To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
God blessed Abraham with everything. (Genesis 24:1)
Abraham gave everything he had to Isaac; and to the children of his concubine(s) he gave gifts…(Genesis 26:5-6)
God said to Abraham…Everything Sarah says—listen to her (Genesis 21:12)
God saw everything God had made, and behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31)
No sooner does the Torah say that God blessed Abraham with everything than it tells us that Abraham sought to marry off his son, Isaac. Too old to make the journey himself, Abraham sends his servant, Eliezer, to find a wife for the child he nearly sacrificed at the end of last week’s parasha. There is desperation in Abraham’s delegation, as if he is holding on to dear life so that he can leave this world knowing his son will be OK.
If Abraham were truly blessed with everything, in the sense of “having it all,” there would be nothing left for him to do or seek. Whatever everything means, it can’t be exhaustive. Everything, in the Biblical sense, leaves room for more.
The word everything (kol) is a small and apparently non-remarkable word, yet it appears far more frequently in the book of Genesis than any other book of the Torah, suggesting that it may have a special connection to the story of Creation and beginnings. Genesis 1 ends with God observing everything that God has made. Ironically, just as God beholds that it is “very good,” a storm is brewing in Paradise; the story is just underway. Everything is set by the end of Genesis 1—but chaos, action, and change, are waiting in the wings.
Another strange occurrence of the word everything occurs at the end of our parasha, Chayei Sarah (23:1-25:18), as Abraham executes his will. The text says he gave everything to Isaac, but then goes on to say that he gave gifts to his other children. If, indeed he gave everything to Isaac, what was left for him to give? Either you’ll have to say that everything is figurative or you’ll have to say that whatever he gave to Isaac was not mutually exclusive with the gifts he gave his other children. The Talmud suggests that the gifts Abraham gave were some kind of spiritual know-how (such as astrology or the ability to pronounce God’s name) i.e., not some physical substance that is zero-sum. To use a familiar metaphor, a chef can only give his set of knives to one child, but can teach all his children how to cook.
If the word everything were not strange, and strangely placed, the commentators would be silent. But the deceptively simple line, “God blessed Abraham with everything,” provokes the most fanciful interpretations. These include: that everything was the name of Abraham’s daughter, that everything means Abraham was spared having a daughter (since there were no righteous men around for her to marry), that everything means Ishmael repented, that Esau—Abraham’s grandchild—was good as long as Abraham was alive (he sold his birthright the day Abraham died), that everything means the Shechina, the indwelling of the divine presence, and that everything is “a Taste of the World to Come.”
Farfetched or not, the preponderance of expositions of everything reveal the emotional truth that no matter how blessed we are, no matter how grateful we are for everything, there’s always more to desire. The diverging commentaries also demonstrate how subjective the concept everything is. Though everything seems like a universal and abstract term, the Midrashim show it to be a Rorschach test for what each commentator thinks makes a good and complete life.
Another possibility is that the Torah wants us to see that having a full cup leads to generosity. Because Abraham knows himself to be blessed with everything, he is able to ask more deliberately, “How can I give?” Once Abraham is blessed with everything—that is, everything worldly—he can climb his “second mountain,” to use the phrase popularized by David Brooks. The image of a second mountain is particularly trenchant, since the last time we saw Abraham interact with Isaac was atop Mount Moriah, where he nearly offered him up as a sacrifice. They never talk again, and the Torah gives us no dialogue between them on their descent.
Perhaps Abraham’s use of Eliezer to carry out his final mission is not simply on account of his physical ailments and old age, but his psychological blocks. Abraham needs a middle-man to help him heal the trauma he has bequeathed Isaac. The everything that Abraham gives Isaac includes some burdens, including that of being the child of a founder who often put mission over family. For Abraham’s children by concubinage, the legacy of this great man was only positive. Since they knew Abraham more as a persona, only at a distance, their inheritance included only “gifts”: they lacked the difficult intimacy Isaac had with his father. They were deprived and spared the complexity included in everything.
That the word everything conceals a wink also comes through in God’s command to Abraham to do everything that Sarah says, including the seemingly harsh and cruel command to expel Ishmael and Hagar to the wilderness. I believe the word everything, there, is code: God is assuring Abraham not to worry about the result—“Everything is not what it seems; I will take care of them.” Everything here means that we must not conflate the relative and the absolute. Abraham is exonerated from having to play God and is instead commanded to be Abraham, with all of his partiality and limitations. But just because Abraham—and we—are limited, doesn’t mean there isn’t a higher truth, a higher perspective. We can’t be everything to all people, as the saying goes. But God is and can be.
It is a hallmark of pantheism, as the name implies, to equate God with all that is. But as we’ve seen from a few Biblical examples, “all that is,” is not a simple, static set. Everything cannot contain itself. If God is everything it is an everything that is not predetermined, prescribed, or exhaustive. Everything as the Torah uses it, means not totality, but infinity, to use a distinction formulated by Levinas. Totality means we can know and objectify it, infinity means we can’t. The laws of nature are a totality. Our encounter with a human face reveals infinity. God blessed Abraham with infinity, an appreciation for the uniqueness of his life and every human life. Abraham did not have everything in any objective sense; he didn’t need it. He was infinite.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
About the name: Deuteronomy 20:19 teaches that when one conquers territory, one should not cut down the trees, because trees, unlike people, cannot run way. Read spiritually, the image-concept of the “tree of the field” represents that which we must preserve in the face of great cultural, political, and technological upheaval and transformation. As the world becomes more and more modernized, it becomes even more necessary to secure our connection to the wisdom of the ancient past and to ways of being that give our lives irreducible meaning.
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