Shabbat Lekh Lekha, 7 Heshvan 5774

(12 October 2013/8 Heshvan 5774)

Lekh Lekha

Last week, I gave you the bad news. This week I want to offer some hope. I want to look at the Pew report through the lens of Jewish theology.

It should be no surprise that Avram appears to us as we think about Jewish demography. From the beginning, Avram was counting his descendants.As you listen to these words of promise, keep that in mind:

The Eternal said to Avram, "Go forth from your native land and from your ancestral house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you and curse the one that curses you; and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you."

Later, after Avram and Lot separated, God said to Avram: "Raise your eyes and look out from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west, for I give all the land that you see to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring too can be counted.  Up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you."

Still later, when he was ninety years of age, God again addresses Avram:  "I am El Shaddai.  Walk in My ways and be blameless. I will establish My covenant between Me and you, and I will make you exceedingly numerous.You shall be the father of a multitude of nations. And you shall no longer be called Avram, but your name shall be Avraham, for I make you the father of a multitude of nations"

Most of the saga of Avraham tells us of his two sons, one estranged. But Genesis also tells us that Avram had six other children late in life. Out of eight children, only one was assigned to carry out Abraham's destiny. Is it any wonder that Abraham shows up every time we do a demographic survey of the Jewish people?

My friend, Rabbi Mark Greenspan, imagines Avraham arriving in shul as the rabbi is unlocking the chapel. Naturally, they discuss the Pew report on Jewish identity. My colleague explains:

“We're very concerned with the future of the Jewish people in America… We are very good at counting Jews - I'm sorry to have to say that the results were pretty dismal. One out of five Jews in America today doesn't even identify with their religion. The rate of intermarriage is higher than ever and affiliation with synagogues is lower. And the numbers are even worse among the millennials - people born after 1980. Frankly the future looks pretty dismal for your descendants."

"Let's see," said Abraham, "one out of five does not identify with their religion, [but] four out of five are proud of being Jewish. That's not bad. And while many of them don’t affiliate with synagogues, I understand that many people find other ways of expressing their Jewish pride.

I want to pick up on that point. Because Avraham represents something very important – a hopeful revolution.

Jon Levenson of Harvard writes:

The gift of the land to the descendants of Abram forms a powerful counter-point to the universal exile [Tower of Babel] that concludes the previous chapter. Similarly, the theme of blessing, underscored fourfold in the [initial call of Genesis 12] reverses the theme of punishment and curse that dominates from the story of Adam and Eve through that of the Tower of Babel.  What is more, God promises to do for Abram what the builders of that tower catastrophically failed to do for themselves- to grant him a great name (compare 11:4).

Moving back farther in the narrative, we can also see the conjoining of blessing to the promise of land as a reversal of the cursing of the ground that was the punishment for Adam’s disobedience. In the Garden of Eden (3:17-19)…. [Abram is] the realization of the hoped-for reversal of the curses on Adam.  The man without a country will inherit a whole land; the man with a barren wife will have plenteous offspring; and the man who has cut himself off from kith and kin will be pronounced blessed by all the families of the earth. (Jon D. Levenson, Inheriting Abraham. Princeton, 2012, pp. 19-20)

The saga of Avraham is about hope, about going against common expectations.

Soren Kiekegaard, the rabbis of the Talmud, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks share a perspective on Avraham as a person who stood apart from others.  Kierkegaard called Avraham a “knight of faith,” a noble, solitary individual who made heroic choices based on his intensely personal relationship with the One God of the Universe.  The Rabbis of the Talmud identify the name Avraham ha-Ivri (“Abraham the Hebrew”) as suggesting that “He was on one side (‘ever) and the entire world on the other.”  And indeed, the Avraham narrative describes a series of separations from Lot, Abimelech, Hagar, and Ishmael.  Rabbi Sacks sees Avraham as a leader able to “free himself from the pressure to conform. Leaders must be prepared not to follow the consensus”.

In some ways, the notion of Avraham as a singular and solitary individual would appear to fit the idea of the millennial generation described in the Pew report.  Less interested in collectivity and more drawn to personal, individual expression of Jewish identity.  What Arnold Eisen and Steven Cohen described as the “sovereign self”.

But such an understanding of Avraham misses a critical point.  Yonatan Chipman points out that Avraham’s life aspirations are all bound up with the concept of family.  The ultimate goal of all he did was to create a family unit which would become a people, to have children and grandchildren who would continue his path.  In three separate places in this parashah—in the opening call “go forth from your land…” (Gen 12); in the “Covenant Between the Pieces” (Gen 15); and in the chapter of Brit Milah (circumcision—Gen 17), three themes repeat themselves with only minor variations of wording:  (a)  Abraham’s personal relation with God, by Whom he is blessed and protected (“I shall make your name great”);  (b)  the promise of a multitude of descendants (“like the stars in the sky”.. ”like the sand of the sea”);  and  (c)  the promise of inheriting the Land.

The image of Abraham of an individual building a people, a faith community, from his own flesh, confutes [the] radical individualism… [and the]  concept of religion as a purely individual matter, a choice of faith, a voluntary thing.  The role of the family, of the community, the concept of the religious community / flock as a historical continuity, [should not be] ignored or negated…. http://hitzeiyehonatan.blogspot.com (Lekh Lekha 5774).

The Pew report points to pride in Jewish culture and Israel, even though the content of that pride is thin. The Pew study challenges us to galvanize that pride and construct a more substantive covenantal identity from it.

Well before the Pew report, Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik explained that the covenant at Sinai was conveyed to the children of Israel through the commandments, while the covenant with the patriarchs was conveyed through personal example.  According to the Pew report, younger people do not follow the conscious covenantal model of mitzvah. But there is the possibility of Jewish life following the heroic examples of our ancestors. Perhaps the path for the near future will not be that of nomos, but will be one of narrative.

According to Soloveitchik, the covenant with Avraham has another important implication: “common sense would say that the development of history follows the principle of causality, meaning that past events determine the future. But in the covenant of the patriarchs, G-d declared that the history of the people of Israel will be influenced by its destiny, by the vision of the end of days”.  ("Until Abraham came and received the reward of all", Bar Ilan Parashat Hashavu’a,  Lekh Lekha 989, Shimon Eliezer (Shubert) Spero)

Following the 1964 Look Magazine article, “The Vanishing American Jew,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel declared, “Our community is in spiritual distress and our organizations are too concerned with digits. The significance of Judaism does not lie in being conducive to mere survival but in being a source of spiritual wealth and source of meaning to all peoples.” Can we draw on Jewish wisdom to bring meaning to our civilization?

This week, Prof Jonathan Sarna, who was a guest at Beth Tzedec last year, spoke by conference call to Conservative rabbis.  He echoed Rabbi Soloveitchik by reminding us of the many reversals, the unexpected developments in Jewish life - in earlier generations and even in the 20th century.  Sarna addressed our capacity for creative survival.  The demographics may not look great, but there are many possibilities for innovation to reach less engaged Jews of the present, to build a Jewish future.  We should understand that past trends are not necessarily indicators of the future, because what we do can and will influence the yet to come.

Avraham continued to speak with my friend, Rabbi Greenspan:

"Gevalt, you people over-think everything." Stop thinking about who you think you should be and start thinking about what you should be doing. And congratulate anyone who finds a way to express their identity as a child of Abraham.  That's what really matters.  If you really want to know who you are, I'll tell you - you're my children.  Now, just get on with it.  God gave you a covenant.  The promise was to keep you around for a long time.  The challenge is for you to live a committed life; to practice righteousness in word and deed; to live a life of faith; to search for God's presence in the world.  There are so many ways for you to do that.  Continue reading the same book (the one Moses gave you) and searching for new meanings in it.

Numbers prove nothing. Jewish life has always been about the she'erit pileita - the faithful remnant - that carries on.  There has always been a small but deeply committed community of Jews who have kept the fire burning. … You may not be as many as the stars in the sky, but you have the ability to be a great nation!  It has been this small core that has kept us alive.  Your people can either be part of this privileged group that assures the future or simply part of the silent majority that will disappear."

That is the hope:  Each of us is in the position of Abraham and Sarah.  Our challenge is to intensify Jewish living and learning and to have the faith that others might also find fulfillment in that which we love.  (Rabbi Stephan Parnes).