עֲשָׂרָה שֶׁיּוֹשְׁבִין וְעוֹסְקִין בַּתּוֹרָה, שְׁכִינָה שְׁרוּיָה בֵינֵיהֶם
Ten who are sitting together and engaging in Torah, the Divine Presence rests among them (Pirke Avot 3.6)
In our parashat hashavua, the weekly reading of the Torah, we begin the story of Abraham (originally Avram) who is seen as the ancestor of the Jewish people. As our tradition preserves the myth, Avraham is the עברי ivri, a word which literally means “one who crosses over.” Avraham is an immigrant from Mesopotamia (the area which is today Iraq) and it is this identity which defines him, and all of us after him who are part of the community then called Ivrim, Hebrews.
This is the “great man” approach to history. It is one way to interpret human experience and turn it into a narrative. We are very familiar with this way of telling the human story: it is the habit of believing that individuals make history. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves; Alexander the Great conquered the world; Moshe Rabbenu led the Jews out of Egypt.
The “great man” theory of history is convenient for simple storytelling. It’s also wildly wrong, and, what’s more, it erases the real stories of what happens to us. It is clear that no one person can make history, really: the circumstances of our lives are made up of a myriad of confusing, conflicting, mostly unsensed words, and acts, and expectations, and assumptions.
The “great man” theory of history is a lazy way to understand existence. And it is an inevitable if mistaken outgrowth of our dependence upon the modern idea that we, as individuals, have the potential to change the world, when in actuality, all we have the potential to do is to agree with enough others to make something happen, whether it’s a barn raising, or an election, or a war.
Abraham didn’t do anything alone. We’re not even sure that Abraham was the primary actor in his story; evidence indicates that his partners, Sarah and Hagar, and later Keturah, are independent actors with their own agendas (to literally see this plainly in the text, look at the way that Leah and Rachel decide how Jacob will spend the night in Genesis 30.14-18). We only know the story they way transmitters assumed it should be told; we don’t know what else was erased by the decisions they made.
What are you assuming today, after Tuesday’s monumental Election Day and its truly frightening aftermath, with newly emboldened thugs already seeking to persecute the vulnerable? What does our assumption about the capacity of the individual say to us right now: that one person can upend everything about our lives? That it has happened before? That the U.S. democracy is now inevitably ended?
This is the enervating poison of the belief in individual agency, the dark flip side of the encouragement we give each other that each one of us is special and capable of great things. That is the simple truth. The complex truth, however, is that you and I as individuals are capable of very little unless we are united in our efforts with others with whom we share not only common purpose but trust, reliance, and awareness that I can do nothing without you.
During the years 2017-2020, Trump didn’t incarcerate thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents; he probably didn’t lift a personal hand to add a single string of barbed wire to a concentration camp. A whole lot of other people all agreed to help make the horrors he envisioned into the trauma too many innocents suffered.
And l’havdil (not comparing the two individuals) Abraham didn’t create a people; we did, the ערב רב “erev rav” (mixed multitude) that went out of Egypt afraid but committed to each other, over many years of walking and stumbling and trying again to discern the path we are meant to take together through the wildnerness of this life and its promises and dangers. That is why there is another origin story preserved in our sacred text, that of parashat HaAzinu:
יִמְצָאֵ֙הוּ֙ בְּאֶ֣רֶץ מִדְבָּ֔ר וּבְתֹ֖הוּ יְלֵ֣ל יְשִׁמֹ֑ן יְסֹבְבֶ֙נְהוּ֙ יְב֣וֹנְנֵ֔הוּ יִצְּרֶ֖נְהוּ כְּאִישׁ֥וֹן עֵינֽוֹ
HaShem found them in a desert region, in an empty howling waste; engirded them, watched over them, guarded them as the pupil of the eye. (Deut. 32.10)
Them, not him, or her – a people, not a “great man.” No individual shapes the world. No individual can do everything, or, really, anything, without cooperation and collaboration. Individuality is a dangerous myth when it leads us to feeling that there is nothing we can do, since an individual has won an election.
There’s a lot you can do now, but, frankly, none of it can be done alone. This is the time for belonging. If you are not a member of some group of people upon whom you can rely for a sense of belonging, now is the time to remedy that lack in your life.
It may be difficult at first to realize that the silly slogan of our time, “I’m just not a joiner” has always been a self-delusion. We may each have to do some dis-assembly of parts of the story we’ve been telling ourselves about our individuality, and strike out, like Abraham, but more like Sarah and Hagar who made common cause (according to the actual text!) toward a new understanding of the world and our place in it.
Fulfilling one’s destiny as one of the ivrim, the Hebrews, means that crossing over must still be an important part of the defining story of who we Jews are: from the known to the unknown, not as a solitary individual in some self-deluded sense of individual capacity, but rather with the sobering realization that we all are in need, most of all, of each other. No one person is a kehillah, a community, and that we are meant to be in community.
חזק חזק ונתחזק
hazak, hazak v’nit’hazek
May we find our strength in each other, and so find HaShem
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 