{"id":37313,"date":"2018-08-08T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-08T10:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=37313"},"modified":"2022-03-05T23:26:25","modified_gmt":"2022-03-05T21:26:25","slug":"why-is-abraham-complicit-in-cruelty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/why-is-abraham-complicit-in-cruelty\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is Abraham Complicit in Cruelty?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[418,391,363,428],"acf":{"old_id":"37313","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":34267,"related_cahpter":"21","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Could it be the abusive model of parenting he learned from his father?","content":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;Cast out that slave woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac!\u201d (Genesis 21:10)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hagar is an enslaved woman with no means, and her name literally means, &#8220;stranger;&#8221; Sarah would rather imperil the lives of a vulnerable woman and child than share the inheritance that is legitimately his. Abraham balks, but God tells him to heed her and Hagar and Ishmael are sent out into the ruthless desert. There is no justice here. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Abraham is silent and obedient. \u00a0Where is the man who bravely confronted the Holy One a few short chapters earlier and demanded compassion for the vulnerable? And in Genesis 22, God commands Abraham to bind Isaac to the altar and slit his throat, and he is again ready to simply follow instructions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Met with the chance to demand mercy for the people of Sodom, Abraham is a prophet fighting for the people. Met with the chance to demand even simple justice for his own children, and he is mute, inert. Complicit.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The reason why, I think, goes back to Abraham\u2019s own father, Terah. The midrash tells us that the young Abraham one day smashed the idols that his father made (Genesis Rabbah 38:11). Terah, furious, took him to the politically powerful Nimrod and the two men threw him into a fiery furnace, to be burned alive\u2014he survived only through divine intervention. \u00a0This is the abusive model of parenting that Abraham learned\u2014that children are not to be protected. Justice doesn\u2019t apply to them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even when Abraham set out to the Promised Land, he couldn&#8217;t extract himself from the patterns he had learned as a child. He didn\u2019t have a model of fathering that involves love, caring or compassion, and so when asked to behave without mercy to his own sons, he doesn&#8217;t comprehend that things could go a different way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our obligation is to try to become as clear as possible on on the ways in which we may have been thrown in the fire, and to acknowledge that, even if we did get out\u2014we may not be as unscathed as we might think we are. Knowing where we&#8217;re burned enables us to be careful as we move forward, to try to bring healing, rather than suffering, down the generational lines.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":37331,"id":37331,"title":"hagar-abraham","filename":"hagar-abraham.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/hagar-abraham.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/why-is-abraham-complicit-in-cruelty\/hagar-abraham\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"hagar-abraham","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":37313,"date":"2018-08-09 06:16:33","modified":"2022-03-05 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