Lech Lecha

Abraham

Abraham is presented as the archetype of the person of faith: God commands and Abraham obeys…It is significant that God’s first recorded approach to Abraham is a command. What was the nature of Abraham’s faith which led him to obey that command? In our everyday conversation we distinguish between the expressions “believe in” and “believe that.” This is a distinction with a difference, and one that teaches us important things about Judaism…To say of a person that she believes that something is the case is to say that she affirms the truth of a proposition…It is a cognitive claim about what a person holds to be true. To say that a person believes in something on the other hand, certainly has cognitive implications, but goes beyond affirmation or denial. Such a statement involves the relationship of the believer to that believed in, a relationship usually taken to be one of trust…It is Abraham’s response to God’s promise (Gen15:1-6) that spells (out the nature of Jewish belief).

Menachem Kellner (Contemporary)

There are moments when we feel that we can soar above the heavens, that there are no limits to our desire for experience. These are moments of joy and love when we feel a sense of adequacy and power. They correspond to the experience of God in the abundance of being, in the overflow and majesty of reality. But there are also moments of tragedy and defeat and suffering, when we experience God as Someone very intimate and close, constricted within the narrow confines of human existential despair. We then encounter “not magestas Dei but humilitas Dei.”..Man must not always be the victor. From time to time triumph should turn into defeat. Man, in Judaism, was created for both victory and for defeat – he is both king and saint. He must know how to fight for victory and also how to suffer defeat.

Joseph Soloveitchik (20^th Century)

These two experiences also create two ethical-normative frameworks of orientation to life. There is the ethic of victory, which calls upon human beings to subject nature to human needs, to build a true and just society and an equitable economic order, to become partners with God in the creation of an ordered and just world. There is, however, in Judaism also an ethic of defeat, which the “victory minded and success-oriented” Western philosophical tradition cannot comprehend…Not only God’s creative activity, therefore, but also His self-contraction and withdrawal become an ethical example for the Jew to follow.

David Hartman (Contemporary)

There can be little doubt that the foundation of biblical religion is indeed the encounter between God and man. The God whom Adam and Eve knew was the one who spoke to them in the Garden of Eden. The history of the patriarchs begins with God’s call to Abraham. The revelation at Sinai is the manifestation of an actual relation between God and the people.

Eliezer Berkovits (20^th Century)

There are two ways of acquiring absolute faith. The easy way is study of the Torah, a method granted to the Jewish people. The other way is via intellectual analysis, the only method available to man prior to the revelation at Mount Sinai. This method does not only require the determination of the truth seeker, but active help from God Himself. Those who in their search for understanding of this truth also employ all their intellectual faculties, arrive at a far deeper and lasting understanding…Abraham’s tremendous achievement was that though he did not have the tradition of a Noach since both his father and grandfather had been pagans, he began to develop this faith through an intellectual approach. At first, he concentrated on demonstrating the complete bankruptcy of the belief held by his contemporaries. Afterwards, having traveled as far as it is possible to travel by means of one’s intellect alone, with the help of God’s Personal Providence, he arrived at that level of faith in his Creator which the Torah describes as “he believed in the Lord, and the Latter gave him credit for this.”

Yitzchak Arama (15^th Century)

I cannot resist telling of a certain person in our midst, of a very high intellectual and moral caliber, who is also immersed in Judaism, who said that after Auschwitz he lost his faith in God. My response is this: you never believed in God but in God’s help, and that faith was disillusioned – God did not help. One who believes in God, however, does not relate this to belief in God’s help; nor does he expect that God will help him. He believes in God in terms of His godhead, not in terms of the functions that he attributes to Him concerning His dealing with man…That is the significance of Abraham…God appears to Abraham, not as He who protects him and not as He who rewards him, but as He who makes the most difficult and exacting of demands, a demand that he is unable to fulfill unless he nullifies all human needs, interests and values – nullifying them in order to serve God.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (20^th Century)