Shabbat Vayera
Written by Rabbi Dr Michael Shire Friday, 14 November 2008
“Can one man really change the world?” the young senator from Illinois was asked. He was comparatively unknown and he had only served one term in the Senate. He had defeated nominees far more experienced and renowned in his run for the Presidency. But his great oratory and ability to sense the mood of the times had won hearts and minds to his great cause for change. His memorable inauguration speech gave his intention to do just that; to change a nation when he said, “A House divided against itself cannot stand”. This of course was Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the only other senator from Illinois to be elected to the Presidency. He was referring to an America that was half-slave and half free and it was his proclamation of emancipation for black slaves 150 years ago that commenced the long and circuitous road to the election of the first Black President of the United States.
During the recent campaign, I was interviewed by a journalist who wanted a rabbi’s views on Obama’s speech in Berlin in which he spoke about tearing down walls and creating a just world amongst all the nations. She wanted to know if Judaism had any sympathy with these rhetorical political pronouncements. I had to remind her that Obama gets his rhetoric from the Bible and especially the Hebrew prophetic tradition. This week’s parasha brings this to bear when our Abraham is called to be the father of new nations and a new world of ethical monotheism. But can one man really change the world?
Abraham appears to us fully developed in his power and authority; the patriarch, the fighter for justice, the pioneer of faith, the beloved of God. He is a heroic figure but he is not flawless. No sooner does he enter the land that he has been sent to, he leaves it and wanders down to Eqypt and back again. He mistreats his first family and casts them away and passes his second wife off as his sister to gain acceptance at Pharoah’s court. He almost sacrifices his son. He fails many tests. But for all that he is remarkable in calling God to account for the justice that God represents. When pleading with God over Sodom and Gemorrah he famously remarks: ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not act justly?’ (Genesis 18:25) For Abraham, God stands as the guarantor of human justice and freedom over human powers in this new paradigm and this cannot be abrogated. Abraham ensures that this change to ethical monotheism will prevail because he continually articulates the conflict between the values espoused in this new divinity and its reality. He is able to discern the gap between what is right and what is being done that is wrong. He begins the tradition of the Hebrew Prophet who ‘speaks forth’ – speaking truth to power and reminding all of their obligations and duty.
As Avivah Zornberg has said about this passage, One may lead perhaps with no more than a question in hand. Ron Heifetz of Harvard University has called this ‘Adaptive Leadership’; the ability to discern the conflicting values in a society and articulate a vision that calls people back to that original vision, to that which ultimately they hold dear. Shall not the People of the earth also act justly? This was the achievement of Abraham Lincoln with regard to a society built on the evils of slavery in the light of the declaration that all men are created equal, as it was of Martin Luther King who equally contrasted the American ideal of freedom with the lived reality of oppression and brutality shown nightly on every television in the land.
‘True history is the history of the spirit’, wrote Rabbi Leo Baeck in 1944 while in Theresienstadt concentration camp, ‘the human spirit which may at times seems powerless but ultimately is yet superior and survives because even if it has not got the might, it still possesses the power, the power that can never cease’.
Baeck had witnessed the brutality and barbarity of the night of 9th November – Krystalnacht whose 70th anniversary we have just commemorated and he witnessed the ultimate dissolution of the world that Abraham had conceived. We who live in the shadow of the Shoah and those sharing a similar fate in Darfur and now the Congo may despair of humanity’s ability to do justice. But Baeck did not despair, he wrote: ‘The Prophets turned against every misdeed of history, they objected to any justification of right by victory. Justice is the ultimate sense of history for Judaism’.
The ability to bring justice to our fractured and contentious world is not by leading battalions but by articulating the wide gap between the vision and reality of a society and of humanity. Abraham, Lincoln, Baeck and King all wanted to change their worlds. Their commitment to their foundational values won hearts, souls and minds to carry their work forward. But they were still limited human beings and no one person can entirely change the world. Perhaps for those of us who still want to try, we and President elect Obama could do no better than heed the words of Abraham Lincoln who in 1864 in the middle of a war and a world divided set forth a vision of justice and right, a biblical Abrahamic call for a society that cares for the most vulnerable and for the renewal of a universal vision of peace and blessing for all:
‘With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations’.
Rabbi Dr Michael Shire
