Lech Lecha

"Avram avinu, padre querido, padre bendicho, luz de' Israel ..."

Thus goes a Ladino (Spanish Jewry) song about Abraham, which either by coincidence or design contains an interesting cross-language reference illustrating Abraham's importance to Jews everywhere.

"Avram avinu" is the classic Hebrew designation of Abraham as our father. This is followed by Ladino words "padre querido," (cherished father), "padre bendicho" (blessed father), "luz de israel" (the light of Israel).

Abraham, of course, is the first of our three Fathers, along with his son and grandson, Isaac and Jacob (Israel). They belong with our Mothers, Sarah, Rivka, Rachel and Leah.

The heritage of each Jew is that we all have a connection to the Torah not only as individuals but as family. The genius of the Torah is that there can be no such thing as a Jewish orphan. We all have a connection to the founders of our faith; we can always open the Torah and commune with them; our First Parents are always there, day in, day out, year in, year out, always ready to teach us something new from the pages of the Torah. We can visit anytime, and they will gladly receive us.

Our father Abraham, who started it all is, according to the song, "the light of Israel," and rightly so, for it was Abraham who brought G-d back into the world.

Humanity is a curious species. Even after the lessons of the generations of the Flood and the Dispersal, knowledge of G-d diminished from generation to generation after Noach, and idol worship rose to prominence.

Briefly, the deal with idol worship is as follows: initially, there was knowledge of G-d. Then, people started "dealing directly" with the powers that G-d had created, i.e. worshipping the sun and the moon and the stars -- all of which had spiritual power endowed within them by their Creator.

Apparently, people were satisfied with the results they got from worshipping these powers, as well as occult powers they developed to perform magic ("powers of Tuma"), and started to forget the Maker of it all.

Now, if you worship the sun, and it happens to be cloudy, what can you do? Why you can make a statue which symbolizes the sun, and worship that. Then the clouds will never get in the way, and you can still have the right "kavanah" (proper intent) to reach the sun with your prayers.

After a time of worshipping the statue of the sun , the statue itself, by necessity, acquires an aura of holiness, being the object of fervent prayers, and before you know it, you're -- G-d forbid -- bowing down, and talking to idols as if they were real gods themselves. Forgotten even is the power the idol was made to represent.

At it's lowest form, what started out as, at the very least, an exercise in appeasing real forces in the metaphysical universe, becomes a very silly practice of believing in sticks and stones -- which Hashem makes fun of as not speaking, eating, smelling etc in Parsha Va-Etchanan, and, as will be discussed here later, which is echoed in the prayer Hallel, quoting Psalms.

Abraham, as a boy, had the good fortune to be the son of Terach, the king's idolmaker. When his father was in the shop making the idols, Abraham saw their origin, and viewed them as ornamental furniture. Having seen their beginnings, he wondered why people were bowing down to them. Who bows to furniture?

Unfortunately, it's not such a cut and dried issue, as we see how Jews themselves worshipped idols generations later in the land of Israel notwithstanding the Torah's warnings against this practice.

So, how can it be? How could supposedly intelligent people worship man-made objects? The Ur of the Chaldees, where Abraham grew up was not a primitive backwater. It was the pre-eminent civilization of its day. These were smart people.

In Hallel, the Jewish prayer of praise to G-d on special holy days, there is a verse from Tehillim (Psalm 115) which echoes the actual word of G-d in Deuteronomy, making fun of idols, "They have mouths and cannot speak, eyes and cannot see, ears and cannot hear, noses and cannot smell, hands and cannot feel, legs and cannot walk, and they cannot make a sound from their throats, ..." i.e. they are inanimate, and therefore, incapable of responding to prayer, so why should anyone pray to them?

There are answers, some of which we can understand, and some which we are given to know but cannot understand. For instance, I'm still waiting to figure out what G-d means when He says in Deuteronomy that when we are exiled to foreign lands and find these mute, inanimate objects of worship, we will cry out to Hashem and we fill find him.

The answers we can understand are that, yes, man-made objects do not become animate and talk to us (unless we're talking about divining objects like Lavan's teraphim which we will read about in an upcoming parsha) but, then again, when you think about it, G-d Himself does not talk to us either, these days.

Only great prophets can lay claim to being spoken to directly by G-d. Only men endowed with "ruach hakodesh" or the holy spirit, can prophesy. When Eldad and Medad ran through the camp of the Israelites in the desert prophesying, they were reported to Moses as if they were doing something wrong. Moses' reply was "if only everyone in Israel could prophesy."

The truth is, if you look at prayer to G-d, versus prayer to idols, you would be hard-pressed to see a difference in the results on a daily basis. Both are acts of faith, and as we know, G-d does not grant us directly all we ask, and does not communicate His plans to us, i.e. G-d can also be seen as silent. It is only in a showdown like the prophet Elijah had with the prophets of Baal, that we find a clearly drawn distinction.

But such one-offs fade in the memory of people who in their frailty require continuing hope in their lives. One powerful attraction of worshipping idols was that at least you could see what you were praying to, unlike G-d who is not visible. Once you had that concrete object in front of you to focus on, you could direct your prayers in an organized way, hoping they would enter through the portal of the idol into the realm of spiritual causation.

That there were unholy magical powers is demonstrated by the ability of Pharaoh's sorcerers to duplicate some of the miracles performed by Moses, including perhaps the dumbest act of all, doubling the number of frogs in Egypt just to show they could do it. There are a rare few instances in the Torah where one can actually hear G-d laughing from behind the matter-of-fact words of the text. This is one of them. The Torah seems to say, incredulously, "and they went ahead and filled Egypt with another multitude of frogs," as if it were saying, "I kid you not; they actually did this." One can imagine the Egyptian sorcerers saying to themselves, "Man, that's a lot of frogs to inflict on ourselves and, boy, do all those dead frogs stink! Especially when there's twice the original number But, hey, we showed 'em!" Sorcerers, yes; rocket scientists, no.

But maybe they did learn from their experience. The very next plague, instead of duplicating it, they tried to undo it -- without success, of course. This last statement is a chidush of mine. Most commentaries read the passuk (sentence) as saying "they tried to bring out lice from the land [just as Aharon and Moses did]. I, however, in light of my view that G-d shows His incredulity that the sorcerers of Egypt should be such dummies as to double the punishment of frogs on themselves, allows them to show some brains after all, i.e instead of trying to duplicate the plague of lice, they try to "lehotzi," to get them out of the land. It's definitely not the conventional view, but I'm not a conventional person.

So, idol worship was really not just bowing to furniture. There was something to it. The inanimate objects may well have been portals to "powers of tuma," and may have yielded results on occasion despite the fact they couldn't see, hear, smell, feel, walk or talk in the physical plane.

And, the act of worshipping itself can be self-validating, i.e. the more one puts into worshipping an object, the more one believes in it because one can feel one's focus increasing and deepening with practice. It is this feeling of depth which may provide incentive to continue the practice. "Mitzvah goreret mitzvah, aveirah goreret aveira," doing a mitzvah, a commandment from G-d, leads you to do another mitzvah, committing a sin leads you to commit another sin."

And, for the part we don't really understand, our sages tell us that up until the time of the Men of the Great Assembly at the time of Ezra and the early part of the second Temple , there was a special "yetzer," or desire, to worship idols embedded in the hearts of people. We are told that, mysteriously, this was taken away, never to return, at this point in our history.

Which means two things. Firstly, it means we cannot feel superior to those who worshipped idols because we don't have the same spiritual makeup they did. We do not have the yearning to worship idols inside of us, so who are we to cast aspersion on people who were fundamentally different, whose drives we can't possibly understand?

Secondly, it points to the greatness of Abraham. If we understand that idol worship was not just a naive error on the part of primitive people but a response to a real part of human nature which no longer exists, we must have a deeper appreciation of what he was up against, and how much he stood out from the world of his day.

Idols were also a big business in those days. In addition to being objects of worship, they were status symbols (or should I say "statue symbols?). The bigger the better. The gold and silver ones inside the house, the wooden ones outside.

Abraham is our First Father of Judaism because in a time when the whole world as he knew it was worshipping idols, he managed to re-discover G-d, the Master of the Universe. His being the son of an idol maker may have helped but the truth is Abraham had a great soul and was a genius of the spirit the way a great scientist who discovers something is a genius of science. Everyone else saw the same world that he did but only he was able to deduce and connect to the Ribono Shel Olam. There are different stories as to what his age was when he "hikir at boro," or "recognized his Creator," but at any age this is an awesome thing, and it's something that we struggle with each and every day.

Every day when we awaken, we are asked to remember who gave us life, and all day long we are challenged to remember G-d. Abraham set the bar for this. He set it very high.

The word in the Ladino song, "luz," means "light." However, by a strange coincidence, it also is a Hebrew word. And what does it mean?

When Mashiach comes, and it's time for "t"chias hametim," the resurrection of the dead, G-d will reconstruct bodies for us from our resting places.

There are some who doubt this. OK. It's a free country. We can believe what we want. Nevertheless, the reason people doubt the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is often due to what I call "human hubris." Human hubris is the idea that humanity is the ultimate arbiter of things, as when doubters might say, "Resurrection of the dead from the graves? Impossible! I can't see how that could ever happen."

The hubris in the above attitude is in the "I", i.e., "I know everything there is to know. If I can't see it happening, it can't happen." Anyone who thinks they know it all, especially at this stage of human knowledge when we still haven't found a cure for the common cold (I take tons of vitamin D every day and have checked my blood level with my doctor to make sure it doesn't reach the toxic level. This is supposed to make my immune system more alert and ready to fight invading organisms. Fingers crossed ...) is dreaming.

G-d, of course, doesn't limit himself to humans' capabilities. And, according to our sages, G-d doesn't even need much of the body at all in order to reconstruct it. In fact, all G-d needs is the "luz," which, in Hebrew, means the tailbone. Under ordinary environmental circumstances, it will survive virtually anything, and will be there for G-d to work with when the time comes.

Interestingly, the Generation of the Flood will not be resurrected. This is because G-d made the waters of the Flood so extremely hot, beyond any normal Earth temperature, that even the people's tailbones were melted. This could be the reason cremation is forbidden to Jews. The extreme heat of cremation melts even the tailbone, depriving the possibility of resurrection to that person.

When we consider the double meaning of the word "luz," we can see how appropriate this is in the abovementioned Ladino song extolling Abraham. For not only is Abraham the light of Israel as the bringer of knowledge of G-d but he is also the irreducible cornerstone of the Jewish faith, who, according ot tradition, even survived a fiery furnace himself. In a metaphorical sense, Abraham found the luz of faith in G-d when there was almost nothing left of it in the world, and, resurrected knowledge of G-d for us, and the world at large. Perhaps this is how we, the descendants of Abraham, came to merit resurrection, "mida k'nedgged mida", quid pro quo.