Weekly D'var Torah

In the opening stories of Genesis, we are taken to two failed worlds: the world of the Flood and the World of the Tower.

The ten generations before the flood began as generations established in love. Love is about sharing, removing boundaries, becoming one. A world of love sounds great- but when there are no boundaries, everything begins to lose its identity and to melt into undifferentiated chaos.  Like amoebas absorbing each other until just one mass of swollen protoplasm remains and then dies and rots, a homogenous world of sameness, of “intersectionality” where everything is everything and everyone is everyone annihilates itself and melts back into the void.  The world returns to the unformed selfless abyss.  It is a horizontal world where nothing remains like seawater eating away at a shipwreck until only the water is left.

After the flood, there arose the world of the Tower of Babel, where human unity became fragmented into languages and divisions.

The Tower world was based not on borderless love but on hierarchical justice, a world of strict limits.  What’s mine is mine and what’s yours and yours without mixing or sharing.  Everything is defined and limited, a crystalline world without the possibility of growth or change.  A world of echo chambers where everyone is entrapped on their “floor”- their level.  The goal is to acquire a Name- a monument to the swollen ego.

Eventually, communication and sharing became impossible and again, the world could not endure.   The tower freezes into a stone stalagmite; like the world of social media where everyone speaks their own language and the only exchange is either slavish agreement or insults and belittling.  

The failed horizontal world of the Flood and the failed vertical world of the Tower are the two poles.  The Flood generation becomes mob rule where only the group matters, where people stop being people and become the many-headed mob filled with violence and rage.  

The Tower generation becomes facism where the individual and only the individual matters and caste or class or clan or a claim of supremacy enslaves the mind and civilization becomes divided into the god-kings, emperors and Pharaohs and the enslaved.

Into these two horrific options of the Flood of Love that drowns the spirit or the Tower of Justice that enslaves it comes one man: Abraham the Hebrew.

We think of Abraham as the man of both love and justice, or rather the discovery of the G-d of both love and justice; Abraham smashing the idols of the god-kings, Abraham rejecting the suffocation of sameness and insisting on being different.  

But Abraham is no philosopher or idealogue.  He’s a brother to Nachor and Haran, the son of Terach.  In the world of the Tower builders one thing and one thing alone matters: to acquire a Name, continuity, fame, profit, greatness.

The youngest brother of Abraham, Haran, dies.  He leaves behind a son, Lot and a daughter, Yiska.  

In the world of the tower builders and the flood, there is no redemption for the orphan.  In the world of the flood, the lost are absorbed and in the world of the tower, they are bought and sold.  In both worlds, their fate is abandonment and slavery.  

But Abraham does something different.  He rejects the preoccupation with self and takes Lot and Yiska not to grow his own Name but to perpetuate the legacy of his dead brother, Haran.

Instead of caring about his legacy, his achievement, he cares about the poor orphans, all that is left of Haran.  

Lot creates his own line and family from Haran.  And Yiska- whose name means princess; in Hebrew the name translates as Sarai.  Abraham marries her to save the last legacy of Haran.

It might seem strange or even wrong for us to think of an uncle marrying his niece, but actually, it was a common practice in ancient times, especially when preserving the family.

That is what Abraham does differently.  Not of the Flood of Love and not of the Tower of Justice, the two failed worlds of Genesis but of something new: concern for the other, willingness to forego the will to pleasure and the will to power and embrace another will: the will to doing the right thing, the realization that love and justice, Chesed and Din as we call them, are combined in the One.

And G-d, who has been waiting bereft and abandoned sees this man whose kindness and sense of justice reaches out to his broken family and turns tragedy into redemption, says, “this guy I can work with.”  

This is the ultimate mark of Jewish identity: to care for each other, for our fellow Jew and for our fellow person.  This is the beginning of the Jewish story, the Abraham Revolution.