Because many of us are not able to attend shul in person, the Rabbi has agreed to share his shabbat morning drashah in advance. Here is the first half of it. To read the full drashah, click on the link below and it will take you to what will become a rich archive of all of Rabbi Staller's drashot.
Serving as an early example of a story that begins in medias res, the Avraham narrative manages to entirely leave out Avraham’s back story and childhood, instead picking up with Avraham having already found God. But the Torah tells us that by the time Avraham heard God’s call of Lech Lecha, Avraham was already middle-aged (or, for the lives of Tanach characters perhaps more third- or quarter-aged). The four decades of growth and character development that brought Avraham to the place where he could hear God and respond are totally omitted! The reader is left wondering what Avraham’s early life was like, and how he became the heroic figure he is.
Thankfully, the rabbis and contributors to the oral tradition stepped up in the place of this lacking and filled in many of the details. Rambam, through a combination of his personal scientific beliefs and Midrashim, describes Avraham as a philosophical and scientific pioneer, extrapolating astrological and astronomical conclusions from his personal observations and hypotheses about the cosmos. Rambam (Avodah Zarah 1:3) makes oblique reference to Avraham’s father and mother as “foolish idolators,” a piece of important context and background info that is absent from the Tanach, but thoroughly developed by Chazal throughout the Midrash, as the rabbis sought to fill in the gaps the Torah leaves in Avraham’s childhood.
In particular, Rambam makes reference to perhaps the two most famous Midrashim about Avraham’s early life. Firstly, Rambam tells us that Avraham broke his family’s idols– a rabbinic legend that has grown and been retold in numerous ways, often framed with the claim that Terach, Avraham’s father, was steeped in idolatry and the production and sale of idols, and a young Avraham, as a sign of protest, destroyed his father’s idols and idol-making shop in an attempt to teach a lesson about monotheism.
Next, Rambam moves on to the famous incident of the Kivshan, the industrial oven that Chazal see as the source of Ur Kasdim’s– literally the the fire of the Chaldeans– name. Rambam references the Midrash that tells us that the authorities had found out about Avraham’s rejection of idolatry in favor of monotheism, as well as his successful prostylezation to his brother Haran. As a punishment, they demanded that Terach give over his children to be thrown into the oven of Kasdim for heresy. The Midrash describes how Terach painfully watched his son Haran immolate in the flames first– picking up on the unusual formulation the Torah uses of “וימת הרן על פני תרח אביו,” “and Haran died in front of Terach his father”– and then gave over Avraham to presumably meet his brother’s fate. Ultimately, Avraham was saved from the flames of the oven by God’s miraculous intervention, and the event served as a major revelation for the religion Avraham was preaching.
On their surface, both of these stories seem to present Terach, Avraham’s father, as a quintessential idolatrous sinner, leaving us to ultimately conclude, much like the Rambam, that Avraham’s revelation and commitment to God must have sprung out of nowhere– from Avraham’s unique perceptiveness and aptitude for astrology and theology. Steeped in a society and family of immoral and corrupt idolaters, little Avraham had to teach himself the truth of God’s singularity. Perhaps that is why Avraham is given little to no introduction in the Torah, as Avraham is meant to feel as if he just appeared out of nowhere, as the striking nature of his autodidactic realization of Hashem’s existence also feels surprisingly ex nihilo.
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