A Tale of Two Abrahams
A few years ago, one of my friends was in a taxi in Israel. Making conversation, she mentioned to the seemingly secular driver that she was a Bible teacher. "I love reading the Bible!" the cab driver exclaimed. "What's your favorite part?" my friend asked. "Abraham smashing his father's idols and teaching him about the one true God," he replied. My friend just smiled politely and said nothing. She didn't want to be rude. After all, there is no such story in the Bible. But there is in ancient rabbinic writings.
The tale goes that a young Abram (his given name, before God changed it to Abraham in Genesis 17) received a revelation from God. Now privy to the existence of the one true divine being, the boy, whose father Terah was an idol-dealer, smashed the clay statues in the family's store. Dismayed, his father asked what had happened. "One idol smashed the others," the young boy proclaimed. "That can't be," his father said. "Idols can't actually do anything." "Exactly," the now-wise young man replied. "But there is one God who can do everything."
Ever since there were foundational stories, humans have been retelling them, but with tweaks. Millennia before those unavoidable Fifty Shades of Grey books and films emerged from Twilight fan-fiction, those who listened to stories, inspired by those tales, decided it would be fun to fill in the blanks in the received versions, adding "what-ifs" and bonus scenes. The Jewish textual tradition contains countless examples of this phenomenon, found in collections of oral traditions collected in Israel and Babylonia and preserved during the first few centuries of the Common Era known as midrash, from the Hebrew word for "to seek or inquire." But unlike speculative fiction, these Jewish stories contain profound moral and spiritual teachings and the authority of having been preserved by esteemed sages.
Along comes Anthony Julius, offering his own modern midrash on the first Jew in history, Abraham. Like his subject, Julius has acquired an admirably mythical status. He was Princess Diana's divorce lawyer. He successfully defended Deborah Lipstadt in the libel suit brought against her by the Holocaust denier David Irving, a trial turned into the film Denial. He is a professor in the Faculty of Laws at University College London, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and Kant.
Julius's Abraham is a literary creation bound by neither fealty to traditional faith nor scholarly convention. The work, the author writes in the preface, presents "neither a historical nor an antihistorical account of Abraham," nor is it an account "written within the rabbinic imagination," i.e., it is not placing itself within the 2,000-year-old traditional Jewish interpretive history of the character. "When it is written [in the Bible] that God speaks to Abraham, I take it to refer to Abraham's inner conviction that he is in communication with God," writes the author. Julius's account is a mash-up of "philosophical argument and storytelling," a reimagining of a Freud-citing patriarch.
Four-fifths of the book is a retelling of Abraham's life through an amalgam of close-reading, psychoanalysis, speculation, and intentionally anachronistic ethical debates.
Julius, making a point noted by numerous contemporary scholars, suggests it is likely not coincidence that the "father of great nations" (per Genesis 17:5) was born with a name that means "exalted father." Adding a novel framework, Julius sees within this forefather a dual personality, a model for all who faithfully follow in his wake.
Borrowing a page from the late 20th century theologian Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's suggestion in his The Lonely Man of Faith that due to differing accounts of humankind's creation in the first and second chapters of Genesis, Adam, the first man, must have balanced two senses of self—a majestic, conquering inclination ("Adam the first") and one characterized by awe of and submission to God ("Adam the second")—Julius offers us two Abrahams. The first "is born into a pagan, polytheistic milieu. In mid-adulthood, he invents himself as an inquiring, skeptical, independent-minded public intellectual … reasoning himself towards monotheism." Abraham the second is more private, subduing himself to God's wishes and founding the first family party to the covenant with God, culminating in the near-sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac.
Julius retells the idol-smashing midrash and the canonical biblical Abrahamic narrative with bold creative license—Terah "was a manufacturer, a retailer, and a trader, the owner of shops in Ur and elsewhere, a person of substantial means and well-connected to the ruling circles in the city." He has a teenage Abraham arguing against the mighty pagan king Nimrod who sought to punish the boy for his stunt defending himself in language no teen would ever use—"Adolescence is an underrated period in a person's life!" the unbowed Abraham shouts. "You by contrast are nothing more than a geriatric dictator. Indeed, you are immobilized in that role, without creativity or prospects for growth or change." When three angels appear before Abraham in the guise of men in an episode described in Genesis's 18th chapter, Julius rewrites the opening scene meditatively: "He saw three men. They were not ordinary men. Perhaps they were not men at all. Perhaps there were not three but only one. Perhaps it was not one but the One."
Amid the action, Abraham the first argues with the second. "In your fidelity to faith, your meta-faithfulness, you imprison yourself in the logic of others—of the Other," the former flings at the latter. "You have no piety," Abraham the second replies. "You think humanity is nothing but an indifferent accident on the surface of being."
Unlike the two seemingly disparate accounts of the first human's origin, there is no indication in the biblical text that there are two sides to Abraham's persona. He receives revelation from God at the start of his journey to the Promised Land (the Bible offers no details about his youth) as well as decades later. He demonstrates commitment to the covenant with God despite challenges, from fleeing to Egypt during a famine to arguing for the sparing of Sodom to mourning the death of his beloved wife Sarah.
"Every Jewish life is two lives, the lives of the two Abrahams," Julius insists.
Julius's Abraham is, of course, a stand-in for the author's wrestling with his own spirituality. In analyzing the near-sacrifice of Isaac, known as the Akedah, or Binding of Isaac, he cites the author Wendy Zierler's complaint that "the Akedah seems to fail as a recipe for passing on religious convictions to living children who we love." "I respond, yes of course it does," says Julius. "That is its purpose, or at least part of its purpose. Its 'failure' is its triumph. It makes Judaism difficult." To Julius, the Akedah asks readers to wonder: "Is sacrifice truly the highest spiritual value? Can God truly be trusted? Should we truly elevate religion above ethics? These questions are Judaism's challenge to itself."
The coda of the book presents the reader with a brief summary of perspectives on Abraham by various faith communities and seminal modern thinkers, including pre-rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud, Christianity, Freud, Hegel, and Kafka.
A quip about the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides seems apt. He has been so used and misused by subsequent scholars in support of their personal beliefs that there is My-monides and Your-monides. Julius has offered us his Abraham. The reader may choose to sacrifice it on the altar.
Abraham: The First Jew
by Anthony Julius
Yale University Press, 392 pp., $30
Stuart Halpern is senior adviser to the provost and deputy director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
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