Monday, Sep. 30, 2002
The Legacy of Abraham
By DAVID VAN BIEMA;Azadeh Moavevi/Tehran, Nadia Mustafa/New York, Matt Rees and
Jamil Hamad/Hebron and Eric Silver/Jerusalem
My first real experience of the patriarch Abraham's crossover appeal came on
the splendid sun-spangled day in June when I took a cross-town cab to
arrange my son's circumcision. Jews have circumcised for thousands of years-ever since God (as the Torah tells it), having made a history-altering pact
with Abraham, directed him to "cut my Covenant in your flesh." Some biblical
commentators suggest that the circumcision was meant as much as a
reminder to the Lord as to the Israelites, a kind of divine Post-it not to
extirpate these people. My thought as we rolled eastward across Manhattan
was, There must be easier ways.
We slowed behind traffic on one of the roads through Central Park, and I
found myself tapping my foot. The tune on the cab's stereo was Arabic but
with a catchy, bubbling horn section. I asked who was playing. A Moroccan
group, said the cabbie. He told me its name. Did I want to know what it was
singing? Certainly. It was a plea to Israel from the Arab people. The chorus
was, "We have the same father. Why do you treat us this way?" Who might the
father be? I asked. "Ibrahim," he said. "The song is called Ismail and Isaac,"
after his sons.
We have the same father. Why do you treat us this way? What did that scrap
of a song hint at? First of all, it gave witness that a figure beloved by Jews and
Christians has a Muslim constituency, suggesting a connection between Islam
and the West that might surprise most Americans in this tense season. But
second, it acknowledged that despite this apparent bond, there is still turmoil
among the sons of Abraham.
It wouldn't do to call Abraham a neglected giant of the Bible; almost everyone
knows the outline of his story. But until recently he probably has not received
the credit he deserves as a religious innovator. As biblical pioneer of the idea
that there is only one God, he is on a par with Moses, St. Paul and
Muhammad, responsible for what Thomas Cahill, author of the 1998 history
The Gifts of the Jews, calls "a complete departure from everything that has
gone before in the evolution of culture and sensibility." In other words,
Abraham changed the world.
Even less well known to most Americans is the breadth of his following. Jews,
who consider him their own, are largely unaware of Abraham's presence in
Christianity, which accepts his Torah story as part of the Old Testament and
honors him in contexts ranging from the Roman Catholic Mass ("Look with
favor on these offerings and accept them as once you accepted ... the sacrifice
of Abraham") to a Protestant children's song ("Father Abraham had many
sons/And I am one of them and so are you ... ").
And neither Jews nor Christians know very much about Abraham's role in
Islam, which acknowledges the Torah narrative but with significant changes
and additions. The Koran portrays Abraham as the first man to make full
surrender to Allah. Each of the five repetitions of daily prayer ends with a
reference to him. The holy book recounts Abraham's building of the Ka'aba,
the black cube that is Mecca's central shrine. Several of the rituals performed
in that city by pilgrims making the hajj recall episodes from his history. Those
who cannot journey still join in celebrating the Festival of Sacrifice, in which a
lamb or goat is offered up to commemorate the same near sacrifice of a son
that the Jews feature at their New Year. It is the holiest single day on the
Islamic calendar.
In fact, excluding God, Abraham is the only biblical figure who enjoys the
unanimous acclaim of all three faiths, the only one (as the song in the cab
suggested) referred to by all three as Father. In theory, this remarkable
consensus should make him an interfaith superstar, a special resource in these
times of anger and mistrust. And since last September, interfaith activists
have been scheduling Abraham lectures, Abraham speeches and even
"Abraham salons" around the country and overseas. A new book called
Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (William Morrow) by Bruce
Feiler, author of the best-selling scriptural travelogue Walking the Bible,
espouses their cause.
Yet they have an uphill battle. For all the commonality Abraham represents,
the answer to the song's plaintive query--Why do you treat us this way?--is
written in anathemas and blood over the centuries. If Abraham is indeed
father of three faiths, then he is like a father who left a bitterly disputed will.
Judaism and Islam, for starters, cannot even agree on which son he almost
sacrificed. Then there is Abraham's Covenant with God. Many Jews (and some
conservative Christians) believe it granted the Jewish people alone the right to
the Holy Land. That belief fuels much of the Israeli settler movement and
plays an ever greater role in Israel's hostility toward Palestinian nationalist
claims. "Our connection to the land goes back to our first ancestor. Arabs have
no right to the land of Israel," says Rabbi Haim Druckman, a settler leader
and a parliamentarian with the National Religious Party. This argument
infuriates Palestinian Muslims--especially since the Koran claims that
Abraham was not a Jew but Islam's first believer. "The people who supported
Abraham believed in one God and only one God, and that was the Muslims.
Only the Muslims," says Sheik Taysir Tamimi, Yasser Arafat's liaison for
religious dialogue.
Not exempt from the tripartite rancor, early Christians used their
understanding of Abraham, who they claimed found grace outside Jewish law,
to prove that the older religion begged for replacement--a contention that
helped propel almost two millenniums of anti-Semitism.
Abraham is thus a much more difficult--and more interesting--figure than at
first he seems. His history constitutes akind of multifaith scandal, a case study
for monotheism's darker side, the desire of people to define themselves by
excluding or demonizing others. The fate of interfaith stalwarts seeking to
undo that heritage and locate in the patriarch a true symbol of accord should
be meaningful to all of us suddenly interested in the apparent chasm between
Islam and the West. Says Abraham author Feiler: "I believe he's a flawed
vessel for reconciliation, but he's the best figure we've got."
Feiler began Abraham after the Sept. 11 attacks, seeking a unifying symbol in a
time of strife. Instead, the book records his growth from a dewy-eyed
Abrahamic novice to a more realistic observer. As he remarks, "When I set out
on this journey, I believed ... the Great Abrahamic Hope was an oasis in the
deepest deserts of antiquity, and all we had to do was track him down and his
descendants would live in perpetual harmony, dancing Kumbaya around the
campfire. That oasis, I realized, is just a mirage." The sober understanding
Feiler ends up with, however, is a more realistic basis from which to seek
reconciliation.
ABRAHAM THE JEW
Abraham was born, according to tradition, into a family that sold idols--a way
of emphasizing the polytheism that reigned in the Middle East before his
enlightenment. The stirring first words of the 12th chapter in the Torah's Book
of Genesis are God's to him and are often referred to as the Call: "Go forth
from your native land/And from your father's house/And I will make of you a
great nation/And I will bless those who bless you/And curse him that curses
you/And all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you." Abraham
would appear ill suited to the job. To make a nation, one must have an heir,
and he is a childless 75-year-old whose wife Sarah is past menopause. Yet he
complies, and he and Sarah set off for a desert hinterland--Canaan--and a new
spiritual epoch.
As they travel, God elaborates on his offer. Abraham's children will be as
numerous as grains of dust on the earth and stars in the sky. They will spend
400 years as slaves but ultimately possess the land from the Nile to the
Euphrates. The pact is sealed in a mysterious ceremony in a dream, during
which the Lord, appearing as a smoking torch, puts himself formally under
oath. He requires a different acknowledgment from Abraham: he must
inscribe a sign of the Covenant on his body, initiating the Jewish and Muslim
customs of circumcision. He is now committed, God notes later, to "keep the
way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice."
Abraham's life becomes very eventful. He travels to Egypt and back and
alights in Canaanite towns that may correspond to present-day Nablus,
Hebron and Jerusalem. He grows rich, distinguishing himself sometimes as a
warrior king and sometimes as an arch-diplomat. At one point, three
strangers appear at his tent. A model of Middle Eastern hospitality, he lays out
a feast. They turn out to be divine messengers bearing word that God intends
to destroy Sodom, where his nephew Lot lives. Abraham initiates an
extraordinary haggling session, persuading the Lord to spare Sodom if 10
righteous people can be found. They can't.
Meanwhile, the Torah portrays Abraham's domestic life as a soap opera.
Convinced she will have no children, Sarah offers him her young Egyptian
slave Hagar to produce an heir. It works. The 86-year-old fathers a boy,
Ishmael. Yet God insists that Sarah will conceive, and in a wonder confirming
Abraham's faith, she bears his second son, Isaac. Jealous of Hagar's and
Ishmael's competing claims on her husband and his legacy, Sarah persuades
Abraham to send them out into the desert. God saves the duo and promises
Hagar that Ishmael will sire a great nation through 12 sons (assumed by
tradition to be 12 Arab tribes). But he stipulates that the Covenant will flow
only through Isaac's line.
Then, in one last spectacular test of his faith, God directs Abraham to offer up
"your son, your only one, whom you love, your Isaac" as a human sacrifice.
With an obedience that has troubled modern thinkers from Kierkegaard
("Though Abraham arouses my admiration, he at the same time appalls me")
to Bob Dylan ("Abe says, 'Where do you want this killin' done?' God says, 'Out
on Highway 61'")--but which seems transcendentally right to traditionalists-the father commences to comply on a mountain called Moriah. Only at the last
instant does God stay the father's hand and renew his pledge regarding
Abraham's descendants.
At age 175, Abraham dies and is laid out next to Sarah, who preceded him, in a
plot he has bought in a town later called Hebron. Both sons attend his funeral.
That is the story. What is its importance? Despite every effort and argument,
there is no way to know what century Abraham lived in, or even whether he
actually existed as a person. (If he did live, it would have been between 2100
B.C. and 1500 B.C., hundreds of years before the date most historians assign
to the actual birth of the religion called Judaism.) But Abraham represents a
revolution in thought. While he is not a pure monotheist (he never suggests
that other gods do not exist), he is the Ur-monotheist, the first man in the
Bible to abandon all he knows in order to choose the Lord and consciously
move ever deeper into that choice, until the point of no return on Moriah.
The implications of his breakthrough are almost infinite. To have "one God
that counts" instead of a constellation of gods who require occasional ritual
appeasement, as Cahill notes in The Gifts of the Jews, means that Abraham's
relationship to God "became the matrix of his life," as it would be for millions
who followed. A universal God made it easier to imagine a universal code of
ethics. Positing a deity intimately involved in the fate of one's children
overturned the prevalent image of time as an ever cycling wheel, effectively
inventing the idea of a future. Says Eugene Fisher, director of Catholic-Jewish
relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: "Whether you call it
submission in Muslim terms, conversion in Christian terms or t'shuva
[turning toward God] for the Jews, monotheism is a radically new
understanding, the underlying concept of Western civilization." So linked is
Abraham's name with this new path that each of the subsequent two
monotheistic religions reached back hungrily to enfold him--and belittle the
others' claims on him.
ABRAHAM THE CHRISTIAN
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is arguably the most Christian
place on earth, and the gray rock mass of Golgotha (or Calgary) inside, the
most Christian place in the church. Traditions dating back to the 300s A.D.
record that Jesus was crucified here. Just above the rock's Plexiglas-protected
expanse is a chapel shared by the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic
churches. The Catholic side boasts three mosaics. In the center is Mary
Magdalene; to the left is Christ, removed from the Cross; and to the right is
none other than ... Abraham, about to slay Isaac. Notes Feiler: "The image of
Jesus sprawled on the unction stone is nearly identical to the image of Isaac
on the altar." The New Testament book Romans proposes Isaac's binding and
release as a prophetic foreshadowing of the Resurrection.
The man credited with that insight is the Apostle Paul. Jesus mentions
Abraham in the Gospels, but it was Paul who did the fine mortise work, citing
the patriarch in his New Testament epistles more than any other figure except
Christ. Perhaps the most strongly self-identifying Jew among the Apostles,
Paul clearly felt an urgency to connect his new movement with the Jewish
paterfamilias. He did so primarily through Abraham's original response to
God's Call and through the old man's embattled faith, or "hope against hope,"
as Paul famously put it, that God would bring him a son. Such faith, Paul
wrote, made Abraham "the father of all who believe."
Yet Paul's Abrahamic bouquet to his birth religion contained poisoned thorns.
One of his themes was that a believer no longer needed to be Jewish or to
follow Jewish law to be redeemed--the way now lay through Christ. Abraham's
story served these arguments well. His Covenant long predated the Jewish law
as brought down from the mountain by Moses, and so, wrote Paul, "the
promise to Abraham and his descendants ... did not come through law."
Nor, Paul argued, did it come through tribal inheritance. The God of the
Hebrew Bible deemed Abraham to be "righteous" years before his
circumcision, he wrote, which meant that his listeners didn't need to become
circumcised Jews to be Abraham's inheritors. Baptism in faith would more
than suffice. Paul waffled as to whether Christianity rendered Judaism's
Abrahamic Covenant null and void. But his successors assumed so. The 2nd
century church father Justin Martyr wrote that far from an indication of grace,
circumcision marked Jews "so that your land might become desolate, and
your cities burned," something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bereft of a divine
warrant for their well-being, Jews were at the mercy of their neighbors' worst
instincts. In a remarkably frank assessment, the Greek Orthodox bishop of
Jerusalem tells Feiler, "What the church did with Abraham was bitter and
cruel."
ABRAHAM THE MUSLIM
No faith is as self-consciously monotheistic as Islam, and its embrace of
Abraham is correspondingly joyful. If many Jews know him best as a dynastic
grandfather whose grandson Jacob actually founds the nation of Israel,
Muslims regard him as one of the four most important prophets. So pure is
his submission to the One God that Muhammad later says his own message is
but a restoration of Abrahamic faith. The Koran includes scenes from
Abraham's childhood in which he chides his father for believing in idols and
survives, Daniel-like, in a fiery furnace to which he is condemned for his fealty
to Allah. And in the Koranic version of Abraham's ultimate test, Abraham tells
his son of God's command, and the boy replies, "O my father! Do that which
thou art commanded. Allah willing, thou shalt find me of the steadfast." Notes
the Koran approvingly: "They had both surrendered," using the verb whose
noun form is the word Islam. For passing such trials, Allah tells Abraham,
"Lo, I have appointed thee a leader for mankind!"
But not as a Jew. Somewhat like Paul, Islam concluded that God chooses his
people on grounds of commitment rather than lineage, meaning that
Abraham's only true followers are true believers--i.e., Muslims. Moreover, if
Allah ever had a pact with the Jews as a race, they backslid out of it in
episodes such as the worship of the golden calf in the Torah's book of Exodus.
Indeed, the Koran advises Muslims proselytized by either Jews or Christians
to answer, "Nay... (we follow) the religion of Abraham."
Then there is the matter of Isaac and Ishmael. Unlike the Torah, the Koran
does not specify which son God tells Abraham to sacrifice. Muslim
interpreters a generation after Muhammad concluded that the prophet was
descended from the slave woman Hagar's boy, Ishmael. Later scholarly
opinion determined that Ishmael was also the son who went under the knife.
The decision effectively completed the Jewish disenfranchisement. Not only
was their genealogical claim void, but their forefather lost his role in the great
drama of surrender.
THE CONTESTED PATRIMONY
Things devolved from there. Jews, stung, took steps to cement Abraham's
Jewish identity. The Talmud describes him anachronistically as following
Mosaic law and speaking Hebrew. And they severely downgraded Ishmael.
Initially, says Shaul Magid, professor of Midrash at New York City's Jewish
Theological Seminary, Jewish parents named their boys after Abraham's Arab
son, but the custom evaporated as they began living under Muslim rule. By the
11th century the great biblical scholar Rashi, citing earlier authorities,
described Ishmael as a "thief" whom "everybody hates," an insult that can still
be found in his prominently placed commentary in many Torah editions today
and that is taught in many Orthodox religious schools. IbnKathir, a 13th
century Koranic commentator, struck back by claiming the Jews had
"dishonestly and slanderously" introduced Isaac into the Torah story: "They
forced this understanding because Isaac is their father, while Ishmael is the
father of the Arabs." That sentiment too survives today on the Muslim side.
It is enough to make a grown man cry, which Feiler nearly does. "They took a
biblical figure open to all," he writes, "tossed out what they wanted to ignore,
ginned up what they wanted to stress and ended up with a symbol of their own
uniqueness that looked far more like a mirror image of their fantasies than a
reflection of the original story." To his horror, he realized that Abraham "is as
much a model for fanaticism as he is for moderation."
The Tomb of the Patriarchs, a massive stone structure built by King Herod
2,000 years ago, is the grim living metaphor for dueling Abrahamisms.
Despite God's promise that this land would be his people's one day, Abraham
in Genesis makes a point of paying Ephron the Hittite 400 silver shekels for a
cave in Hebron to serve as a burial plot. He and Sarah were laid there, and
later, Scripture adds, so were Isaac and his wife Rebecca, his grandson Jacob
and his first wife Leah. Herod erected a grandiose monument at what he
thought was the site. For most of the past few hundred years, its Muslim
owners, who called it the Mosque of Abraham, allowed Jews to pray near the
entrance. When the Israelis took control in 1967, believers of both faiths
worshipped side by side. Then in 1994 a radical Israeli settler, Dr. Baruch
Goldstein, mowed down 29 Muslims at prayer in the tomb. Custody shifted to
a complex scheme granting each side access to parts or all of the tomb on
different days but avoiding their meeting. Since the latest intifadeh, the
arrangement continues, but the site, hedged about with checkpoints and razor
wire in a neighborhood under strict military curfew, presents a message of
piety inextricable from violence and mistrust.
There is an eerie effortlessness to the way in which fights picked by scriptural
revisionists hundreds of years ago feed today's psychology of mutual
victimhood. The Jewish Theological Seminary's Magid describes a 1st century
tradition in which Ishmael is a bully and Isaac "becomes the persecuted
younger brother." That belief has persisted. "The Muslims are very aggressive,
like Ishmael," an Israeli settler tells Feiler. "And the Jews are very passive, like
Isaac, who nearly allows himself to be killed without talking back. That's why
they are killing us, because we don't fight back." Arafat's religious liaison
Sheik Tamimi snaps that any Jewish claims based in Genesis are "pure lies,
aimed at achieving political gains, at imposing the sovereignty of Israeli
occupation on the holy places."
HOPES FOR RECONCILIATION
It is a staple premise of the interfaith movement, which has been picking at
the problem since the late 1800s, that if Muslims, Christians and Jews are
ever to respect and understand one another, a key road leads through
Abraham. Says Fisher of the Conference of Catholic Bishops: "We can't not
talk to each other about him." But identifying a path does not make it
passable. Part of the problem, says Jon Levenson, a Harvard Jewish-studies
professor who has examined affinities and conflicts in the Abrahamic
traditions, is that even before they went to work on him, his story featured a
theme of exclusivity. "If you want a symbol for universal humanity, go to
Adam," he says. "Don't go to Abraham, because his whole story is about the
singling out of one guy to found a new family, a distinct family marked off
from the rest of humanity. He was always a particularist." Another stumbling
block between Jews and Muslims is that they are working from two different
texts.
Nonetheless, moderate Islamic leaders have periodically enlisted Abraham as
a bridge builder. In 1977 Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, announcing before
the Israeli Knesset the brave initiative that would become the 1979 Camp
David peace accords, invoked, "Abraham--peace be upon him--greatgrandfather of the Arabs and the Jews." Sadat noted that Abraham had
undertaken his great sacrifice "not out of weakness but through free will,
prompted by an unshakable belief in the ideals that lend life a profound
significance," clearly hoping that both sides would approach Arab-Israeli
cohabitation in the same spirit. The accords went through, although this time
a sacrifice was completed. Sadat was assassinated in 1981.
More recently, seeking a way to reach out to the U.S. that would pass the
scrutiny of his nation's dogmatic clerics, moderate Iranian President
Muhammad Khatami proposed a "dialogue of civilizations," with Abraham as
common ground, in 1998. (The U.N.'s Kofi Annan subsequently adopted the
gesture.) Observers assumed Khatami was crafting a smoke screen for
political talks. But the former professor of Eastern and Western philosophy
seems to regard Abraham as a mascot for his comparatively humanistic, openminded brand of Islam.
A more thoroughgoing theological initiative has been undertaken by the
Catholic Church. Christianity's position on Abraham had remained
depressingly consistent since Justin Martyr's condemnation of the
circumcised, but theologians at the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65,
shaken by the Holocaust, reread Paul's letters. They noted that at one point
Paul calls the Covenant between God and the Jews irrevocable and that in one
passage he compares Christians to a wild olive branch grafted onto the tree of
Judaism. "If the Covenant between God and the children of Abraham dies,"
says Fisher, "the branch withers with the roots. Christians would be orphans."
The resulting Vatican II document rolled back centuries of anti-Judaism and
began a rehabilitation of the notion of Abraham as a Jew. No one has pursued
its spirit more avidly than Pope John Paul II, who in March 2000 pressed a
prayer card between blocks of Jerusalem's Western Wall: "God of our fathers,
you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations ...
we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the
Covenant."
THE EFFECT OF SEPT. 11
Such rapprochement, especially involving Muslims, has been trickier in the
past 12 months. Interfaith advocates say that after the attacks, many plans for
Jewish-Muslim conversations fell through. One group that bucked the trend
was the Children of Abraham Institute, a Charlottesville, Va., association that
organizes intensive three-way scriptural studies modeled on Abraham's
hospitality to the strangers at his tent. It has held meetings in Denver and at
England's Cambridge University and has sent representatives to lecture in
Cape Town, South Africa, and parley with imams in Malaysia. It has the ear of
the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury. At one of its gatherings last October,
University of Virginia professor of Islamic studies Abdulaziz Sachedina
expressed an interfaith ideal when he contended that people of faith can
"control" their respective interpretations of Abraham's story "so that it doesn't
become a source of demonization of the other."
As the anniversary of Sept. 11 passed, several new enterprises inaugurated
similar efforts. In Portland, Ore., a group called the Abraham Initiative began
a two-year, citywide interfaith program. The venerable, Protestant-founded
Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York is starting an open-ended
Abraham Program involving lectures and trifaith panels. A participant in
several such efforts is Feiler. At the end of Abraham, its author announces
that understanding how each faith, and seemingly each generation, concocts
its own Abraham has liberated him to create his own, whom he whimsically
calls "Abraham No. 241." This Abraham, he says, "is perceptive enough to
know that his children will fight, murder [and] fly planes into buildings." But
he also knows that "his children still crave God, still dream of a moment when
they stand alongside one another and pray for their lost father and for the
legacy of peace among nations that was his initial mandate from heaven."
It is a historical oddity and a hopeful sign that as the three religions battled
over Abraham, they continued (without admitting it) to swap Abraham
stories. The borrowings and counter borrowings, as old as the conflicts, make
far more pleasant reading. The most heartening may be an Islamic tale cited
by Feiler whose roots, scholar Reuven Firestone hypothesized, reach into both
Judaism and Christianity. It is set after Abraham's near sacrifice of his son,
whichever son it was. The moment of truth is just past; the father's hand is
stayed. As the boy lies stunned on the altar, God gazes down with pride and
compassion and promises to grant his any prayer. "O Lord, I pray this," the
boy says. "When any person in any era meets you at the gates of heaven--so
long as they believe in one God--I ask that you allow them to enter paradise." -With reporting by Azadeh Moavevi/Tehran, Nadia Mustafa/New York, Matt
Rees and Jamil Hamad/Hebron and Eric Silver/Jerusalem Judaism Islam
Christianity.