Why Avraham? That is the first question we must ask. He is the key figure in the story of our faith, the father of our nation, the hero of monotheism, important not only to Jews but to Christians and Muslims also. Yet there seems to be nothing in the Torah’s description of his early life to give us a hint as to why he was singled out to be the founder of our faith.
This is very strange. The Torah leaves us in no doubt as to why God chose Noach: “Noach was a righteous man, blameless in his generations; Noach walked with God.” It also gives us a clear indication as to why God chose Moshe. We see him as a young man, both in Egypt and Midian, intervening whenever he saw injustice. These were obviously extraordinary people. There is no such suggestion in the case of Avraham. So the Sages, commentators and philosophers, through the ages were forced to speculate, to fill in the glaring gap in the narrative, offering their own suggestions as to what made Avraham different.
There are two primary explanations. The first is Avraham the Iconoclast, the Breaker of Idols. Avraham’s father Terach was an idol worshiper. According to the Midrash, he made and sold idols. One day Avraham smashed all the idols, leaving the stick he used in the hand of the biggest idol. When his father queried who had broken his gods, Avraham blamed the biggest idol. “Are you making fun of me?” demanded his father. “Idols cannot do anything.” “In that case,” asked the young Avraham, “why do you worship them?”
Avraham was the first person to challenge the idols of the age and Jews, believers or otherwise, have often been iconoclasts (willing to confront accepted beliefs). Some of the most revolutionary thinkers – certainly in the modern age – have been Jews. They had the courage to challenge the accepted wisdom, think new thoughts and see the world in new ways. It is as if, deep in our cultural intellectual DNA, we had internalized what the Sages said about Avraham ha-Ivri, “the Hebrew,” that it meant he was on one side and all the rest of the world on the other.
The second view is set out by Rambam in the Mishnah Torah: Avraham the Philosopher. In an age when people had lost their way and fallen into idolatry, one person stood against the trend, the young Avraham who, when still a child, asked: “How is it possible that this planet should continuously be in motion and have no mover? Rambam notes that “He had no teacher, no one to instruct him ... until he attained the way of truth and knew that there is One God ... When Avraham was forty years old he recognized his Creator.” According to this, Avraham was the first person to think his way through to God as the force that moves the sun and all the stars.
What was unique about Avraham according to both these approaches is that he saw the world differently from everyone else, and had the courage to ask the questions, find the truth, and live his life accordingly.
