Why Did God Choose Abraham? Because He Was Fit to Be a Father

This week’s Torah reading of Lekh-L’kha begins with God’s call to Abraham (then still called Abram), a figure only minimally introduced. After examining three contrasting extra-biblical portraits of Judaism’s founding father, Jonathan Sacks explores what can be gleaned about him from the text itself:

What . . . does the Torah say about Abraham? The answer is unexpected and very moving. Abraham was chosen simply to be a father. The av in Avram/Avraham [the Hebrew version of his names] means “father.” In the only verse in which the Torah explains His choice of Abraham, God says: “For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what He has promised him.” (Genesis 18:19)

The great scenes in Abraham’s life—waiting for a child, the birth of Ishmael, the tension between Sarah and Hagar, the birth of Isaac and the binding—are all about his role as a father.

Judaism, more than any other faith, sees parenthood as the highest challenge of all. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah—the anniversary of creation—we read of two mothers, Sarah and Hannah, and the births of their sons, as if to say: every life is a universe. Therefore if you wish to understand the creation of the universe, think about the birth of a child.

Abraham, the hero of faith, is simply a father. Stephen Hawking famously wrote at the end of A Brief History of Time that if we had a Unified Field Theory, a scientific “theory of everything,” we would “know the mind of God.” We believe otherwise. To know the mind of God we do not need theoretical physics. We simply need to know what it is to be a parent. The miracle of childbirth is as close as we come to understanding the love that brings new life into the world.

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Abraham, Family, Genesis

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society