What's the Point?

Retaking Nihilism

Have you asked yourself this question recently? I’m still feeling fairly raw from the election results the other night so I wanted to utilize this space to share some hopefully connected thoughts that can provide an answer or two to that question. When I woke up at 2:30am to check the election results, my initial thoughts over the next two hours centered around this question.

Reflecting on what it was like to live in a Trump presidency already was tiring and now to think about doing it again sent me down a middle of the night rabbit hole. Especially now as I imagined many Trump voters come next year wondering, “wait, why am I paying more for imported goods?” or, “wait, gutting the department of education is going to do what to my child?” there was something therapeutic around giving in to the nihilistic question of wondering what is the point.

Then, I came across a line in our portion which struck me in that I don’t know if I had ever noticed it before. In Genesis 17, God details the covenant that is being made with Avraham. This covenant is marked by circumcision. After a lovely description of what that covenant entails, the text tells us in verse 22:

וַיְכַ֖ל לְדַבֵּ֣ר אִתּ֑וֹ וַיַּ֣עַל אֱלֹהִ֔ים מֵעַ֖ל אַבְרָהָֽם׃

Done speaking with him, God was gone from Abraham.

And I wondered, what is the point? The text picks up right after this verse with Abraham fulfilling what God just asked him so why was it necessary for this logistical note to be put in the text? A major collection of commentators see the language translated here as “gone” more accurately as “ascended” in the sense that this moment speaks to the heightened spiritual status of Abraham. God arose from Abraham because of how elevated he already was.

I then came across a Midrash from Bereishit Rabbah 47:8 that is discussing an earlier mention of Abraham being at a placed called Mamre. Except the Midrash interprets Mamre not as a place but a person:

And why was he called Mamre? Rabbi Azarya in the name of Rabbi Yehuda in the name of Rabbi Simon: It is because he was brazen-faced regarding Abraham. When the Holy One told Abraham to circumcise himself, he went and consulted with his three friends. Aner said to him: ‘You are already one hundred years old and you are going to bring pain upon yourself?’ Eshkol said to him: ‘What, are you going to put an end to yourself in the midst of your enemies?’ Mamre said to him: ‘[This is] your God who stood by you [during your ordeal] in the fiery furnace, and during [your war with] the kings, and during the famine, and in this matter that God has said to you, to circumcise yourself, you do not heed that message?’ The Holy One said to him: ‘You gave him counsel to circumcise himself; by your life, I will not appear to him in Aner’s palace, nor in Eshkol’s palace, but only in your palace.’ That is what is written: “The Lord appeared to him in the palace of Mamre” (Genesis 18:1).

This teaching sees boldness in Abraham’s friend Mamre. He is able to stand in the face of oppositional forces who want Abraham to only look out for himself and not fulfill this covenantal promise and remind him that there are forces more powerful than just his individual needs. Mamre is rewarded for this loyalty by having God appear at his place. It is a powerful reflection on what fuels courage in the face of powerful currents cutting against you.

It’s taken in an even deeper direction by Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, the Chasidic Rebbe known as the Kedushat Levi¹. After quoting the above Midrash, he says the following:

The point our author sees in our ‎verse is that Avraham was given an opportunity to refuse ‎carrying out this commandment, so that if he withstood the ‎temptation to do so he could receive an even greater reward for ‎having resisted the urgings of the evil urge. God’s “ascending from ’above’ Avraham,” means that God ‎distanced God’s self from Avraham for a while in order to give the ‎evil urge, in the guise of two of his friends, an opportunity ‎to tempt him not to obey this commandment.‎

To be sure, there are parts of this teaching that do not resonate with me on a theological level. Conceptually though, I find it resonant. This was a moment where Abraham had a choice according to the Kedushat Levi. He could decide whether he was going to follow through on God’s ask. In doing it, he would be rewarded. The reason why the Torah tells us God “arose” according to the Kedushat Levi is that Abraham needed to feel that absence and in its place the alluring tendrils of the evil inclination to find out what he was made of.

I find that relatable in this moment. No, I don’t think God is testing me, or any of us. But I do think we have these moments in life, especially when we feel an absence of divinity, a sense of being unmoored, and palpably darkness that leave us in the clutches of our worse angels. In those moments, we always have a choice.

I’m not yet at the point of offering up pollyannish sentiments about where we go from here. Nor do I believe those of us whose candidate lost need to extend some mythical olive branch to people whose votes represent very real threats against people we love. That may come another day.

But now, in this moment, I think we have a choice. For each of us it is different. This is because the yetzer hara, that evil inclination is uniquely your own. It is pushing you to answer that “what’s the point” with a big sigh of apathy. I don’t know where the path leads yet and even if there exists this aspirational America that many of us have believed in.

I do believe that in this moment of absence and lacking, we can remind ourselves that we have agency. Something else exists there beyond nihilism. There is a point. It is us and within us. We’ll take our time to find it. And then, we’ll be ready with some answers to “what’s the point.”

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend!

1. Lech Lecha 49