Dear Chaverim,
This year, we will be employing a particular approach to the weekly pre-Shabbat message. Each week, we will focus on a particular individual who may feature in the Parsha, Haftorah or perhaps one who embodies a lesson within a particular Mitzvah or law. The obvious choices are Abraham, Jacob, Moses etc. However, lesser figures such as Geichazi, Gedalyah and Nimrod – this essay’s focus – will also provide valuable insight and perspective. We feel this is an excellent way to articulate some of the core messages of the Torah.
Who was Abraham? What made him unique, pivotal, and of enduring influence?
We live in a world that has been shaped by his thought and example for close to 4,000 years. On the one hand, evidence of his legacy is everywhere; the Abrahamic faiths account for 47% of the world’s population, spanning all six of its inhabited continents. On the other hand, his influence has evolved over four millennia in ways unimaginable in his own time. The world has changed so much and so radically that it is nearly impossible to account for the many ways Abraham’s influence shapes the 21st century.
The rabbis of the Talmudic period were particularly interested in articulating Abraham’s uniqueness. One of the principal methods of characterizing his persona is by placing his thoughts and deeds in the context of the world in his time.
Enter Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noach, and the grandson of Ham. Nimrod is the first to be described as a גבר, which could be translated as a hero or a strongman, even a bully. His particular variety of bully may have best been captured in the relief with Ashurbanipal killing a lion, [c. 645–635 BC], currently in the British Museum. In this famous work of ancient propaganda, we see the kind of figure for which Nimrod is the archetype.
The Torah says that Nimrod went out to Ashur (as in Ashurbanipal) and built Nineveh, the place where this relief originally stood before the British took it to London for their collection. Hunting and propaganda of the hunt were a spectacular way to project power; the rabbis understood Nimord as a vicious totalitarian.
The Talmud in several places (Eruvin and Pesachim ) states
ולמה נקרא שמו נמרוד שהמריד את כל העולם כולו עליו במלכות. – “Why was he called NiMRoD? Because he caused the whole world to rebel – HiMRD – against [Gd]. This derivation rests on the idea that the Hebrew verb MRD – to rebel – was the essence of the man. He usurped the authority that was due to Gd.”
Nimrod was also king of Shinar, which is the location of the Tower of Babel. The society of the Tower is described as having שפה אחת ודברים אחדים – one language and the same words. This can be understood to be a place where differences of thought and speech were not tolerated. It was a place where dissent and varieties of expression were expressly forbidden. It was positively Orwellian.
Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov understood the Tower of Babel to be a surrogate for Gd, and one that authoritarians tend to seek. He would call it the ‘ism’ that demands the kind of total devotion that Gd would demand. It is the fascist state replacing the divine as the highest cause of society. Dostoevsky combines the idea of rebelling against Gd with the use of idol worship to control an entire society into complete obedience. The totalitarian regime replaces Gd with the false idol of its “ism” – i.e., its ideology. Then it uses propaganda and eliminates free speech to make dissent a crime.
The rabbis took a similar approach in describing the work of the Tower of Babel. The Midrash states that if a brick fell, they would hold a funeral for the brick, but if a person fell from the scaffold, they paid no heed.
The rabbinic interpretation of Nimord as a totalitarian also aligns with the political history articulated by Nicholas B. Breyfogle and Philip C. Brown in Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History. Here, the authors describe the need for totalitarian systems to facilitate the building of the hydraulic systems needed to irrigate the great agricultural societies of the Nile, Mesopotamia, and the Chinese river valleys.
The end of Parshat Noach affords a spectacular midrash that builds on the idea that Haran, Abraham’s brother, died in front of his father Terach. It describes Nimrod as compelling ritual worship of idols. Abraham refuses and is thrown into the fiery furnace. Abraham miraculously survives because of this pure faith. Haran engages in a version of Pascal’s wager; he wagers that it is more rational to believe in Abraham’s god than not because the reward is eternally great, whereas the penalty is infinitely bad. He follows Abraham’s example, but his heart is not sincere. He wavers in his belief and loses the wager. Leaving Haran’s fate aside, the Midrash is the prime example of Abraham resisting the Orwellian thought policing of Nimrodian idol worship. Let’s imagine that the idol is some version of Nimrod, the [false] Gd of his people, ruling with divine authority. Abraham is one of those lone voices of dissent, of independence, trying to escape this bully.
The brilliance of the rabbinic tradition is seen here in how well it characterizes the tyrants of Mesopotamia, almost as they would describe themselves. In this installment of our series, we have examined in modern terms and contexts the meaning of the narrative of Nimrod. It sets the stage to examine the life of Abraham, which is our goal for the next installment in this series.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rosenblatt with Dr. Terry Neiman
,_c._645-635_BC,_British_Museum_(16722368932).jpg){kind=link}