Don't Compete
Abraham's Quest To Live Without Jealousy
Abram said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, between my herdsmen and yours, for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Let us separate. If you go north, I will go south; and if you go south, I will go north.” Lot looked about him and saw how well watered was the whole plain of the Jordan, all of it—this was before the LORD had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah—all the way to Zoar, like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt. (Genesis 13:8-10)
Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. (John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Sec. 27)
The Torah does not tell us why God chooses Abraham. It does not tell us what Abraham was thinking or feeling when he accepted God’s call, in this week’s parasha, Lech L’cha (Gen. 12:1-17:27), “to go from your land, your homeland, your father’s home, to the place that I will show you.”
But we can infer that whatever Abraham believed, he was highly disagreeable, deeply contrarian. It takes an unimaginable amount of self-confidence and conviction to leave one’s society behind and venture out towards a new one without anything but trust in the process. Yes, Abraham is promised tremendous upside (“I will bless you…and make of you a great nation”), but in the moment of his response, he has no social validation. The line between genius and self-deluded madman is always faint, especially at the beginning.
An armchair philosopher might come to the conclusion that there’s only one God who created the world, but only a faithful person can act on such a conclusion, can put real “skin in the game.” The crux of the Torah’s introduction of Abraham into the picture is not that Abraham is a person of theoretical wisdom or insight or understanding (though he might be, and though this is how medieval thinkers like Maimonides imagine him), but that he is a person who takes risks that most of us would not. Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham in Fear and Trembling makes this point emphatic—Abraham goes so far at times that he appears monstrous to those who cannot walk with him. Abraham and his family pay a high price for being pioneers. And it would be selection bias to romanticize them too much when for every Abraham we hear about there are hundreds for whom it did not work out.
Despite being a contrarian, Kabbalistic thought surprisingly identifies Abraham with the attribute of Hesed, loving-kindness. Abraham and Sarah were known to epitomize an ethos of hospitality. When Abraham and Sarah leave Haran, they do so with “the souls that they made there,”—an allusion, says the Midrash, to all the people they taught and brought closer to God. That Abraham was iconoclastic did not mean that he was a misanthrope. On the contrary, his willingness to stand apart made him highly desirable, his example contagious. Or said differently, Abraham’s love of God and his recognition of his existence as fashioned in the divine image compelled him to be disagreeable, to shrug at the possibility of imitating those around him.
René Girard theorized that human conflict arises not from our differences, but from our similarities. Mimetic rivalry occurs when we take our cues for what desire from one another. In short, we envy people not for what they have, but because we want to be like them; and we want to be like them because we feel that we are them; they are just like us. A lack of a sense of self leads to endless competition over things we only value because others value them. Luke Burgis, in his book on Girard, Wanting, names this kind of reality Freshmanistan, for its evocation of the pettiness of high school feuds. Abraham, if you will, is commanded by God to leave Freshmanistan. He’s also able to do so because of his love. The love he has for God and that he feels God has for him allows him to see beyond the small-mindedness of his neighborhood in Ur Kasdim.
When Abraham arrives in Egypt, he tells Sarah to pretend that she’s his sister:
I know what a beautiful woman you are. If the Egyptians see you, and think, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me and let you live.
After a life without pretense, a life of telling it like it is, and straying from the mainstream, Abraham returns to society by necessity (there’s a famine), and the first thing he and Sarah do is pretend.
If the religious path is the path of truth, the path of survival, and of socialization, often requires masks, personas, blending in.
By Girard’s theory, the Egyptians don’t desire Sarah because she’s beautiful—they desire to be Abraham, to have the joy and fulfillment that he has, and that they think they will have if they take his wife. They don’t want Sarah, they want Abraham’s face when he looks at her. Agnes Callard, reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, makes a similar point in her essay on jealousy, “The Other Woman.” Natasha doesn’t want her husband’s affection, which she imagines is reserved for someone else; rather, she wants to be desired as though she were the other woman.
It’s only a matter of time before Abraham has to contend with the fact that, though he might be free of envy, others are not; and though he might be above competition, others still hate him—precisely for this reason.
Abraham is deeply loyal to his nephew, Lot. He goes to war, even entering into alliances with evil kings, to save him. But despite his care for Lot, their proximity sours their relationship. What strife could there be between Abraham and Lot? You might think that it’s strife over resources or land. But both of them are very rich. It’s ironic—they got along better when they had less. Abraham offers Lot to go in any which way, proving that for Abraham the conflict is not about land, but about psychology. Venturing a Girardian reading, Lot envies Abraham, and so no amount of helping him is going to ease the relationship. In fact, the more Abraham helps his nephew, the more hated he may become. The intangible “blessing” of Abraham is what people are after, not the externals.
Lot chooses the beautiful, fertile land—yet it is land that soon will be destroyed because of human evil, perhaps even because of human jealousy.
In Pirkei Avot (5:10) we read:
There are four types of character in human beings:
One that says: “mine is mine, and yours is yours”—this is a commonplace type; and some say this is a Sodom-type of character.
It seems that having a proper sense of boundaries would be normal, even good. How then, is it associated with the people of Sodom? A common answer is that the people of Sodom were selfish, with no sense of communal spirit or common good. That may be. But a Girardian reading would offer this possibility: the people say “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours” precisely because they do not follow it, precisely because they look to one another for a sense of purpose, with no integrity. Sodom is a house of mirrors. Sodom is Freshmanistan. Postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Baudrillard believe there is no escape from this condition. Language is a system of signs, deferring meaning, all the way down. There is no outside the Matrix.
Well, if you believe that, you may have a society that looks like Sodom. Whereas the Abrahamic errand is the quest for transcendence, a way out. It is the quest for a sense of self free of envy, free of imitation. Sodom is Times Square, a world of ads. The natural bounty that Lot sees is unsustainable because the land is occupied by people who do not know how to desire the right things in the right way.
Last week, in parashat Noah, I wrote about God’s commitment to land, specifically, as the site for human life.
What we see from this week’s parasha is that good land is not enough. Or rather, the land is only as good as the people who inhabit it. Abraham makes the land blessed wherever he goes. Lot goes to the objectively better land only to realize that without good people, it’s worthless.
God tells Abraham to go to the land that I will show you, not the land that is of the best quality. Moreover, God does not promise that the land will flourish. Rather, God says “You will be a blessing.” (12:2)
Of course, we need certain environmental conditions to have a good life; of course, ecology and environment are basic to our ability to live and survive at all—and there are times when we, like Abraham, have to sojourn in Egypt for practical purposes. Some of us have to live our entire lives in Egypt, or so we think.
Yet the lesson of Lech L’cha is that when we are a blessing, when the people around us are blessings, we can live anywhere and elevate it.
Locke understood that it is our human labor which transforms land into property, adding value to what is otherwise merely given. But what Locke gestures at more obliquely, and what Lech L’cha highlights, is that it is not human labor alone that makes the land good, but human existence. Babel, Sodom, and Egypt may have been impressive places as far as technological innovation goes, as far as agricultural advancement goes, but they were inferior as far as the human condition goes.
Abraham is a nomad. The Torah ends or nearly ends with conquest and settlement. Can we take the nomadic, original, truth-seeking character with us when we settle or will we be doomed, like the other civilizations before us, to become places of mimetic rivalry, insecurity, and narcissism? Lech L’cha tells the story not of how Abraham and Sarah got rich, but how they avoided the impoverished life that comes from evaluating oneself on other people’s terms.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh