Monday, May 7, 2012

Is Avraham the Best of them All?

So far, we have extensively learned about two out of our three forefathers. After finishing our discussion on Yitzchak, most of us were enraged about how passive and naive Yitzchak was. As I think back to our many discussions about Avraham, all I can remember is all of us thinking how perfect Avraham seemed to be. Even though we have not learned Yaakov's full story yet, we do know that he was very weak willed and desperately needed to break out of his shell. We also know that he had a very hard life because of this and the trickery he committed. Besides for Rabbi Amnon's idea that Avraham did wrong by going to Egypt because of the famine, we don't really see (from the text) any bad attributes or actions of Avraham. As we have said, he was a political/ military leader who was very worldly. Not only this but he was very spiritual and had the utmost trust in G-d and devoted his life to spreading G-d words. So what do ya'll think? Was Avraham the one that we should look up to the most? If you had to choose the 'best' of the forefathers, who would it be? Who do you look up/want to exemplify to the most? Now, you might say Yitzchak seems more relatable and humanely. He did have some negative sides, but he did grow and he didn't hesitate to admit he made a mistake. Even at the end of his life, he found room to grow and improve on himself. In conclusion, maybe the point of having such different characters is important to us because we get to see all different aspects of how to make ourselves better people. Each person had a special attribute, and we should look up to that instead of looking down on the person for all the 'bad' he did.

1 comment:

  1. I think Avraham is the best of them all. I mean, he was the iconoclast- he found God. Everyone is different, though, and like you said, I dont think that we're meant to compare them directly to each other because they each teach us different lessons. I also don't think that we should look down on any of them, because even if they're not our favorite they're still really holy people.

    ReplyDelete