CHAPTER VI

ABRAHAMIC FAITH:

Calling and Response in Jewish Narrative Theology

MICHAEL S. KOGAN

Montclair State University

FINDING ONESELF IN THE STORY

            Human beings and their narratives exist in a thoroughly dia-lectical relationship: people shape the stories and then the stories shape them. Even the early storytellers of our tradition were born into a world in which stories were already being told and it was in the light of these tales that they produced their own. For the first storyteller, perhaps, experience preceded the creation of the narrative -- or was simultaneous with it. But for everyone since, experience has been shaped by narratives already circulating in the community, "in the air." Learning the existing story, its language and its logic, enables individuals to "experience on their own" in the terms of that story or to use it as a foundation for new and expanded experience. In this way, learning the story is like learning a language. Only by doing so is one empowered either to speak in that language or to master others.

            Religious traditions are like languages. They are made up of stories which one must learn if one is to function within their parameters.1 This narrative view of religion is popular today, but it is no new discovery. In its tradition of midrash, and in the Bible itself, Judaism has produced and preserved a treasury of stories arranged to form a continuous narrative through which the Jewish people has come to understand itself and its role in the world. That these stories, differently interpreted (as they are in Christianity), or differently told (as they are in Islam), have become part of the core narrative of two related faiths attests to their profundity and their power. But to be a member of the people Israel is to find oneself in the story as originally told and as interpreted by Jewish tradition. That tradition is, in fact, an extended gloss on the narrative, a gloss which has, with time, come to be considered essential to the story itself. In Wallace Stevens’ words, ". . . what we said of it became a part of what it is."2

            In this paper I will be discussing core elements of Jewish self-understanding as they emerge from the story of Abraham, father of the faith. His story will first be located in the context of earlier events, for it is presented as the beginning of a solution to a human dilemma as old as our species itself. It is a beginning because it is only the first chapter of an Israelite narrative still being told in the lived experience of a living people. That experience, even today, is wholly shaped and directed according to patterns established long ago in the scriptural record of present-day Israel’s ancient forebears.

THE PAST IS PROLOGUE

            Something has gone wrong. All biblical religions agree to that. In fact, something has gone drastically wrong and all of those religions have been put in motion to attempt to set things right. We open the pages of the Bible and step into a narrative of human error and divine correction elevated to the level of cosmic drama. A good and beautiful world, created by a holy God, is corrupted by the misuse of human free will. Unwilling to abide by the single prohi-bition given to them, Adam and Eve tear themselves away from their true source and attempt to establish themselves as the ultimate authority in their own lives. Their hubris and folly bring about their downfall and exile into a place of "thorns and thistles" - our world. But all is not lost. God is still present. God continues to speak to them and attempts to guide them. What has been lost is the intimacy with God which Adam and Eve enjoyed in the garden. Before their transgression the divine will and the human will were as one.3 Now they are distinct and often opposed.

            Following the expulsion from the garden, human beings continue their moral and spiritual descent into murder in the next generation,4 rejoicing over murder several generations later,5 and finally the universal corruption of Noah’s day.6 Seeing that the earth was "filled with violence," the Lord repented having made humanity and acted to correct the error. Not in anger but in sorrow God blotted out all save Noah and those few who were with him in the ark.7 Noah was spared because he was a person "righteous in his generation." Not perfect, but righteous compared with his fellows of that time. The sin in Eden, then, did not destroy the possibility of at least partial human righteousness. Each human being must still make the decision whether to attempt to realize that possibility.

            The deluge described in the narrative was no ordinary flood. The text tells us that the waters above the earth and "the waters of the great deep" (primal chaos - tahom) came together, crushing humanity and un-creating the world.8 The force of human evil is seen as being so great that it can undo creation itself. God will now begin anew by creating a new world and a new humanity through Noah and his family.

            Following the flood the ark comes to rest and Noah under-takes the first and only action he performs which is not in direct obedience to a divine command. He offers a sacrifice, "a sweet savor to the Lord" entirely on his own initiative.9 The innately reli-gious nature of humanity is pointed to here, a nature which can be distorted or evaded but never wholly effaced. The Lord, we are told, is pleased with the offering and pledges "in His heart:"

I will not again curse the ground anymore for man’s sake, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. . . . (Gen. 8:21)

            This is an extraordinary passage with a profound logic all its own which must give every careful reader pause. One might expect God to say that the spontaneous offering has led to a divine re-consideration of the earlier negative evaluation of the human race. Here Noah is demonstrating his piety with an open and generous heart. Perhaps humanity is not so bad after all. Or perhaps, since it is Noah who performs this deed -- one who has been singled out from a corrupt humanity as righteous -- what he does can in no way influence God’s attitude toward other humans. But the quote tells us something quite different. Because of Noah’s offering God will adopt an entirely new approach to child-rearing. The sweet savor softens God’s resolve, modifies God’s policy toward human beings. No longer will God, either through anger or sorrow, exile or banish or act to destroy these human creatures. This alteration in God’s approach does not result from any divine realization that people are better than God had thought them to be, but rather from its opposite. "The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth." Apparently humans can do nothing on their own to change that. Therefore God will have to change, will have to adopt a new way with erring humanity.

            How different this concept is from later notions of divine stasis ("I am the Lord; I change not")10 and human mutability. Here humans are frozen into a pattern of sin which they seem unable or unwilling to alter. It is God who exercises the freedom to start anew, to deal with humanity according to revised rules. It will take God two chapters to begin to formulate this fresh approach.

            At this point in our story it should be noted that all the characters in the narrative so far are pre-Israelite. They are the ancestors of all humanity. While Israelite authors are writing the tale, they are commenting on the universal condition of all people. Adam and Eve and their wayward progeny represent all of us. Given divinely ordained norms of behavior, they choose their own will and set human history on the path of self- destruction. There are, of course, many ways to evaluate the human story. The Bible’s authors chose a standard of obedience to God which is most often expressed in ethical terms. The spiritual and the moral are like two sides of a single coin ("Noah was a righteous man. . . . Noah walked with God").11 For biblical religion, God-consciousness which does not issue in moral sensitivity is, in most cases, seen as a false consciousness, an inauthentic religiosity. This is true for all peoples, not only Israelites.

            And so it is that Jewish tradition draws lessons both from the flood and from the flood’s aftermath which are true for all nations. Following the deluge God enters into a covenant with Noah and his sons. The theme is the sanctity of life. God pledges to preserve life on earth and never again to send a flood; human beings are forbidden to shed human blood or to ingest animal blood -- blood being the symbol of life. From these commands later commentators derived seven statutes: six prohibitions and a requirement which apply to all humanity. The covenant between God and Noah and his sons (all of us) forbids homicide, robbery, incest, idolatry, blas-phemy and the cutting of a limb (for food) from a living animal. It requires all people to live only in societies with functioning legal systems.12

            Thus the first covenant mentioned in the Bible is a universal one. Israel’s scriptures consider all people as being in the same moral dilemma. All are equally in need of ethical-legal structures within which to live lives acceptable to God. The initial biblical frame of reference is neither tribal nor national, but human. It is only when universal solutions prove inadequate that the people Israel emerges. Even then the particularistic and local are always seen as existing for the sake of the universal. But until chapter twelve of Genesis, we are dealing not with Israelites but with the forebears of all humanity.

            The divine evaluation of human character expressed after the flood is borne out in the next episodes of the narrative as even the righteous Noah falls prey to the temptations of the grape. This presents his son Ham with the opportunity to commit a crime so heinous that the text can only refer to it as looking upon "his father’s nakedness."13 What possible incestuous goings on are hinted at here the reader can only guess. Suffice it to say that with this act serious moral disorder once again appears in human affairs. The Tower of Babel story which follows reinforces our view of humanity as plagued by hubris and narcissism, this time accompanied by cowardice.14 But we ought not to be surprised that the progeny of those who in Eden sought to be "like God" would attempt to take heaven by storm and "make a name" for themselves little less than divine.15

            And so the stage is set for another new beginning for the human race. If in some sense Noah was a second Adam called on to rebuild a newly re-created world, Abraham is the third Adam summoned to open a wholly new future for humanity. By chapter twelve of Genesis, God has decided on the plan that began to emerge in the flood’s aftermath. If people cannot change, then God will. Instead of merely reminding humans of the right and of their free will to choose it, as with Adam and Eve and Cain after them, and then allowing them to proceed unsupervised, God will now play a more consistently attentive role in history. God will choose one man. From him and his wife God will -- miraculously -- create a family; from that family, twelve tribes -- a people of God to receive divine instruction and witness to God in the world.

THE CALL OF ABRAHAM

The Lord said to Abram: Get you out of your country, and from your kindred, and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you . . . and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed (Gen. 12:1-3)

            "Get you out" -- from all that has been, from old ways and inherited patterns of disobedience and self-indulgence. Get you out from human assumptions into a new and divine perspective. Get you out; learn to live beyond yourself, in and toward your ultimate possibilities. Go from where you are to where you can be. Break old habits and be free. Move out of stasis and share the divine life of eternal becoming. In the call to Abraham is recorded the birth of the Hebrew people. It is crucial to understand from the beginning that this call combines both particularistic and universal elements. No authentic understanding of Jewish existence can ignore either of them.

            First of all, the call is to self-transcendence. Move beyond where and what you are into your potential, your future. But immediately the stress shifts to the particular; "go to a land that I will show you." Here the language is of a particular place, a destination for their journey. The place is unnamed. This deliberate omission points to the central requirement of faith. Abraham trusts God. This is not faith in a much later sense -- belief in what one has not experienced.16 -- but, rather, faith in the sense of taking seriously what one has experienced, in this case, the call of God. Abraham does not "believe in" God. The divine reality is hardly a matter of dispute. He "believes" God. He accepts the promise and the commission on trust.

            Nevertheless, "the land that I will show you" is a concrete, earthly destination -- a home in which to develop the society God calls Abraham’s progeny to build. This land represents all the particulars of Jewish life: peoplehood, culture, distinct religious practices and unique self-consciousness. And, of course, it points to Zion itself at the center of the Jewish hope and the Jewish reality from the first moment of our existence while our nation was as yet hidden in Abraham’s loins. The theme of particularism joins with that of universalism in the next verse. "I will make of you a great nation." Israel is to be a distinct people with distinct ways, "a people not numbered among the nations,"17 with a unique heritage and a unique destiny. This people will not be "great" in numbers, but in the greatness of its calling and its mission: to keep God’s Law, to witness to God’s reality and authority in the world, to build God’s Kingdom on earth. This understanding of Israel’s greatness leads us to the next verse which focuses exclusively on the universal. Again self-transcendence is the theme, but not as it was in the opening command, transcendence from old to new self. "In you shall all the families of the earth be blessed." Here the tran-scendence is from self to other. Abraham’s descendants are not chosen for their own sake alone. This people exists to be a blessing to all the world. Its calling is ultimately to the service of humanity. It has always been understood by Jews that the particular treasures of our religious life are knowledge of the one, true God and of the divine moral law. If we are called as witnesses it is to these truths that we must testify. That testimony is to all nations and it is accompanied by an appeal to all to adopt the universal moral code. Israel’s God is the God of all humankind.

            It has become a commonplace to observe that Judaism is not a missionary faith. This is a half-truth at best. And half-truths are often the most dangerous of lies. True, Jews do not seek to convert those of other faiths to Judaism. But Jews do witness to and labor for a moral law to which all must eventually come. Israel’s God may not require that all worship in Jewish fashion, but God does command all to live ethical lives in preparation for the Peaceable Kingdom of the future. Thus Judaism does have a spiritual and ethical mission to the peoples of the world which is an essential element of the call of Abraham, father of our faith but of others as well.

            It must be remembered that Abraham is called in response to a problem. In fact his call is the opening act to that problem’s solution.18 And while the call is to a particular individual out of whom will emerge a specific people, that people’s mission is to cultivate its own life of holiness so as to bring a message to the world at large. The problem pointed to in the pre-Abrahamic history is everyone’s problem and so the solution must be for everyone. God has chosen to create the Hebrew nation as bearer of God’s word to a world which has lost its moral moorings and, all unknowingly, drifts in desperate need of redemption. God will train Israel by means of a series of sacred-historical events to be God’s redemp-tive agent in the world. It is the concrete, "corporeal election"19 and ongoing existence of this collective individual, this first-born son of God20 that makes God real in the world. Abraham’s seed will turn its father’s leap of faith into a walk through history as finite bearer of the infinite life of God. All three elements of this conception combine to make a whole. Together they constitute the Jewish faith: God, Israel, world, a continuum of creation, election and re-demption.

            The last of these three elements implies a somewhat para-doxical view of the world. Judaism considers the world in both po-sitive and negative terms. Clearly the world, in its present state, has gone astray -- that is, human beings have gone astray. But if redemption is Judaism’s project, then the original state of the world is seen as positive as is the future state to which we seek to bring it. Both the former condition and the ultimate possibility of this earth are good. Our task is the realization of this possibility, the fulfillment of the world’s original promise as Kingdom of God. The source of sin is not the world as such but is the "evil inclination" in each human being which leads to the misuse of his or her free will.21 It is that inclination which must be overcome by the "good inclination." This will be accomplished by the day-to-day moral training of Abraham and his seed. By means of a series of historical en-counters with God they will learn of the spiritual and ethical nature of the "blessing" they are to bring to the world’s peoples.22

            The call of Abraham takes place once but it inaugurates the history of a divine-human relationship which is still unfolding. Abraham could have had little comprehension of the nature of his call or of his destiny at the beginning. Even if God had handed him a bill of particulars spelling out the terms, he could hardly have comprehended it. The covenant outlined by God contains both commission and promise, both command and ultimate assurance. But its specific terms will be revealed gradually as God and Abra-ham interact on many levels and in varying circumstances.

            In response to God’s command, the patriarch leaves his home and journeys to the land of promise. There the Lord appears to him and he builds an altar consecrating this place to God. He sojourns in Egypt, separates from his cousin Lot and wanders the length and breadth of the land.23 God gives him several promises regarding the land, that God will give it to Abraham and his seed forever.24 These promises make clear both the centrality of the land in Hebrew thought and the need for descendants to people it.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE COVENANT

            Up to this point the covenant has been presented in ex-clusively positive terms. God will make Abraham a great nation, a possessor of a goodly land, a blessing to all peoples and a father of myriad descendants. This last promise is specifically reiterated in Gen. 15:5. But just seven verses after this most comforting of pro-mises, we see for the first time what must be called the dark side of the covenant. Abraham is put into a trance, "a deep, dark dread" overwhelms him and God speaks: "know of a surety that your des-cendants . . . will be slaves in a land not their own. They will be . . . oppressed for four-hundred years."25 A terrible price must be paid for being covenanted with God. Those whom God elects God also afflicts. In fact such affliction is "of a surety." If God’s people represent a striving for righteousness in the world, then they will be the first to suffer at the hands of the enemies of righteousness.26 Has there ever been a tyrant in a land where Jews have sojourned who did not persecute Abraham’s seed? As if to affirm Israel’s claim to be God’s witness people, the opponents of God have singled out Jews for oppression and, in our own day, annihilation. "For it was not one enemy alone who rose up against us to destroy us; in every generation there are those who rise up against us and seek our destruction. But the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.27

            And so He does. The divine promises are not to the individual Israelite. Abraham receives assurances as the exemplar of a people to come. It is Israel, the collective individual, who is the redemptive agent chosen by God to build God’s Kingdom on earth. And it is to Israel as a whole that the promises are made. A thousand of Abraham’s descendants may suffer and die -- or ten thousand -- or six million. But the people is eternal. The "salvation" offered to each Jew, the chance not to avoid but to transcend suffering and death, is through his or her identity with the people of God and with the Holy One who is its creator, sustainer and redeemer. This identity does not offer an escape from suffering. In fact it makes suffering more likely, either for oneself or one’s progeny. But it offers assurance that what Israel suffers for is worth the suffering and will issue in ultimate redemption for the people and the world when the Kingdom of God shines forth undimmed. Abraham is given a prophetic vision of a tragic and glorious history. Four thousand years later it has become plain that the periodic persecution of Jews will end only when and if the world achieves some higher measure of moral health or when and if Israel abandons its witness and its mission.

            But even in the face of this terrible prophecy Abraham decides to go on -- and that means fathering a nation, having a son. In fact he will father two sons who will give rise to "a multitude of nations."28 The universal stress is clear. God is not concerned with one people only, but with many. However, the spiritual promises to which Judaism is heir are passed from Abraham to the son born to his wife Sarah. Isaac is the son by promise and the second patriarch of the Hebrew people. In chapter eighteen of Genesis, God appears to Abraham in human form accompanied by two divine messengers. God promises Abraham a son through Sarah. It will be a miracle birth since both Abraham and Sarah are old and past child-bearing age. The covenant will be carried on through Isaac. Here the stress is on Israel as a distinct nation.

THE CONSCIENCE OF GOD

            Immediately following the promise of Isaac’s birth, the Lord confides to Abraham that God is about to judge the wicked city of Sodom.29 Amazingly, and apparently to God’s surprise, Abraham challenges the Lord’s right to destroy the city. In a passage which must stand as the loftiest in the Torah, the human person actually becomes the conscience of God. "Will you indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?" The patriarch will not accept a result in which righteous and wicked fare alike. Moral distinctions must be made. "Shall not the Judge of all the world Himself do justice?" Has there ever been a more exalted image of humanity? Here Abraham risks everything -- his people’s future, his relationship with God, his very life -- to defend strangers. His one brief interaction with Sodom’s king revealed the distaste in which he held him.30 Nevertheless, he takes his stand for justice in God’s world. Abraham remembers that God is just, even if God has forgotten. In this unforgettable passage a new aspect of Israelite witness is revealed. Certainly Jews are to stand before the world and proclaim the presence of a righteous God who demands that human beings practice justice on the earth.31 But here the Jew is seen as turning about and facing God, demanding divine justice on behalf of humanity.

            This tradition of challenging God in the name of the principles that same God has taught us may well be unique to Judaism. A human being can rise no higher. This is not blasphemy but the ultimate demonstration that we have absorbed the lessons we were born to learn. In the name of divine justice to shake one’s fist in the face of divine power -- to protest the suffering of the innocent with every fiber of one’s being is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength."32

            Here is the source of the passionate social conscience so often manifest in Jewish political conduct. "Justice, justice shall you seek!"33 It is this imperative which has led Jewish communities throughout the world to act as ethical catalysts in their societies. It may well be the reason God has scattered this people abroad on the earth. For every place of human habitation needs moral wit-nesses to protest before powers human and divine in defense of the right. It is certainly why defenders of the status quo so often find Jews to be social irritants, never content to "leave well enough alone." For Abraham’s heirs, what is will never be "well enough" until society lets "justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.34 The result of Abraham’s challenge to God is a stunning victory for the patriarch’s position. At the end of a negotiation over numbers that is one of the most dramatic exchanges in world literature, God agrees that if even ten righteous are to be found in Sodom the city will be spared. One has to imagine the Holy One exasperated but profoundly pleased. The human child has confounded the divine parent.

            It is no minor element of this story that Sodom’s population is obviously not Hebrew. Lot, Abraham’s cousin, is the only resident even remotely connected to the patriarch. The message is clear; the descendants of Abraham are to emulate their forefather in assuming moral responsibility toward all people. Any interpretation of Judaism which rejects the principle of kinship with humanity is a misinterpretation. From time to time isolationist or chauvinist views are heard among the Jewish people, usually as a response to antisemitic prejudice or a result of soul-damaging persecution. Such reactions are understandable but must be rejected as inau-thentic and unacceptable. Without the element of self-tran-scendence, self-affirmation becomes stunted, bigoted and nar-cissistic. This is as true for peoples and faiths as it is for individuals. In developing concern and responsibility for others we move from a smaller to a larger sense of self, we begin to become what God would have us be.

THE ULTIMATE TEST

            In due time, the son promised to Abraham is born. And all of God’s assurances of land and posterity, which Abraham had doubted on several occasions in the past, seem en route to realization. But then, suddenly, the narrative takes an unexpected turn and all is thrown into uncertainty once again. As abruptly as the Lord called Abraham in the beginning, God calls him again and in words of the same cadence. But where once the Holy One sum-moned Abraham to new life, now God demands a death.

Take your son, your only son, Isaac whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering. (Gen. 22:2)

            Abraham is speechless. He who waxed eloquent in defense of strangers has no words with which to plead for the one he loves more than his own life. Why? Is Abraham so traumatized by the ghastly demand that he is struck dumb? Is Isaac less innocent than the hypothetical "righteous" of Sodom? Surely not. Why then the silence? Is it because he understands that self-sacrifice will, in the final extremity, be one expression of Israel’s witness to the world? This is a terrifying thought. Even to entertain it today, after the Holocaust, seems totally unacceptable. We flee from it; the ground trembles beneath our feet. And yet Israel’s history is filled with accounts of the suffering and death of God’s people "for the sanctification of the Name."

            Abraham already knows that his descendants will suffer in slavery. Now this theme is immeasurably intensified by God’s dread command. The dark side of the covenant is suddenly all Abraham can see of it. He stands before the ultimate requirement, the final test of fidelity to God’s mysterium tremendum. The awe-some power that gives life deals out death as well. There is no greater truth than this. And there is none more terrible. God’s bloody demand is heard in the first generation of an often bloody history. If the God of Israel is more than a hypothesis, if Judaism is more than a theory, it is because living, breathing, flesh and blood people who loved life and its gratifications were willing to cast it all away to endure torture and death rather than abandon the post to which God had assigned them. Jews have purchased their share in the covenant at a fearful price. "We have met the test of Isaac’s binding"35 not to justify or to mystify suffering and death but to proclaim to all peoples that fidelity to the Holy One has no limits, and that there are some things worth dying for.

            We may also consider that in demanding this of Abraham, God was, as it were, inviting humans to enter into and share the divine life itself. The prophets write of God’s suffering along with God’s people.36 Perhaps by asking Abraham to do what God must do with each of us, the Lord is revealing that suffering is an element of the divine inner life. If the giver of life and the lover of life is also the taker of life, then the Holy One must suffer at the need to deal out death to God’s children. That God must do this to make room for the next generation can hardly lessen that suffering. But perhaps sharing it can. If we are here to know God, we must know this about God too.

            But whatever else we may make of the high drama Judaism knows simply as the akedah (the binding [of Isaac]), scripture itself tells us that it was a test.37 Ultimately Isaac is spared, but only after Abraham lives through three days of agony, believing that he is to be his own son’s executioner. There is great ambiguity in all of this. Is Isaac’s life as an individual Israelite demanded, but his life as progenitor of Israel, the collective individual, spared? Given the covenant already sworn to, God cannot require the life of the people itself. If Isaac dies without issue there is no people and God becomes a liar. Jewish history reveals that, while individuals are struck down, the people endures. Here Isaac plays a double role and so the story is filled with uncertainty. But one thing is certain and that is Abraham’s readiness -- despite his horror and despair -- to obey his master’s command.

            This lesson in fidelity unto death is one that Israel must never forget, nor must Israel’s God. And so the ram’s horn is sounded at the season of penitence in every synagogue on earth. The ram which, at God’s command, Abraham sacrificed instead of Isaac, reminds both Israel and God of what occurred. We sound the ram’s horn to call the people to repentance, to remind them of their su-preme duty to their God as represented by Abraham’s obedience. But we also do it to call God to remembrance of Abraham’s willing-ness to sacrifice that which to him was dearer than life, and to accept the penitential prayers of the patriarch’s descendants. We pray that our God will pardon us, not for our sake, but for the sake of our father Abraham and of Isaac in whose stead the ram was slain.

            Abraham’s faithfulness, his willingness to give up everything for God, to hold nothing back, raises the divine-human covenant to another intensity. God must respond.

By myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, that in blessing I will bless you and in multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is on the sea-shore . . . and in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed (Gen. 22:16-18).

The words can hardly contain the divine emotion. The blessings come pouring forth in a linguistic profusion new to the narrative. In these promises God holds nothing back, even as Abraham had not. All doubt, all uncertainty between the parties to the covenant have vanished. Now God knows how much Abraham loves God; Abra-ham knows how much God loves him. And they are united in the infinite love they share for Isaac and his seed to come. This is the high plateau of Abraham’s life. Here he stands side by side with his God atop the mount of vision38 and sees through the future millennia of his people’s story as they strive to bring blessing to all the nations of the earth.

CONCLUSIONS

            The story has begun well. The initial problem has been met with at least the beginnings of a solution. The people born of Abra-ham will come to see history as an extended course of instruction, filled with lessons and tests by which God seeks to educate them for their redemptive work. In this narrative Jews find the meaning and purpose of their lives. They seek not so much to lift earthlings up to heaven, as to bring heaven down to earth, to transfigure the world through the knowledge of God and of God’s universal moral law. This is task enough for any people and the nation chosen for it is privileged indeed.

            But the text tells us that Abraham is the father of many peoples, not just one.39 The original reference of this passage is to the other Middle-Eastern peoples, Abraham’s offspring through Ishmael, his first-born. But today, in an age of interfaith rapproche-ment, we can find a larger meaning in this text. Abraham’s fathering of many may be seen in spiritual as well as ethnic terms. In Christianity and in Islam we see the expansion of the covenant between God and Abraham’s seed beyond the limits of the people Israel. In these two faiths God has broken open the terms of the original covenant to include the Gentile nations.40 Today three Abrahamic faiths strive to bring humanity to sanctification. God’s plan of redemption is a comprehensive one. It requires the labors not only of those who were the first to receive the divine call, but of those who have heard it since. God is one; God’s servants are many. The task is great and there is work enough for all.

NOTES

            1. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984), p. 35.

            2. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), p. 159.

            3. Philo, On The Creation, L: 154 in Philo, Volume I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 115. "[Adam] endeavored to please the Father and King . . . to be fully conformed to God. . . ."

            4. Gen. 4:8.

            5. Gen. 4:23.

            6. Gen. 6:5.

            7. Gen. 6:6-8.

            8. Gen 7:11.

            9. Gen. 8:20-21.

            10. Mal. 3:6.

            11. Gen. 6:9.

            12. The so-called Noahide laws first appear in the Tosefta, a Jewish commentary of the second century C.E.

            13. Gen. 9:20-22.

            14. God had commanded them to "fill the earth" after the flood. Instead they huddled together, apparently in fear (of another flood, perhaps?)

            15. Gen. 11:1-9.

            16. John 20:29.

            17. Nu. 23:9.

            18. Genesis Rabbah (fourth century Jewish midrashic commentary on Genesis) 19:17. ". . . God’s presence leapt upward from the earth on account of the events in the garden. . . . But, as a counterpart, there were seven righteous men who rose up: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Levi, Kahath, Amram, and Moses. They brought the Presence of God [by stages] down to earth." Here the history of Israel is seen as the solution to the problem of Eden.

            19. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (Minneapolis: The Seabury Press, 1983), pp. 175-177.

            20. Ex. 4:22.

            21. See Genesis Rabbah 9:7 and Tractate Berachot 61 d. for discussion of the good and evil inclinations (impulses).

            22. Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Book One: Know-ledge: Laws Concerning Idolatry and the Heathens, Chapter 1:2. "[Abraham] began to proclaim to the whole world . . . that the entire universe had but one Creator and that Him it was right to worship."

            23. Gen. 12:4-13:18.

            24. Gen 13:15.

            25. Gen 15:13.

            26. Frans Josef van Beeck, S. J., Loving the Torah More Than God? (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1989), pp. 17-18.

            27. Nathan Goldberg, Passover Haggadah (Hoboken: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1993), p. 12.

            28. Gen. 17:4.

            29. Gen. 18:16-33.

            30. Gen. 14:2-24.

            31. Op. cit., van Beeck, p. 21.

            32. Deut. 6:5.

            33. Deut. 16:20.

            34. Amos. 5:24.

            35. Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence In History (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 67-104. Fackenheim may be correct in his view that the Holocaust has altered forever the terms of Jewish witness through suffering. For the paradox inherent in that witness is that only a Jewish people which is present in and to the world can witness for God either through triumph or affliction. The aim of the ghastly and diabolical Nazi program was to remove from the earth every Jewish man, woman and child, and thus render moot forever the vexing conundrum of Jewish suffering. Since it is meaning which adds the crucial redemptive dimension to suffering, the Nazis sought to rob both Jewish life and death of all meaning by hunting down and murdering every Jew, religious and nonreligious, be-liever and atheist alike. By shifting the terms of the definition from confessional to ‘racial,’ the murderers sought to kill Israel’s essential tie to its God, to destroy the soul before dispatching the body. But, this loathsome project was ultimately doomed to failure. For every Jew is a Jew for religious reasons, whether or not he or she acknowledges this truth. Every Jew, pious or secular from his or her human point of view, is from God’s point of view a Jew because the Holy One called him when He called his ancestors at Sinai. In suffering and death, as in life, every Jew witnesses, willingly or unwillingly, to that call with every breath and every step he or she takes. No Nazi scheme could undo the eternal cords which bind God’s people to their source, their ground, their destiny. Those cords, not made with hands, are woven of a substance more enduring than the worldly mind can comprehend.

            But if the Nazis attempted what was and is impossible ‘for as long as the heavens remain over the earth,’ still the attempt was made to sweep from the world the witness people of God, to silence the divine voice as it had been heard in human history for four millennia, and thus to eliminate from the earth the moral conscious which renders life human. Did this change in a fundamental fashion the call of Israel, a call which has in the past included the summons to redemptive suffering? It may be. If the aim of the Nazis was total genocide, then today it is Jewish life, not Jewish death which wit-nesses to the divine presence in the world. We must not cooperate with Nazi aims by yielding up additional Jewish lives. God’s pur-poses calls for the survival of the remnant of God’s witness people, their fecundity, their flourishing in Israel and around the world. A holy calling either to an individual or to a people to proclaim the divine presence can be a summons to life as well as to suffering and death. That is our call today as the behavior and the very existence of the reborn Israelite State proclaims. Masada will not fall again, Auschwitz is over and done and God’s Kingdom will be established in a future built by God’s people redeemed from the ashes for the great work of life to which the Holy One has called us.

            36. Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, ed. Jules Harlow (New York, the Rabbinical Assembly, 1972), p. 561.

            37. Jer. 4:19, Hosea 6:4-10, 9:10, 11:1-4, 11:8-9, 14:1-8.

            38. Gen. 22:1.

            39. Gen 22:14.

            40. Gen. 17:5.