Dvar Torah on Parshat Noach

At the end of this week's parsha - Noach - we are introduced to Abraham. Famously, we are given next to no information about him, beyond a fairly perfunctory genealogy and a tiny bit of family history. On the face of it, therefore, there is nothing in the Biblical text to explain what was so unique about Abraham, and why he was chosen by God. The Rabbis, as is their wont, use some vague hints and implications in the Torah's text to stitch together an entire biography of Abraham, which includes a father who is an idol salesman, Abraham's own spiritual journey, his miraculous escape from death at the hands of a violent, jealous, pagan society, and more. These stories are great, and contain plenty of food for thought. They are however, built on the flimsiest of connections to the Biblical text. Which brings us to our basic question: why is the Torah so tight-lipped about who Abraham is, and where and what he comes from? Why not tell us more? I would like to suggest that one answer might lie in a basic human mystery: the mystery of personality, of character. I have two brothers, and boy, are we three different from one another. I have six children, and boy, are they different from one another! All growing up in the same family, going more or less to the same schools, living in the same neighborhood, but each one a totally different and unique individual. How did it happen? As parents, we agonize about doing or saying the wrong thing, making the wrong parenting choice, sending them to the wrong school, letting them watch the wrong TV shows. And all the while, we are actually dancing in the dark, grappling with a mystery, because, after all, who knows what relationship there may be between a specific event or activity and "how they turn out". It's daunting, and humbling to realize that we don't have a clue, beyond some obvious basic principals, about shaping character. My wife Iris and I have a little code phrase we use whenever we see what seems to us to be a particularly bad piece of parenting - "axe murderer" - meaning that the children of these miserable parents should turn out to be lunatics, axe murderers in fact, if there is any correlation between our upbringing and our personalities. Such a correlation certainly does exist, for good and for bad, but its ways are mysterious, and rarely seem to express a simple one-to-one causal relationship between what happens to us as we grow up and who we become as adults. Some of these "axe murderers" have in fact grown up to become Rabbis, educators, doctors, and wonderful mothers and fathers themselves. Sadly, we also know of many cases where apparently sensitive, caring, and enlightened parents have had horrible and tragic difficulties with their children. Apparently, when it comes to the formation of personality, one never knows. Perhaps the Torah's secretiveness about Abraham's childhood and early family life is meant to express this truth: we can come from almost any kind of background, any kind of family, and any kind of society, and become almost anything. We are not told about Abraham's past because, ultimately, his past doesn't really matter. His parents' sins or good deeds, the kind of family he grew up in, his social circle, all of that is of secondary importance, and of no direct relevance, to who Abraham would become. What matters is what he does with the hand he was dealt, what he makes of the life he was born into, what he makes of himself. This may be why the first thing that God says to him, at the very start of next week's parsha, is "lech lecha" - go, leave the home and society of your father, because what matters is not your past, but the journey you embark upon, which, of necessity, leaves that past behind. What matters is where you go, and not where you come from. What might also matter are the indirect, unpredictable effects which things that happened to Abraham may have had on him. The Torah is telling us, with its silence on the subject of Abraham's upbringing, that we can never really be sure which interactions he may have had as a child were the ones that turned him into the adult he became; what incident with which friend or relative, or what word a parent or teacher may have said to him, might have been the trigger which, in fact, sent him on his journey to become Abraham. Which is a good reason for us all to be mighty careful, and hopeful, about the impact our behavior may have on the people around us. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix