Was Abraham a Jew?

Hey Yosef,

I wanted to start by telling you who I am and why I'm writing this. I'm a locksmith in Calgary. I've been watching your videos for a long time and I'm a huge fan. I love the way you talk with people, and I love that you make them answer for what their own book says. You've responded to a comment of mine before, and this time I'm writing it out properly, because in your latest debate you said something that I disagree with more than anything I've ever heard you say, by a long shot. It isn't that I disagree with your strategy. The information you gave there is twisted. I'm writing this because I care about you and about what you're doing, and because I think what you said in that video is going to hurt people who don't know any better. I think you already know everything I'm about to tell you. This isn't about you not knowing. It's about what happens when the people who don't know hear it from you.

What you said

In the video with the jihadi that went up on September 14, at three minutes forty nine, he has just asked you what Abraham was in our book. You say he was the first Jew, the father of the Jewish people. He asks if Abraham was Jewish, and you say Abraham was a monotheist. He asks again, so he was not Jewish, and you say no, he wasn't bound by the halacha and he had sons that weren't Jewish. Then he pushes, and you say Jacob technically was not a Jew either, but he was the father of the Jewish people.

Half a minute earlier you had it right. Then you gave it away, and you gave it away on his definition, not ours. Everything below is about that.

The one thing the other side has right

The word Jew comes from Yehudah. Its first appearance in all of Tanach is in Melachim II chapter 16, a thousand years after Abraham, and the first person ever called an "ish Yehudi" is Mordechai in the Megillah. So if someone says Abraham never carried the title Jew, they're right about the title. There is no source in our own tradition that says he wasn't the first Jew. What there is, is sources that argue about the title and the legal category, which is a different thing. Parashat Derakhim opens with the question of whether Abraham ever left the category of the sons of Noah at all, and the Ramban on Bereishit 26:5 says the Avot took the Torah on themselves and were bound by it only in the Land. Those are arguments about what Abraham was bound to. None of them are arguments about whether he was the first of us.

And the Torah does give him a title. It calls him Avraham HaIvri, Abram the Hebrew, in Bereishit 14:13, the first person in the book to carry it, and Bereishit Rabbah 42:8 brings the reading that he was the man who stood on one side while the whole world stood on the other. So the question was never whether Abraham was called a Jew. The question is what a Jew is.

What a Jew is

The Gemara in Megillah 13a asks why Mordechai is called a Yehudi when he was from the tribe of Binyamin, not Yehudah. Rabbi Yochanan's answer: because he repudiated idolatry, and anyone who repudiates idolatry is called a Yehudi. The classic reading of the word is yichudi, one who declares that Hashem is one. That's what the word means in the Gemara's own hands.

The Rambam tells the story at the start of the laws of idolatry. The world forgot Hashem. A few men still knew Him, Chanoch and Metushelach and Noach and Shem and Ever, and the world went on that way until Abraham was born. Then a boy in Ur started asking who turns the sphere, and once he had the answer he went out and told everybody and broke the idols in the open. Bereishit Rabbah 38:13 has him alone in his father's idol shop with a club in his hand. The men before him knew. Abraham was the one who stood up in front of the whole world and tore idolatry down in public, and that is the man the covenant got built on.

Not bound by the halacha

You said he wasn't bound by the halacha. He didn't have a written Torah, that's true, and I'll come back to why that matters. But not bound isn't true, and the Torah says so itself. Bereishit 26:5: "inasmuch as Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge: My commandments, My laws, and My teachings." The last word there is Torotai, My Torahs, plural, and that's the word the Gemara in Yoma 28b builds on when it says Abraham kept the entire Torah before it was given. He didn't have the laws written down, but Hashem made sure he knew them, and he lived them. He circumcised himself at ninety nine years old. Nobody does that unless he is bound.

It's not that we got the Torah and all of a sudden we were bound to those laws. It's the opposite. We were bound to the laws before we got the Torah. The Torah came once we were a people, to organize it and to make a system that could be spread and shared with the world instead of kept to ourselves.

The covenant started with him

The Torah didn't come to Abraham, but the covenant did, and the covenant is the thing. In Bereishit 12 Hashem tells him He will make of him a great nation and that all the families of the earth will bless themselves by him. In chapter 17 comes the covenant of circumcision and his new name, father of a multitude of nations. Then Bereishit 18:19, which to me is the strongest verse in this whole discussion. Hashem says He singled Abraham out so that he would instruct his children and the ones after him to keep His way, doing what is just and right. He's the first person in the world charged with handing it down. Yeshayahu 51:2 says it to us straight: "Look back to Abraham your father and to Sarah who brought you forth, for he was only one when I called him." And a convert with none of his blood says "God of our fathers" in his prayers because of Abraham; the Yerushalmi in Bikkurim rules it, and the Rambam brings it: he is the father of everyone who comes under the wings of the Shechinah. The lesson, the whole structure of it, started with Abraham.

Why Abraham, and not Noah

People ask why it starts with Abraham and not someone before him. Noah was righteous, the Torah says so. But look at how the Torah describes the two of them. Noah walked with Hashem. Abraham says of himself, the God before whom I walked. Rashi on Bereishit 6:9 points at exactly that difference: Noah needed Hashem to hold him up, Abraham walked on his own strength.

The bigger difference is what each of them did with it, and this is something my close friend Rabbi Yisrael Levi taught me and I've learned on my own since. Noah warned them. Rashi says the ark took a hundred and twenty years so people would ask what it was for and he could tell them a flood was coming. What he never did was plead for them. The Zohar Chadash on Noach has Hashem call him a foolish shepherd after the flood, when he finally weeps for the world: I told you it was coming so that you would plead for them, and you built the ark and saved yourself. Abraham argued with Hashem for Sodom. And Abraham went out to people. The Gemara in Sotah 10b tells how. He planted an eshel, an inn, Rashi says on Bereishit 21:33. He'd bring people passing by into it, feed them, give them a place to stay, and when they got up to thank him he'd tell them, you didn't eat from mine, you ate from the God of the world, so thank Him. If you're willing to thank Him, the meal is on Him. That was Abraham spreading the knowledge of Hashem, one meal at a time. He went against the whole world and wasn't afraid to show it, and he never tried to hurt anybody doing it. He didn't do it by the sword. He did it through love, and that's what Judaism is.

So the line runs like this. Adam and Eve experienced Hashem in the world. Noah was the next step, a man who wasn't just aware of Hashem but lived a righteous life. Abraham was the step after that, a man who took that righteousness out to other people. And to spread it the right way he had to know the laws, so Hashem taught him, unwritten. That's the step that makes him the first of us. Nobody before him did it, and Yitzchak and Yaakov were born into it, while Abraham entered it.

Then Moses. It took a long time to become a people, and it happened under slavery in Egypt. Moses freed the people who were carrying what Abraham had passed down, and at Sinai they got it in writing. That's where the term comes from, getting something in writing. Sealed, physical, something you could hand to the next generation without saying a word. The point of the Torah was never to start something new. It was to continue what had been going since Abraham, at the next stage, as a system that holds people accountable over time. Abraham's job was to be righteous and spread it. Moses' job was the same thing, inside a system. That's what the Torah is.

The sons

You also said he had sons that weren't Jewish, as if that proves something about him. It doesn't. At Abraham's stage the line wasn't drawn by a rule, it was named by Hashem, and He said it to him directly, about those exact sons, in Bereishit 21:12: through Isaac shall your offspring be called. The Gemara in Nedarim 31a reads that as in Isaac, but not all of Isaac, which is how Esau ends up outside the line with Rivka for a mother. And the rule we live by now says the same thing about a father. A Jewish man's children by a non-Jewish woman are not Jewish. It goes by the mother, never the father, and the Gemara in Kiddushin 68b learns it from Devarim 7. That's never changed. Hagar wasn't Jewish. Sarah was. Yitzchak is and Yishmael isn't, and none of it says a thing about Abraham. Sons outside the line prove nothing about the man the line came from.

The strongest thing they can say back

I want to be fair to the other side. The strongest thing anyone can say is the Rambam in Issurei Biah 13: Israel entered the covenant with circumcision, immersion and an offering, before the Torah was given, and a convert enters the same way today. That's mainstream halacha, and it means the Jewish people as a people, with a legal status, was constituted at Sinai. I don't argue with that. But the Rambam's own account of Abraham cuts the other way. Right after Abraham finds Hashem, the Rambam has him gathering thousands, writing books on it, teaching Yitzchak, who teaches Yaakov, who sets Levi over a yeshiva to keep the mitzvah of Abraham. Rashi on Bereishit 12:5 says the souls they made in Charan were the people Abraham and Sarah brought under the wings of the Shechinah, Abraham the men and Sarah the women. People were joining this thing in Abraham's own lifetime. Sinai is where that house got its legal status, but it isn't where the house started. And notice what even the Ramban says: Abraham kept the whole Torah before Sinai, by his own choice. A man who takes the whole Torah on himself with nobody obliging him is more bound to it, not less. That's a bigger claim about the man, not a smaller one.

Where the jihadi's line comes from

The jihadi's line comes from the Quran, chapter 3 verse 67: Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, he was a hanif, a Muslim. That's the verse behind what he said at six minutes in, when he told you Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but a monotheist, and that monotheist comes from the word Muslim. That isn't a correction of the Torah, it's a different claim from a different book, written well over two thousand years after Abraham. When you answer that he was a monotheist, and then that no, he wasn't bound by the halacha, you're answering inside his sentence, and he walked away with it.

Why I couldn't let this one go

I know why you do it. You argue from the Quran because that's what gets through to them, and you show them their own book says things they don't want to hear. You tell them, to you your religion and to me mine, I don't need you to change, I hope we see each other in Jannah. I understand the strategy. But there's a line, and I think you crossed it here, and I think it's part of a pattern.

Once before, you said that a child in Palestine has the same value to you as your own child, and I commented then. I said it's good that you care about the children in Palestine, and nobody wants any child to die. But your own children come first, simple as that. If someone puts us in a situation where we have to choose between their kids and our kids, we choose our kids. They're not the same, and saying they are doesn't make it true. You pushed back that all you meant was that every child matters and no child should suffer, which is the safe thing to say. This is the same thing, only bigger. To keep the conversation with a Muslim going, you say the thing that sounds like their book instead of the thing that's true in ours.

And it's the same thing when Olam Haba gets talked about as if it's Jannah. They're not the same thing, and talking about them as one thing is mixing Judaism into Islam. When a Jew who doesn't know hears you say it, he learns that they are.

Here's the damage. The jihadi didn't learn anything from you, he already had his verse. But the Jewish people watching who don't know, who thought Abraham was the first Jew and now think, I guess he wasn't, just learned the Quran's version of Abraham from you. They're going to believe the Quran over the Torah on the question of who our father was, because you said it. That is so against the Torah. That's not how you educate anyone. You don't teach people by letting them believe something that isn't true because that's what it says in their book.

The part I have to say plainly

I don't think you believe Abraham wasn't a Jew. I think you were catering to the man in front of you because you thought that's the best way to get through to him. But catering to him is blinding you to what it does to everyone else watching, and everyone else is who you're actually reaching.

Your whole philosophy is truth. Share the reality, stand behind it, don't cater and don't bow to people who want you dead in the hope that they'll accept you. That's what I watch you for. So I'm asking you to hold yourself to it here. You're way too smart, way too influential and way too important to Judaism and to Israel to hand Abraham to the Quran to win a moment in a debate.

And the last part, which is the part that actually worries me. Pirkei Avot chapter 5: whoever causes the many to be righteous, no sin comes through him, and whoever causes the many to sin is not given the means to repent. Teaching a mistake to a quarter of a million people is a heavier thing than making one. I don't think you saw what it costs. I'm telling you because I can't stand by and say nothing after that video, and because I care about you and about what you're building.

So here is what I'm asking, and it's small. A pinned comment under that video, or thirty seconds at the start of the next one: Abraham was the first Jew, and here is why. You'll say it better than I just did.

I hope you take this the way it's meant. Good or bad, let me know.

Isaac Hashman