Notes on the Wandering Mind 2: What's So Great About Abraham?
“When this great one was weaned, he began to wander in his mind…”
– Maimonides on Abraham
The biggest mystery about the First Jew is also the most basic: why him?
Oddly, Abraham’s qualifications are never stated. Scripture gives scant background before the moment he is called out to by God to leave everything familiar and set off on an unmapped journey towards an unknown land, accompanied by laughably grandiose promises of progeny, destiny, and blessing. In a subtle literary sleight-of-hand, we as readers find ourselves mirroring Abraham’s experience: like him, we feel the twinge of nausea, the wash of exhilaration and dread at being swept up suddenly on a pathless journey led by an enigmatic character we’ve just barely met.
Why was this particular Mesopotamian selected to be the protagonist of an epic world-historical saga? Why was he the one chosen to become the First Jew?
This question has been stymying commentators of all traditions since the beginning, generating endless interpretation across the ages till today. According to Midrash scholar James Kugel, from the earliest times Abraham’s story was told, readers were exercised, “disturbed,” by the glaring absence of this essential information: “For the Bible has just now begun Abraham’s story; and suddenly God is promising him that he will be blessed, he will found a great nation, and so forth – what had Abraham done to deserve these things?” (Kugel, The Bible As It Was, 133)
Of the countless interpretive answers that have been offered to this founding conundrum, a striking number foreground not virtue or piety or heroism, not a track record of moral or spiritual excellence – but some form of Wandering. Whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or geographical, commentators attribute to Abraham a native propensity to roam outside the accepted boundaries of his known world in response to some basic unassuageable irritation: an out-of-placeness that sparks an unquenchable quest for answers to uncomfortable questions no one else in his world is asking.
Irritation and out-of-placeness. A question and quest.
These Wanderings unfold along a common trajectory, in which the quest to answer the question leads first to isolation and estrangement, then eventually to profound new ways of seeing and being in the world. The search to vindicate an intuition about a radically different, radically deeper understanding than the views and doctrines held (and violently enforced) by his society, sets him at odds with everything familiar – and seeds a new culture nourished on the spiritual, intellectual, and physical fruits of his Wanderings.
Author Aviva Zornberg characterizes the ancient Sages’ major takeaway of Abraham – not just his life, his primary spiritual legacy – as describing precisely this radical new human trajectory: “It is possible — Abraham is the first to live this possibility — to move to a new place, to deconstruct all the structures of the old place of being, and in a radical act of keri’ah (tearing/ripping), of akirah (uprooting), to create entirely new paradigms of reality.” (Beginning of Desire, 79)
This epic saga officially starts with a call to Wander (“And God said to Abraham, ‘Get the f*ck out!’ ” Genesis 12:1), which in the Bible seems to come out of the blue. But for interpreters from time immemorial, this call is itself predicated and prompted none other than – wait for it – a prior, proven willingness to Wander.
In other words, it’s Wandering all the way down.
And if the wandering mind is an unhappy mind…does that make Abraham the Unhappy Patriarch?