elevated state.

This could not be tolerated. Abraham was warned again and again to desist, and when he failed to comply, his life was threatened. Abraham and his family were forced to flee from Ur and relocate in the city of Harran in Syria on the outskirts of the empire.

Abraham was not the only person in the world who recognized the one true God. There were a small number of others, most notably Shem, Ever and the disciples in their yeshivah. Why was Abraham the only one to rise up against the god race? Why not the others?

We can suggest that Abraham was more suited to speak to the multitudes than they were, because he himself was a product of the pagan society. Moreover, the others may not have felt the same obligation he did. If Shem had seen someone attempting murder or robbery, he would undoubtedly have admonished him and prevented him from committing a sin. But if he had seen a pagan bowing to an idol, his admonishments would have fallen on deaf ears; the pagan would not have understood what he was saying.[2] What was required was a revolutionary to step forward and change the world. They were not revolutionaries. Abraham was.

Abraham was the ultimate revolutionary. He was called Ivri, because although he stood on one side and the rest of the world on the other, he was not discouraged. He did not falter in his resolve. The revolution, however, clearly could not be launched in the imperial city of Ur.

When Abraham reached Harran, he found a more conducive climate for his revolutionary efforts. Far from the imperial centers, he was able to work relatively undisturbed. He gathered around him many followers. According to the Rambam, there were alaphim urevavos, which means thousands and tens of thousands, but this may simply be an idiom meaning significantly numerous. In any case, there were many; the Torah calls them hanefesh asher asah b’Harran, the souls he formed in Harran. They followed him and joined his encampment together with their families.

Over the course of several years, Abraham became the leader of a new tribe that numbered in the thousands, a tribe organized on the principle of faith in God and the rejection of paganism and pagan practices. But what happened with these multitudes? Where did they go? What did they do? We find no traces of them in the ensuing generations. They seem to have reverted to paganism and were forgotten to history.

Most probably, they succumbed to the lure of paganism just as their ancestors did, The idea of worshipping and praying to an unknowable God was just too difficult.

Let us consider, for example, a person who comes before a judge to plead for mercy. He looks at the judge and tries to assess if he is strict or kindly. Will he be more receptive to a reasoned argument or to an emotional appeal? Will tears move him? And then he makes his plea according to his assessment of the nature of the judge.

But what if the pleas were made in a pleading room in which he could not see the judge? The supplicant is led into a large room with screens on all four sides. The judge or judges sit unseen behind these screens. The supplicant doesn’t know if there is only one judge or more. He doesn’t know if the judge or judges are old or young, black or white, male or female, tall or short, fat or thin. All he knows is that his plea is being heard. In that case, he cannot tailor his plea to his conception of the judge. He must focus on the from rather on the to. He knows that there is a to, but nothing more about it.

It is the same with the relationship between man and God. We know nothing about the nature of His essence. We cannot understand the concept of an infinite God who is existence itself. But we know that it is the truth, and we know that He wants the painting to recognize the Painter. It is difficult, but it can be done.

Abraham’s multitudinous followers who sat at his feet and listened to his passionate speeches and lectures were so inspired that they were able to recognize the truth about God and relate to him in the way Abraham had taught them. Their descendants, however, and the descendants of their descendants who were not exposed to Abraham’s charisma and passion could not sustain that level of existence. Over time, they began to seek out gods to whom they could better relate, and soon, they slipped back into paganism.

When Abraham was seventy-five years old, after teaching in Harran for decades, God spoke to him for the first time. “Go forth from your land, your birthplace,” God said, “to the land I will show you, and I will make you into a great nation.” God would lead him to the land of Canaan, where he would establish the people of Israel.

The ultimate success of Abraham’s revolution would not come through reaching out to the multitudes but through his descendants who would grow into a great nation built on the foundations he laid. A nation that would form a special covenant with God and become His chosen among all the nations. A nation that would accept the Torah and live by it. A nation that would be l’ohr amim, the shining light of Judaism to the nations of the world.[3] A nation that would defeat paganism and denial of God, even if it would take centuries and millennia.

The notion of a chosen people did not mean that the nation would consider itself racially or ethnically superior. The Jewish people are chosen because of their covenant with God, and that covenant is open to all people who want to assume the spiritual burdens of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are chosen to set an example for all humankind, to stand in the vanguard of the battle against paganism.

So, did all Abraham’s outreach efforts in Ur, Harran and afterward in Canaan go to waste? Was there no lasting historical benefit beside the strengthening of his own faith and devotion to God? And if so, why did God allow him to toil in futility in Harran for decades before sending him on to Canaan to build a new nation?

There may indeed have been a lasting benefit from his heroic efforts in Harran. As we explained in Chapter 10, the descent of the world into paganism was gradual. The final straw, in the words of the Rambam, was that the honored and holy Name of God was completely forgotten. That severed as the last tenuous connection of the human race to the unknowable God.

Abraham taught the multitudes that flocked to him that there was an unknowable God about whom they had never heard, a God who had brought the world into existence from non-existence; he reintroduced them to the honored and holy Name. He told them that, although they could know nothing more about the essence of God, all prayers should be directed to Him. He showed them that serving Him gave deep meaning to life.

Eventually, these multitudes slipped back into paganism, but not to its very lowest stage. They did not forget the honored and holy Name of God, but they found it too difficult to pray to a God that was completely beyond their imagination. And so, we find that the Philistine king Avimelech tells Abraham that God came to him in a dream. Lavan tells Jacob that God came to him in a dream. The Syrian seer Bilaam tells the Moabite king Balak that he is in communication with God. Even the polytheistic Hindu religion today, with its numerous gods and goddesses, believes in one transcendent God they call Brahman whom people find too distant for communication. Because of Abraham, the honored and holy Name of God reentered the pagan consciousness, and the power of paganism was diminished. It was the work of Judaism to destroy it completely.

[1] Rambam, Hilchos Avodah Zarah 1:3, writes that he recognized God at the age of forty.

[2] There is a difference of opinion in the Talmud (Shabbos 68b) regarding whether a tinok shenishba, an abducted child who knows nothing about the Torah, needs atonement if he commits a sin. According to one opinion, he needs atonement, because his sin is considered shogeg, accidental, rather than oness, involuntary, probably because the knowledge exists in the world even though it has not reached this particular person. In the pagan world, however, knowledge of God was virtually non-existent, and Shem would not have been under the obligation to prevent any individual act of pagan worship. What was needed was a revolution, and he was not a revolutionary.

[3] Yeshayahu 42:6.