After the war with the five Kings, Hashem comes to Avram in a vision and says, “Fear not, Avram.”
It seems like an odd message.
The war is over and the war has been won – why would Avram be fearful?
I would like to share an answer that touches directly on a tremendous problem facing the many ideological and physical descendants of Avraham: how do we respond to the wars in Syria and Iraq?
The world Hashem creates is not a perfect one. If it were, if we all moved in clockwork to the dictates of G-d, then we would be incapable of imitating G-d. We would be incapable of being truly creative – of making something new in the world. We would be like windup timepieces. Perhaps, even more critically, we would be incapable of having a relationship with G-d. We would not, in any sense, be external to Him. You and I do not, in any meaningful way, relate to our hands.
Our world is imperfect, but because of that, every person has an opportunity to develop a true and close relationship with the Almighty.
Indeed, it is our purpose.
Before the flood, the opportunity for those relationships had been lost. The world was filled with men of name – interested in establishing their own presence, not recognizing the presence of G-d. They were the sons of elohim; believers that the might of their fathers has gifted them with some form of divinity. It was a world filled with murder in zero-sum pursuit of glory and fame. The sons of the powerful had their choice among the daughters of men. There was no check to this. Noach alone sought (and found) grace in the eyes of G-d. The pre-flood world was a world of divine clemency and a world in which good people had no avenue by which to limit those who take the good for themselves.
The flood restores the possibility of relating to G-d. Clemency has been limited. Murderers must be executed – there is some sort of check on the sons of elohim.
But there was then a new challenge: an entire society that sought its own name. Two of the verses which describe the actions of the builders of the Tower of Bavel can be read as “They whitened white and burnt the burnt. For brick for stone and the mortar was for them mortar.” The builders of the Tower were extremists – everything was made white and black. They built not only a Tower, but a society in its image; a society with a single sapha. The word sapha is often translated as ‘language’, but it can also mean ‘distinction’ or boundaries. The variety that is present in rocks has been crushed and replaced by the uniformity of bricks locked together by mortar. Hashem destroys this ideology, easily. He creates saphot. He creates divisions, and the group is scattered. People are rocks once again, and boundaries are reestablished.
But while this threat has been neutralized, mankind was now no closer to relating to G-d. Individuals may have related to Him, but not communities. Mankind was divided and chaotic and no closer to fulfilling their potential.
It is on to this scene that Terach emerged. He moved from one city to another. He named one child (Avram – meaning ‘my father is raised up’) after the past and one (Haran – meaning ‘to conceive, teach, instruct or train’) after the future. The name of the third son captured the limits of the present; Nachor means ‘to dry out, burn or sneeze’.
Terach crossed cultures and times. He understood that there was a greater picture. He was a man whose descendants – male and female – could work to bring mankind to our purpose.