Smashing Idols - Parshat Lech Lecha Drash 2025/5786

There is a great midrash, a great story, to put us in the mind of Abraham when he was found by God. The story goes: there is a wanderer who comes across a building that is on fire. The wanderer looks to the building and wonders who could possibly be in charge, and where they are. As the wanderer is wondering this question, the owner of the building comes out and announces that he is the owner of the building.

This, it is said, is how Avram found the world. Avram was looking at a world lit up in flames when God came out and announced that it was God who was the master of the universe.

And thus monotheism is created. As Avram was looking to understand how this world lit up in flames could possibly be sustained, he found God, and as we will read momentarily when we read the Torah, “Avram went forth as Adonai had commanded him.” (Gen 12:4).

Avram followed God zealously, and began this by destroying his father’s idols, effectively destroying his father’s access to his own gods.

Allow me to illustrate this point. Avram’s father (Terah) was a shop owner, and sold idols of the local gods to the people in their town of Uhr Kasdeem. One day, Terah left Avram in charge of the shop. Avram, as a doubter of these idols, smashed them – one and all – before anyone noticed. A customer came into the shop and asked what happened. Avram responded that the idols had been given an offering, and that they started to fight over who deserved this offering. In the fight, the largest of them all took a stick and destroyed the rest in its hunger. 

When the world is filled with false idols, how do we respond? In the creation of monotheism, and eventually what we know as Judaism, Avram saw a world that was on fire, and the only answer that he knew was to destroy what he knew and start over in a new homeland.

Consider this: these were the idols that he grew up with, and that his father told him were the gods that he could place his belief in. I have to imagine that for Avram, it must have been emotionally wrought to destroy his own idols. In order to do so, he had to turn his back on what was his grounding force since he was a child.

The way I see it, idols here can be understood as the way in which we ground our identity. Nowadays, those idols might be our societal norms, such as the constitution, our favorite baseball team, or our social media feeds. Dr. Aviva Zornberg, a Scottish Jewish theologian, agrees, arguing that “The idol is not the object itself, but the projection of a powerful human desire: the desire for the beauty, the wisdom, the energy of the other… Such an idol need not be a statue; it can be an idea, an institution, a text.”  

The Torah’s objective is to help us to understand our lives through the lens of God, and with an understanding that God is what grounds our lives and connects each of us in this community. YET we each are raised with different idols which ground our lives, and that’s okay! I’m not saying to get rid of the constitution, God forbid. But to follow a false idol is a grave sin. These false idols appear to ground our lives, but in fact lead us away from community and a sense of humility before the universe. That’s the sin.

So, for Avram, as he wakes up to the fictions of his father’s idols, this is a powerful awakening, and the process is slow and painful. Turning one’s back on what grounded their childhood is a vulnerable process; it takes time to feel grounded in the new. The Torah’s version of Avram’s awakening to a singular God is almost immediate. But there is so much we are missing. Even after he left his home and started this new path, did he have doubts? Did he ever lose faith in his God; a god with no physical manifestation in a world where people could subscribe to the newest and flashiest god?

But the Torah offers a blessing, which God gives to Abraham as he starts this journey. God says: 

“I will make of you a great nation,

And I will bless you;

I will make your name great,

And it shall be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you

And I will pronounce doom on those who curse you;

Through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

And this part is crucial. He is leaving his homeland, he is leaving what has been his community and his faith and everything that he understood to be givens, promises. And in that precise moment when he is feeling most alone, with only his nephew and wife at his side at the beginning of the journey, God gives him the assurance that he needs. As if to say, Avram, you’ll be okay. I’ve got you. I know the future, and in the future you will be loved.

This message is something that each of us could hear at one point or another. You have a community who loves you. You might not feel it now, and I know things are hard, but you can lean on those who love you. They’ll hold you.

And you may know someone who needs this message. You can tell them; I’ve got you. I don’t know the future, but I know that I’ll be there with you.

Perhaps, this is what community is. And this community is filled with love, and support. May we each know that we are held by this community, and perhaps by those beyond as well. So that in our most vulnerable moments, when we are smashing our own idols, we have a place to return to.

Shabbat shalom.