Do You Really Know Avraham?
Abraham. Avraham. We all know him as the first on a list of our three forefathers. We know that he made a covenant with God. But what do we really know about Avraham?
We're first introduced to Avraham when we're introduced to his father and his siblings. There's nothing in the passukim that makes it seem like Avraham is anything special. The passukim talk a little bit about his brother dying and then how they leave... and then it ends, right...
And then there's לֶךְ-לְךָ, which starts talking about Avraham like we already know him or something. Literally, לֶךְ-לְךָ starts talking about Avraham like we know him or something. But we don't! Why is Hashem coming out and appearing to Avraham and telling him stuff? What's going on here? Is there something I'm missing? Do you know something that I don't?
I mean, Hashem doesn't appear to just anyone, right? Obviously there's something special about Avraham, I'm not denying it. We clearly witness the awesomeness of Abraham later on, but we know nothing about him before this! And is he really the only one like him? What if there was somebody else who had the same thoughts as Avraham and didn't worship the sun?
Seriously, we know nothing about Avraham, and all of a sudden Hashem is offering up the land to him. Yeah, that just happened. I feel like it would make us more comfortable if we knew more about him.
This must come to teach us something. So what is it teaching us? I would love to hear your feedback. I could make up something, I suppose. Maybe it comes to show us that there doesn't need to be anything particularly special about a person's background for a person to be particularly special. It doesn't matter what happened to Avraham in the first few years of his life, or any other small little details. What matters s that obviously there was something unique about him that set him apart from the rest of the people of his generation. Clearly he believed in one God and was special enough for Hashem to appear to him. After Hashem appears to him, we see that Hashem made the right decisions because Avrahams behavior throughout shows us what a truly righteous person he was.
Well, that was just my take on it. What do you guys think?
 |
| Here's another Abraham: Abraham Maslow. Some of you guys might recognize him as being that psychology guy. Anyways, maybe this is what Avraham looked like! Who knows? Guess we'll just have to keep on looking at pictures of Abraham until we're done blogging about him! Yay! |
Firstly, the picture is hilarious. I like your ideas. They make a lot of sense because we really did not know THAT much about Avraham before, but I think this whole account with him leaving so abruptly gives us a pretty good outlook on what kind of a guy he really is. We read about his family tree earlier, where he came from and that his dad worshiped idols, yet he refused. We are beginning to learn his story because maybe he was just an average man, which makes his whole story more relatable, but we see that he stood out from everyone else because he actually recognized that there was a God and not just a bunch of gods who were portrayed through idols out there. He's a perfect role model because we can learn how he came to recognize God and that he was just an average man who believed in something rational, and he happened to be right.
ReplyDelete