Abraham and Justice - Part I

Abraham is recognized throughout the west as the patriarch of the three major religions, the first monotheist. And for the Jews, he is the first Jew, the father of our people, and a figure of unique standing. Danny pointed out in a comment to an earlier post that, according to Heschel, Abraham served God only out of love, and with no ulterior motive. But what often goes overlooked in appreciating the significance of Abraham is his contribution to our understanding of justice.

In order to appreciate Abraham fully, one needs to step back in time, and consider the Noah story. According to Genesis, God destroyed the entire world, all living beings, except Noah and his family, and those animals lucky enough to have secured passage on the ark, because people had become evil. Of course, it stands to reason that not all people were evil; a few people aside from Noah must have been good, or if not good, then at least okay. And what about all the little kids? How many kids under the age of say, six years old, together with their mothers, were killed in that flood, on account of evil acts committed by their parents and elders? Or how about all the animals; certainly, the animals weren’t evil. Giraffes, and peacocks, and chipmunks, and caribou; even lions and tigers weren’t evil. What had they done to merit their complete destruction?

In case there’s any misunderstanding here, it only took God about five minutes after the flood to realize that he had made a grave mistake. To make amends, he put a rainbow in the sky, and promised Noah that he wouldn’t kill everyone again. He also promulgated the first laws, so that people would know what was right and what was wrong, and that would help save them from falling collectively into evil practices in the future. It does seem to me, in retrospect, that God might have been well advised to have passed these laws first, to have let his people know what was permitted, and what was forbidden, thus saving him and them from a lot of needless killing.

But that’s not the way the world worked before Abraham. If people were bad, then they got wiped out; all of them, including their children, including their animals; everyone got killed. There are two ways to see this; God versus man, and man versus man.

I heard a news story on NPR a few weeks ago; some guy was interviewing people in the Philippines, who had just endured a catastrophic typhoon. Villages had been destroyed; families had been torn apart; loved ones lost to the storm. A villager described the typhoon as ‘the whim of God’, and the NPR guy was patronizing that perspective, all the while knowing how simple-minded and primitive this kind of thinking was. But the truth is that the guy was right, and that the smug NPR reporter couldn’t figure that out. A typhoon is the whim of God. It is a disaster without explanation; it wreaks havoc and death on the guilty and innocent alike. Fires, floods, earthquakes; none of these pick and choose their victims for any reason at all.

So really, the story of Noah is purely descriptive; it contains no didactic message. In the ancient world, particularly the ancient Middle East, with everyone living near the rivers, civilization was at the mercy of the elements, and subject to destruction by floods. It’s fair to assume that everyone in those days had some memory, personal, familial, or collective, of the floods. And Noah’s story is an attempt to make some sense out of that. And when one considers that Noah’s story was written centuries later, after God and Abraham, after the Exodus, and after the building of the Temple, it’s easier to see how an ethical dimension was introduced into the story. People didn’t get killed randomly; they got killed for a reason. They were evil. And if people are evil, they get punished.

Dershowitz discusses how Job is unable to comprehend God’s ways; how human understanding is incapable of making sense out of the disasters that befall us. And that’s true. The Book of Job offers no explanation for why bad things happen to us. The point is not why these things happen; the point is how to cope with the things that do happen. And Job remains true today, even if there is no sense to these things. Human understanding is incapable of explaining some of the disasters that befall us, simply because there is no explanation for these events. They just happen.

So Noah is really a story about the world in which we live, where floods, or fires, or disease seem to strike us down, without discrimination, without purpose, without any particular meaning. But I’ll suggest that, before Abraham’s time, that was also true of the world in which we lived, in that nations, or tribes, or cities, visited the same kind of indiscriminate death and destruction on their neighbors. It was a savage world. A world in which one tribe would slaughter another, killing everyone -- men, women, children. Justice, such as it was, was a collective concept. If someone violated a family member, then you wiped out their entire family; you didn’t just punish the guilty party. Abraham’s contribution was to distinguish between the good and evil, punishing only the latter. It was a novel concept, and one that has influenced all western thought for four thousand years.