The Gods Are Broken!: The Hidden Legacy of Abraham

6 (Re)Embracing Teraḥ

81 6 | (Re)Embracing Terah . The young man entered my rabbinical study without an appointment . He told me that he had been passing by our synagogue, and not for the first time. He had often driven by our house of worship, and only that day did he gather up his courage to come inside and seek out the rabbi. He was sixteen years old, and he was troubled. What was bothering him? For several years he had been developing nagging doubts about his Christian faith. He had come to believe that Jesus was neither the Messiah nor the son of God, and he had begun to suspect that perhaps there were other religions that were closer to the religious truth he had been seeking. He had explored Buddhism, and Hinduism, and Islam—but now he wondered if perhaps he should “just get to the source,” as he put it— and go all the way back to Judaism. The young man was, in contemporary terms, a spiritual seeker. He only just happened to be the youngest one to wind up sitting across the desk from me. He asked me if he could attend services, and I warmly invited him to worship with the congregation whenever he wanted. Could I recommend some books for him to read? Yes, of course, and I wrote out a small list for him. “But,” I said to him, “what do your parents think of all this?” At that moment, he paused, and a sad expression crossed his face. “Well,” he said, “that’s part of the problem. They are strong believers in Christianity, and they are disappointed in me.” It reminded me of the story of the girl who gingerly approached 82 (RE)EMBRACING TERAH . her mother. “You know that vase on the fireplace mantle that has been passed down from generation to generation?” she said. “Yes,” the mother replied, “what about it?” “Well, this generation just accidentally dropped it.” “I can understand that this must make your parents sad,” I said to him. “If your parents say that it is all right—then yes, come to services. But if your search goes any further, I would want to meet with them as well.” To do—what? Would I be asking their permission to encourage their son to walk away from his religious upbringing? It was precisely at that moment that I thought of Terah . , the father of Abraham. Terah . was not the father of the Jewish people, but he was the grandfather of the Jewish people. He was the last “pre-Jew” in history. He was a man who lost one son to death (Haran), another son to nothing more pernicious than falling through the scriptural “cracks” (Nah . or), and another son to a radical new faith (Abraham ). In the words of Leon Kass: Terah . was a radical, a man who left behind the land and presumably also the ways of his fathers in search of something new. A severed link in his own cultural chain, Terah . set the example for Abraham’s own radicalism. Cultural discontinuity was part of the cultural teaching on which Abraham was raised. Terah . also lives long enough to feel the isolation that often comes from having abandoned the ancestral ways: one of his three sons (Haran) dies in his young manhood, a second (Nah . or) refuses to follow his father on his journey toward Canaan, and the third, Abram, leaves him behind in H . aran where he lives alone for sixty years and dies, perhaps without heirs to bury him.1 Does he not deserve a measure of our compassion—the same kind of compassion that I was feeling at that moment for this young man’s parents, who sensed that their son could be in the process of putting their inherited religious truths on the curb? (RE)EMBRACING TERAH . 83 Why Did Terah . Only Get as Far as H . aran? The Bible tells us almost nothing about Terah . . He appears at the end of Genesis 11, and by the time Genesis 12 begins he has already disappeared. Neither does the Bible record the name of Terah . ’s wife. This in itself is not unusual, for few women are mentioned by name in the first eleven “pre-Jewish” chapters of Genesis. But how could we have completely glossed over the “grandmother” of the Jewish people? Later generations of interpreters and storytellers will call her Amitlai.2 Terah...