Recorded live on Clubhouse on Friday October 15th 2021 Parshat Lech Lecha - Geoffrey Stern, Rabbi Adam Mintz and Rabbi Abraham Bronstein explore various ways of viewing Abraham's epic journey and how it reflects our own.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/354270
Transcript (excerpt):
You know, I could make the argument that Abraham was the first atheist. And what I mean to say is, if you look at Abraham from the perspective of Terach, or if you follow the story of Nimrod, who puts him into a fiery furnace? Here is a guy who's saying that everything the world believe was a God does not exist. He says, No, the sun has no power, the stars have no power, this Totem, this animal, it has no power. And and what he was claiming, was, in fact, of a power and of course, this is all a projection of the Midrash, or of Maimonides or of the Zohar was this hidden this unseen, untouchable thing from the perspective of the landed powers that be he was denying God, he was denying all that they believed in and from that perspective it leads all the way to Spinoza, who was excommunicated by saying God is no way but God is everywhere. Maybe he was the first secularist.
Avraham Bronstein 20:13
You remind me of Peter Brown. So Peter Brown, the great historian of the Roman Empire, and one of his books about religion in the ancient Roman Empire, or the classical world, talks about how the Judeans, the original Jews were seen as atheists by the more polytheist, pre Christian Roman Empire at the time, because they couldn't comprehend how Jews maintain the belief not in their God, but in a god. It didn't make any sense to them.
Geoffrey Stern 20:44
Fantastic. Yochanan welcome to the bima
Yochanan 20:48
Thanks, thanks. Thanks so much for having me. By the way, Rabbi Maza, the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, 400 years ago, he says what you just said. So he says that Abraham was a kultur b'kalim . He was like, like you said, he was the first secularist or atheists to to deny all the deities, all the old the religions of the environment.
For full Transcript: https://madlik.com/2021/10/14/abrahams-epic-journey-and-our-own/