Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [75]
When I say that God “answers” Abraham, you may wonder just what a believer like me could mean by that word. I do not take it in a literal or personifying way. The Midrash compares Abraham to one wandering about the world and encountering a tower engulfed in flames31 (or, as Heschel sometimes chose to read it, “a palace full of light”). “Can it be that the tower has no owner?” he cried. Then the owner looked out and said: “I am the owner of the tower.” Abraham was a seeker. He confronted the tough nut of trying to understand life's meaning. “Can it all be for naught?” he asked. “Can all this pain— or all this beauty—have no meaning?” And life responded to him, opened up to him, spoke to him, saying: “It all has a purpose.” He chose to follow the voice that spoke within him. That One of the inner voice needs these rare contrarian types. Who but they will push forward the evolution of human thought?
This “choosing” of (or “by”) Abraham does not imply the rejection of others as God's children.32 If reality “reveals” itself to Abraham, this by no means implies that it does so for him alone. Abraham's search becomes our doorway into the mystery; we have no need to deny the existence of other doors. Abraham and Sarah's wide-open tent flaps point to an intent to convert as much of humanity as they encounter to the monotheistic vision, but not to “Judaism” in a specific sense. Future Christians and Muslims can easily find room for themselves in the original big tent that our first ancestors worked so hard to create, ever expanding on “those souls they had acquired in Haran” (Gen. 12:5).33 Melchizedek, outside the tent, is still a “priest to the most high God” (Gen. 14:18). In standing up for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham challenges God not for members of his own tribe or faith community, just for fellow humans.34 His defining cry of outrage (“Will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” [Gen. 18:25]) shows how far we have moved from the times of Cain. Now God, partner in a covenant, can be called to live up to certain expectations. These expectations, however, have to do not just with “members of the tribe” but rather with ordinary, sinful humans and the “righteous” (by their deeds, not creed or lineage) who live among them.
But Judaism does not remain a religion of lone seekers. It is the religious legacy of a tribe, a people, who sees itself as a covenanted community. That covenant begins with Abraham. However we conceive God, the legacy of standing in the line of generations, all of whom carry forth the ancient covenant of faith, is central to our self-understanding. We celebrate the human advantage of building and living in community by passing down a strong sense of inherited faith from one generation to the next. How does this process begin? The question is historical, but it applies as well to the life of the individual in each generation. How do we go from one to the other, from seeker to tribe? Abraham is to be not just a seeker of God but the founder of a clan. What happens to us and to our very private quest when we decide to pass it on, to build the spiritual legacy of a family around it? Many seekers today are asking that very question. For more than a few, it is this challenge that brings them back to our shared tradition. Judaism is made for families. To be a Jew is to see oneself as a link between generations, passing down an ancient legacy.
The question of progeny becomes central when we seek to create a clan, immediately raising the question “Who is in and who is out?” as