Finding Our Way: Jewish Texts and the Lives We Live Today

Four - God

F 0 U R GOD In the last chapter I spoke about tradition and experience as two great foundations ofreligious faith in the past and why today each of them presents us with certain difficulties. But there is a third traditional pathway to belief that we should also put on the agenda: finding God through the path of reason. Isn't it possible, this position argues, that there is something about the very nature of the world that leads us, through the rational powers of our own minds, to accept the reality of God? To explore this idea more deeply we can turn to a midrash on the first great religious "call" in the Bible: "The Lord said to Abram: Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you." (Genesis 12:1) R. Isaac said: This may be compared to a man who was traveling from place to place when he saw a castle in flames. Is it possible that the castle lacks a person to look after it, he wondered? The master of the castle looked out and said, "I am the master of the castle." Similarly, because Abraham our father said, "Is it conceivable that there is none to look after the world?" The Holy One, blessed be He, looked out and said to him, "I am the Master, the Sovereign of the Universe." (Genesis Rabbah 39:1) 83 FINDING OUR WAY The midrash above, like many rabbinic interpretive texts, begins with an implicit question about the biblical text: Why at the beginning of chapter 12 in Genesis does God choose Abraham as the father of what will later become the Jewish people? Why was that particular person appropriate to become "Abraham our father "? This kind of investigation is one we often find in the rabbinic literature about biblical characters. Indeed, one of the intriguing questions that any reader feels about those figures in the Bible chosen by God is, does the prophet appear to get chosen because he is worthy or is he worthy because he was chosen? In other words, does God seek out people who are already appropriate and make them into prophets, or does the very choice by God take ordinary people and make them extraordinary? Were Moses or David or Deborah or Samson-all very different charactersunusual people before the divine mission, or did the mission (and the relationship to God because of the mission) change them into something greater? In general, when faced with this question, the rabbis argued for the first point of view and tried to find those special elements already present in the individuals that made them worthy of divine choice. Thus, midrashim about the origins of various biblical figures try to show how reasonable it was that they later became the messengers of God. 1 The case of Abraham is particularly striking since he, after all, becomes the starting point of the entire history ofJudaism. Yet before the divine command to "go forth from your native land," the Bible tells us virtually nothing about him, aside from the genealogical account at the end of Genesis, chapter 11. There his origins are traced back to Shem, one of the three sons of Noah. Why, the rabbis want to know, was this man in particular chosen by God? What had made him worthy? The legends about Abraham are a striking example ofthe way the so-called "laconic style" of the Bible-the way the Bible tells its tales with very few details -leads to the evolution of midrashic interpretation. 2 The midrashim about Abraham therefore tend to stress his personal discovery of faith, his understanding that there was a God 84 God that ruled the universe. Thus, we have, among others, the midrashic story of Abraham breaking the idols in his father's home.3 The midrashic text quoted above is also part of that interpretive tradition. In our text Abraham recognizes the need for the castle to have a caretaker, that is, for the world to have a Master. This idea too is part of a larger midrashic family of sources. There are many texts that present the image of God as creator of a well-ordered universe: God is an architect who designed a palace or a builder who constructed a ship. In fact the Torah itself is seen as the blueprint that God consulted...