The Three Patriarchs: Mirrors of Our Own Lives

The repetition of the parashiyot (the weekly Torah portions) corresponds to a renewed look at the history of man as Israel, and of Israel within the family of nations. The Torah has presented us with the history of the Patriarchs: these are individuals who, by their lives, left their mark on an important stretch of history whose repercussions remain, in the long run, burningly relevant. That is to say, the story of Avraham did not happen just once; it is reenacted, it is reread from era to era, from century to century. So too the story of Yitzchak, the story of Yaakov, of Yosef. The whole book of Bereshit is called Sefer HaYashar, the Book of the Upright — but in truth it should be understood as the mirror of history: not only of the Jewish people, but of all humanity. For what are we, in reality, in the history of humanity? We are Avraham, we are Yitzchak, we are Yaakov, we are Yosef, we are the Shevatim (the tribes) — and no more than that. And yet it seems as though the whole history of humanity revolves around our own reality, and one wonders: are we ourselves, in the end, aware of this part we play in history, or is it imposed upon us, in a way that goes beyond the bounds of any voluntary commitment to that history? This is why the whole journey of the Patriarchs within humanity, in its first faltering steps, speaks to us so directly. At times we have the impression that we are the actors of this history; yet in the end there are events that truly lie beyond our grasp, independent of our will, events that draw us, despite ourselves, into a history we did not want. But precisely because it was imposed upon us, we have been obliged to take our own responsibility within it and to claim it with sovereignty.

Let me explain. We are now analyzing the chapter of the war — the first war after two thousand years of human history, the first war in which Avraham is involved. In reality, it is not he who starts the war; it is not he who mobilizes his followers, his disciples and soldiers, to wage war against the other nations. No — it is the nations that contend for a monopoly over the history of humanity, those who truly wish to impose a course on that history according to their ideology, their outlook, their beliefs; and Avraham is drawn in only indirectly. Of course, Avraham had resolved to follow his faith to the very end and not to bend his back before the current then emerging within humanity — a current whose whole aim was to isolate spiritual life from material life, from national life, from economic life, and to bring about a migdal ve-ir, a tower and a city, governed not at all by any outside force but entirely the work of man. This is a constant in the history of humanity: nations that vie for empire and seek to stamp their history with their own way of seeing things, independently of any religious belief. One must not mix, they say; religion and state must be separated. And who is the author, the leader of this ideology? It is Nimrod. Nimrod — as his name indicates — is aware that there is a Creator of this world; that the world, as it was conceived, answers to a consciousness, to a supreme and universal consciousness. But it is not that consciousness, in his view, which should hold the keys to the history of humanity.

Man, he holds, must take his destiny in hand and forge it himself. These are notions still with us today: must religion truly be separated from the state? Is it possible? It might really have been possible, were there not events that outrun our forecasts and at times foil all our plans. And when it comes to wars — to the war of the kings — it seems as though the Holy One, blessed be He, were pulling the strings on one side and on the other. And we stand in the middle of this situation. In this race for power, for kingship, for control over the destiny of humanity, the sovereignty of the Creator of the universe ought to be recognized. That is malchut shamayim, the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is the one that draws the whole project of creation, as it was conceived, back toward itself — but which has left in the hands of man the power to choose: to be the partner of the Kingdom of Heaven, or to be its challenger, the one who contests the Kingdom of Heaven.

That is why I say that Nimrod, who had manipulated the whole society of his time, was aware of this divine presence that governs the world — and yet, for all that, he claims a power that is not his own. You see, there is no confirmed kingship unless there is a choice by the people, unless there is free will. Free will, then, is the ability to contest the kingdom of G-d — a kingdom that G-d has left in the hands of man. Nimrod knew how to exploit this. For that purpose he made use of the first garment made for man — the garment G-d made for man after the sin of Adam: kotnot ‘or, garments of skin. It is an opaque tunic, a tunic that created, as it were, a screen between man, the creature of G-d, and his Creator — but which was meant to reach a certain transparency, to become kotnot or, garments of light, as Rabbi Meir taught.

This screen was to be worked until it became as transparent as a rakia, as the sky. But man, unfortunately, uses his free will above all to assert himself — before himself, before society, and still more before Him. He knows full well that he is incapable of managing everything; he knows there are black holes in his own life; he knows his limits — and yet he asserts himself all the same. But take note: this is not only a matter between the Jewish people and the nations; it is a matter within the people of Israel itself. Listen to what […] says when he discusses the war waged by Avraham against the four kings — a war which, as we have seen, would have a messianic character. Why? Because it confronts us with Babel, which condemns us to exile.

We are to have no right to a land. Then we must face Persia — the Iran of that time — which does not recognize our existence at all and wants to remove us entirely from the stage of history, physically: this is the story of Haman, the story of Amalek. And then you have Yavan. We have left traces in this history, we have brought something to it on which they feed — yet the root must be cut out. That is the case of Yavan, the case of Greece. And finally Edom, which is the sum of them all: it is Edom that denies us the right to a land, the right to our existence as Jews, as descendants of Avraham; it attacks and contests our heritage, and seeks to substitute something else for it.

Now tell me: are these three currents not found, to some degree, even within the constituted body of the Jewish people? There are those for whom, in the end, the idea of a national homeland is incidental — this is nothing less than an apology for exile, for life in Egypt. Then affirming oneself as a Jew has also become something one should perhaps try to erase and replace with a nationality pure and simple. And as for the history of the Jewish people — what it has given, its legacy, its heritage — sadly, there are many people who have no interest in it. Here the Likutei Moharan says something wonderful. It says: you know, the four sons of the Passover Haggadah are these four kings who fight against Avraham.

Yitzchak is the wise son; Yishmael is the wicked son; the simple son is Yaakov. You find them even in the four-fold patterns of the festivals, for in each great festival there are these fours: on Passover, the four cups of the Haggadah, the four movements of liberation; on Shavuot, the four levels of reading and interpreting the Torah — you may adopt the literal meaning, and there is also allusion, and mysticism; and on Sukkot you have the four species, which represent the four tendencies within society itself. What this means is that the messianism which is, in a sense, the object of this war is a war within the Jewish people as well as outside it — within the ranks of Avraham’s disciples, as among those who broke away from him, like Lot.

So the question arises: what war is this? Here, four kings wage war against the other kings, seeking to subjugate them. But these four kings in themselves form a league around — or rather against — the very existence of Avraham as such. But Avraham is be-hibar’am: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth be-hibar’am” (Genesis 2:4). What does be-hibar’am mean? It is the story of heaven and earth — be-hibar’am, “when they were created”? No: be-hibar’am, in creating themselves, in their self-creation. Avraham is someone who re-creates himself, who remakes himself. He is cast into the fiery furnace; he can come back to life, rise again from his ashes, and once more make history. For the power he holds does not lie in weapons, in the drawn sword, the cherev.

It is not the sword. It is on the level of speech, on the level of language. The generation of the Tower of Babel wanted to build a city and a tower. The city, it has been said, is the Ir David, the City of David. And the migdal — the tower — take note: it is the Sanctuary, which establishes the junction between heaven and earth, between spirit and body, between shamayim va-aretz. It is what makes possible, as it were, this passage […], so that the body is one with all four of its components. Four components: nefesh, ruach, neshamah — and then chayah and yechidah, which are something that goes beyond. But if we let these four levels function separately, the result is catastrophe.

Then there is no longer that river which rises at the summit of Eden and divides into four heads; there is no longer that stream issuing from Eden; there is no longer that light which… One must be able to gather things together in a single impulse, in a single movement of thought, and bring about their unity. And we do not do so. And that is the problem of Lot. Of course, we ourselves run the risk of becoming a false identity of Avraham; Lot is a false identity of Avraham: he resembles him, but he has already drawn limits, separations. And this, too, is an isolation one can create on several levels — in our way of living, in our way of conducting ourselves.

When we confine ourselves to one aspect of things and forget to see everything as a whole, in its unity, then the nations can attack it. For what is Christianity? It is an aspect amputated from the body of Jewish thought. The same holds for each of the religions: it means taking one current of Judaism itself and placing a particular emphasis on it that relegates everything else to second rank. That is a messianic miscarriage — for messianism unfolds in different stages, on the personal level and on the collective level. Enough of thinking about a messiah who will come from outside! The Messiah — we bring him ourselves; we make him come. But to make him come, one must learn to use a language […].

Even when ha-yadayim yedei Esav, when the hands are the hands of Esav, it must be ha-kol kol Yaakov (Genesis 27:22) — the voice must be the voice of Yaakov: the voice of study, the voice of prayer, the voice of communication among all the components, so that a shirah, a song, rises from the whole. That is the messianism of the Jewish people. It is not a reduction of all forces or all currents to a single current; it is the vassalage of all ideologies, of all schools of thought, to malchut shamayim, the sovereignty of Heaven, the sovereignty of G-d. This is what characterizes the one and only war waged by Avram: to free the hostages, the hostages taken by the other nations.

We are held hostage not only physically; we are held hostage intellectually, we are held hostage spiritually. We ourselves no longer manage to reassemble all the rest, because we have lost the ability to communicate with all those who were once one body with us and who, little by little, drew away — so far away that they reached Sodom. Lot’s choice of Sodom was no accident. For Sodom stands for justice: it wants every person to realize himself by his own efforts and to develop his own faculties, without living in dependence on anyone else. If someone wishes to live on charity, there is no place for him there.

At all costs one must work and live from the fruit of one’s labor — that is Sodom. But if one insists on pushing this reasoning to its end, one will find oneself facing its imperatives: at a certain moment we lose our capacity to work, we lose our capacity to provide for our own life. Not everyone has the same abilities, and everyone wants to secure his future. Each will always depend either on society or on his own children — and so [love] must enter into the world, into justice. But the justice of Sodom is also a shevi, a captivity; it too holds people hostage. For we consider… But if Avraham intercedes for Sodom, does he consider Sodom defensible?

There may be tzaddikim, righteous people, in Sodom — there may indeed be righteous people there. Well, provided that windows are opened here and there. But when one shuts one’s eyes and refuses to move, then one ends up at the opposite extreme of love — and the opposite extreme of love is incestuous love, which indeed leads Lot’s daughters to seek to bear children by their father, in a state of half-consciousness or total unconsciousness. And that is precisely where, each time, messianism loses its own substance: for want of having been able to reassemble the whole and to wage the struggle for its reassembly. This too is something the Holy One, blessed be He, imposed upon him: Avraham finds himself in this war despite himself; it is the kings who are fighting one another — yet in the end he becomes the principal actor.

The principal actor, because nothing that happens in the world is foreign to the destiny of the Jewish people. This we must get firmly into our heads: we are directly and indirectly bound up with every turn of humanity’s future. To confine oneself to silence, to want to withdraw behind borders that are purely national, or purely spiritual, or purely intellectual, is to condemn the Jewish people to permanent persecution, in an exile that passes from one stage to the next and forces each new generation to resize itself, to re-create itself […]. This is the theme of this chapter fifteen, where, in the end, from the battle that was fought there is nothing to expect. Nothing to expect. They want to give Avraham gifts, they want to give him recognition — and Avraham says no. Admittedly, this cannot be demanded of everyone. What do people want? There are those who use faith to improve their situation, to meet this need or that one. That may be a favor requested; it cannot ground a reality of its own.

He gave — G-d gave, and gave, and gave: He gave a world, He gave a Garden of Eden, as a father gives, ready to give everything for his child. The world is founded on giving — kindness on every level — with nothing in return. Hence: “Not a thread nor a shoelace” (Genesis 14:23). Avraham lifts his hand to “G-d Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:22) […] — he wants nothing of it. People have asked who gave: was it the son of Shem who gave to Avraham? There are commentators who say no — it was Avraham who gave. And if Avraham gave, he did not do so to assert himself further over others. No: above all it was to serve the sovereignty — malchut shamayim, the sovereignty of G-d. It was so that “he called in the name of Hashem” (Genesis 12:8): to teach people, the world, to claim the name of G-d, to claim His presence, to bind it to the destiny of His creation. And that is the messianism at issue in this chapter, which we try to trace at every point […] — which always presents the same characteristics, but at different levels. In that era […]; and so the promise is made that a safah berurah, a clear language, will be given to the nations — one that eases communication — “that they may all call upon the name of Hashem” (Zephaniah 3:9), so that all may call by the same name, upon the kingdom of G-d. I will stop here, if you have any questions to ask.