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The story of Abraham smashing his father s idols might be the most important Jewish story ever told and the key to how Jews define themselves. In a work at once deeply erudite and wonderfully accessible, Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin conducts readers through the life and legacy of this powerful story and explains how it has shaped Jewish consciousness.
Offering a radical view of Jewish existence, The Gods Are Broken! views the story of the young Abraham as the primal trauma of Jewish history, one critical to the development of a certain Jewish comfort with rebelliousness and one that, happening in every generation, has helped Jews develop a unique identity. Salkin shows how the story continues to reverberate through the ages, even in its connection to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.
Salkin s work combining biblical texts, archaeology, rabbinic insights, Hasidic texts (some never before translated), philosophy, history, poetry, contemporary Jewish thought, sociology, and popular culture is nothing less than a journey through two thousand years of Jewish life and intellectual endeavor.
- Sales Rank: #1214636 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-04-01
- Released on: 2013-04-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
The story’s not in the Bible, but Hebrew-school veterans, Salkin says, virtually all know it. When he was about bar mitzvah age, Abram destroyed his idol-making father’s wares because, among other things, grown men shouldn’t worship clay figurines. In so doing, he became the first Jew and established the tradition that Jews are idol-smashers. Mining the vast troves of Jewish legendry and midrashim, Salkin expands and deepens knowledge and understanding of the biblical Abram, both before and after God changed his name and promised that his descendants would be the chosen people. He also discusses Moses, when he shattered the first tablets he received from God in a most consequential and very surprising later act of idol smashing. Iconoclasm is essential to being Jewish, Salkin argues, and continues—or should continue—today against the consumerism and materialism worshipped at the altar of free-market economics. Of course, there are consequences for idol smashing, which is why the Jews have so long been exiles and outsiders, dissidents and protesters. Lively, engaging biblical exegesis for Christians, perhaps, even more than Jews. --Ray Olson
Review
“Jeffrey Salkin takes us on a magical journey through Jewish history and texts, showing us how a simple, ancient postbiblical tale is essential for our understanding of the totality of the Jewish experience. It is full of insights that will challenge how we as readers view modern society and the idolatries that are inherent in it.”—Norman J. Cohen, rabbi and professor of Midrash at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, and author of Masking and Unmasking Ourselves (Norman J. Cohen 2012-09-19)
"Mining the vast troves of Jewish legendry and midrashim, Salkin expands and deepens knowledge and understanding of the biblical Abram."—Ray Olson, Booklist (Ray Olson Booklist 2013-04-01)
"Smoothly weaving together contemporary scholarship, midrashic elaborations of scripture, and meditation on the key symbols that evoke his central issue, Rabbi Salkin provides a map of Judaic meaning. By comparing and contrasting Abraham’s breaking of his father’s idols with the breaking of the first set of tablets by Moses, he opens up a investigative mode that has far-reaching consequences for the world Jewish community, both present and future."—Phillip K. Jason, Jewish Book Council (Phillip K. Jason Jewish Book Council)
"Salkin's work—combining biblical texts, archaeology, rabbinic insights, Hasidic texts (some never before translated), philosophy, history, poetry, contemporary Jewish thought, sociology, and popular culture—is nothing less than a journey through two thousand years of Jewish life and intellectual endeavor."—Dov Peretz Elkins, Jewish Media Review (Dov Peretz Elkins Jewish Media Review)
"The text is filled with quotations from throughout Jewish history; Talmud and Midrash, medieval sages and modern scholars have all had important things to say about this small vignette. Salkin has skillfully woven them into a useful and comprehensible tapestry."—Fred Issac, Association of Jewish Libraries Review (Fred Issac Association of Jewish Libraries Review 2013-09-15)
About the Author
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin is the author of numerous books, including Righteous Gentiles in the Hebrew Bible: Ancient Role Models for Sacred Relationships and Putting God on the Guest List, winner of the 1993 Benjamin Franklin Award for the best religion book published in the United States.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Misguided, intellectually sloppy, theologically suspect, spiritual Trojan horse
By Rick J. Strassman
Long review.
This is a dangerous book. The only reason I might recommend it is for one to learn yet another set of anti-Judaism, anti-Israel tropes emerging from our own clerics. Both the title and publisher’s summary are misleading. Rather than an explication of “a certain Jewish comfort with rebelliousness” as exemplified in the story of Abraham and the idols, Salkin has written an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel Trojan horse.
Salkin opens his work with a relatively straight-forward retelling, and contemporary contextualization, of the midrash regarding Abraham’s smashing of his father’s idols in Ur. This, in his addressing the question: “Why did God choose Abraham?” The last section of the book is mostly—but in important ways, not entirely—a familiar call to reinvigorate one’s Jewish religiosity with more fervency and rigor.
There was nothing novel in the initial chapters—the familiar critique of the “idols” of consumerism, materialism, and narcissism—and I debated whether to shelve the book without finishing it. I did note Salkin’s tendency to attribute equivalent “historical” and spiritual legitimacy to midrash and Tanakh. This differs from my approach, which combines admiration for and fascination with the Sages’ creative responses to the foundational text with a recognition that midrash is exegetic. I’m grateful when midrash helps me understand the text. If it doesn’t, there are other ways to do so, including philology and grammar, philosophy, natural science, and ancient near East archaeological discoveries. I feel free to disagree with midrash—either its content or implications. With Tanakh, any case of conflict or confusion that I experience precludes disregarding it. If I can’t understand it now, it will remain simmering on the back burner, hopefully to be explicated at a later date.
As I continued working my way through Salkin’s book, his motivation to place midrash and Tanakh on equal footing became clearer. This was his wish to create midrash on the midrash. In particular, a midrash on the episode of King Nimrod of Ur casting Abraham into the furnace because the latter refused to worship anything other than the one God.
In the original midrash, Nimrod demands that Haran, Abraham’s brother who is on hand for these events, pledge allegiance to the king or to Abraham. Haran equivocates, waiting for the outcome of Abraham’s trial. Seeing that his brother emerges from the furnace unscathed, he votes for Abraham. Nimrod, not surprisingly, throws Haran into the furnace, which accomplishes its task this time.
Next Salkin asks us to “imagine, mischievously” (and who among us wishes to be seen as lacking imagination and a little mischievousness?) an extraordinarily perverse reading of the midrash. That is, Abraham abandoned his brother Haran, allowing him to be killed, by not intervening to save him from Nimrod. Abraham failed, as did their father Terach—who may also have witnessed this drama unfold. This “primal trauma” engendered terrible guilt in Abraham and, according to Freudian psychology, buried itself in Abraham’s unconscious. Further, it continued, and continues, to express itself in the unconscious of Abraham’s progeny; that is, all Jews—including other Biblical patriarchs. This, according to Salkin, is the root of what he sees as the Jews’ proclivity of “sacrificing” their kin—that is, other Jews—oftentimes their children.
Abraham thus began a Jewish tradition of acting-out survivor’s guilt, a Freudian compulsion to repeat, where the unconscious hopes that the outcome will somehow turn out better than did the original incident. According to Salkin, this is why Abraham pleads for God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah. Not because of the patriarch’s compassion, but because of his wish to be freed of the burden of the guilt of Haran’s death—a death he could have prevented but didn’t. Abraham is neurotic, sick. Of course, there is nothing in the midrash suggesting that neither Abraham nor Terach didn’t plead for their brother’s/son’s life. Perhaps they did. And if they did, would Nimrod have listened? But to assume they didn’t plead for Haran’s life got me wondering why Salkin makes this interpretation.
Well, it provides a coherent and damning explanation of why, in Salkin’s view, so many prominent figures in Tanakh threw their kin under the bus. Here, by the way, we see another example of Salkin conflating two separate but related issues by bringing in, unannounced, the additional motivation of the Jewish forebears’ greed and duplicity. While straining credulity, the attribution to Lot of “hereditary survivors’ guilt” in his offering his daughters to the crowd of Sodomites is at least consistent with his original thesis. On the other hand, in an embarrassing misreading of Genesis 20, his suggestion that Abraham handed over Sarah to the Philistine king Avimelech, “exchanging her sexual favors for riches” (page 77), is quite different—and an even more reprehensible motivation than acting out survivors’ guilt.
In addition, what does Salkin’s theory imply? Invoking Freud’s notion of collective repression of (collective) sin is a slippery slope. Freud hypothesized that the Hebrew’s murder of Moses led to an unconscious process of semi-deification and attributing to him Mosaic law. From this, it follows that the de-repression of that murder’s memory would remove the basis of Judaism. This is consistent with Freud’s belief that all religions were obsessive-compulsive neuroses, which would disappear with the widespread adoption of psychoanalytic treatment.
In Salkin’s iteration of Freud’s pathologizing Judaism, if Abraham had access to a top-notch psychoanalyst, it also follows similarly that there would be no Judaism. And now—if all Jews could have their unconscious guilt over Abraham’s primal “sin” (and that’s what it is, not a “trauma”) treated successfully, what would Judaism look like? And an inconvenient question: Where is God in Salkin’s model?
I should note, too, that Salkin raises the confusing prospect that the repressed memory of the Jews’ (or their forebears’) worship of idols is the “primal trauma.” But this is not a repressed memory. The Prophets and the Writings are replete with clearly articulated accounts of Israel’s idol worship.
Salkin’s thinking takes us into some strange territory. For example, he uses his theory (or is it theories: one of hereditary survivors’ guilt motivating “sacrificing” one’s kin, and/or that Jews are greedy and will sell their wives into sexual slavery for money) to explain why Abraham so readily agreed to sacrifice Isaac. Here, we learn that Abraham is neurotically compelled to replay his “sacrifice” of Haran; not that he’s demonstrating his faith in, submission and obedience to, or love of God.
Jacob comes in for especially harsh treatment by Salkin. He equates Isaac’s blessing of Jacob, effectuated through the latter’s disguise prompted by Rebecca, as Jacob’s “sacrificing” Esau. His theory explains Jacob’s “willingness” to “sacrifice” half of his family if Esau attacked his camp; this, rather than being the last and least desirable resort if prayer and gifts failed to halt the feared onslaught. This is Jacob's motivation, not a painful decision regarding which part of his camp would begin his military defense.
This neurotic acting out by the first Jews—“sacrificing” their kin in the unconscious wish that “it won’t turn out so bad this time”—is also why Jacob sent Joseph to search for his brothers. Not in order to reestablish sibling peace among his brood, or because of prophetic inspiration, but as an unconscious reenactment of Abraham’s “primal trauma” of “sacrificing” Haran his brother. Similarly, Jacob “through utter obliviousness” throws Dinah under the bus of Shechem’s sexual predation.
It doesn’t stop there. In fact, it seems as if God is guilty of the same neurotic acting out, as in the next paragraph, we read how the death of Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu for “offering alien fire before YHVH” fits in with this pattern.
What is Salkin attempting to accomplish? I don’t know, but I do believe that some ideas are not worth sharing, particularly if they may bring more calumny against the Jews.
In fact, as I made my way through the disturbing mid-section of the book, the heart of the new ideas Salkin wishes to share, I felt as if I were being invited to condemn the Jews and their forbears. Why, for example, does Salkin portray Jacob’s breeding of uniquely colored sheep and goats as “cheating” Laban? Jacob received instructions on this breeding technique from an angel, in prophecy, from God, after Laban had once too often taken advantage of Jacob’s loyalty and love of Laban’s daughters. Jacob clearly needed divine intervention—he didn’t come up with this “subterfuge” on his own. Such an approach to the patriarchs feels spiteful and demeaning, even if Salkin may think they are novel approaches to the text. Approaches, to the text which lack textual grounding.
Salkin provides many examples of uncritical thinking, conflating various notions in order to buttress his sermonizing. For example, in lauding the attribute of rebelliousness, as exemplified by Abraham in the midrash of smashing his father’s idols, he refers to the case of the rebellious or wayward son, for whom the Torah prescribes the death penalty--a penalty, the Sages (and thankfully, Salkin) note, was never carried out. We know, however, that the rebellious son does not rebel against paganism, idol worship, astrology, and child sacrifice—all those things in the Ur religion which Abraham rejected. Rather, the wayward son rebels against his parents by being a glutton and a drunkard. How could these two examples of rebelliousness be equated in Salkin’s mind? Not all rebellion against one’s parents is the same.
Another example: On page 102 Salkin states that the Israelites brought offerings to the Golden Calf. There is no mention of this in the Torah; rather, Aaron proclaims a “festival to YHVH,” not to the Calf, for the following day. In an even stranger corollary to the Calf incident, Salkin posits that early Christian thinkers believed that Judaism itself (his italics) was the punishment for the Calf. This makes little sense. Judaism was not the punishment; rather, Christian aggression was a response to the Jewish religion. Is Salkin channeling Paul? That is, does he see “the Law” (Judaism) which Paul mostly excoriated, as“punishment” for the Calf?
On page 117, he suggests that the Hebrews in Egypt were commanded to bring a lamb into their households for four days before the Passover in order to lull the Egyptians into believing that they had finally decided to fit into Egyptian life. How could this possibly be the case, after nine devastating plagues wrought by God in response to Pharaoh’s refusal to send the Hebrews out of Egypt?
On page 119, Salkin equates the Jewish tendency to not mingle with gentiles with generic misanthropy, a gross misreading of the tradition. And that this “Jewish misanthropy” is evidenced by the legend that the Egyptians expelled the Jews because of the latter’s suffering leprosy. How is this an example of Jewish misanthropy, even if such a thing existed?
Salkin cannot have it both ways. That is, his damning midrash on the “authoritative-as-Scripture” midrash carries weight, whereas real midrash, attributed to the Sages, doesn’t. On page 111-112 he describes as “ironic” how Rabbi Joshua Ben Levi is “wrong” when he suggests that both the second intact and original broken tablets on which were inscribed the 10 Commandments were placed in the Ark. Salkin points out: “that is a rabbinic tradition rather than a Scriptural citation.” Then, he suggests “mischievously, creatively, and compassionately” (and who among us doesn’t wish to be seen as mischievous, creative, and compassionate?) that the Sage’s recollection of Scripture was impaired because of senility. Rabbi Joshua’s dementia leads to a relatively harmless midrash, and Salkin advises compassion for a doddering Sage—supported by his footnote to this interpretation. This, while impugning malignant psychopathology to the progenitors of the Jews and their progeny, based on his midrash of the selfsame midrashic literature.
Salkin’s less well-articulated agendas—that is, additional to his psychopathologizing and morally execrating the Biblical founders of Judaism—becomes clearer in the book’s final chapters. These include anti-Zionism and facile inter-faithism. He suggests, by favorably adducing the “Jew and non-Zionist” George Steiner, that Jews are best served in exile, in the Diaspora, and that the security of the homeland is “a betrayal of Jewish identity.” This, apparently, is in the spirit of Abraham, in that it is a “smashing” of the “idol” of the Land. This, of course, flies in the face of dozens of mentions of God’s wish for the Jews to conquer, settle, and make flourish the land of Canaan—as found in the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Nowhere do we read that God wishes for the exile; rather, the exile is a punishment, or at least the consequence of beliefs and actions inconsistent with living on the Land.
As the book wound down, I noted Salkin’s tendency to support many of his notions with the writings of Protestant Christian academics and clerics at least or more often than contemporary Jewish sources. In addition, his use of “Orthodox” and “radical right-wing” in describing certain Jewish writers stood out in contrast to his never using the qualifiers “secular” or “radical left-wing” for other Jewish writers. His ready acceptance of “interfaith” dialogue around Abraham as the common patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also belies an apologetic approach that interferes with critical thought. In this case, he and others sharing this watered-down understanding of Abraham as the “father of Western monotheism” would be well-served by studying the nuanced, and in many ways, contrary conclusions of Jon Levenson in his highly recommend “Inheriting Abraham.”
Salkin closes his disturbing book by suggesting that “modern religious understanding” believes that a reliance on older communal and structural models of Judaism is a form of idolatry. Does this mean that they are to be smashed, or to be reworked? To be turned away from, or to be explored more deeply? Do we reinvent Judaism? Do we stand on our ancestors’ shoulders, sit at their feet, or walk with them? And who is to say, using what criteria?
Perhaps not surprisingly, Salkin ends with a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a proponent of the type of nature-based non-monotheistic spirituality that Abraham so forcefully and effectively repudiated. And, whose poem “William Rufus and the Jew,” takes delight in humorously and contemptuously lambasting “Jewish usury.”
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Captivating and Thorough
By Karen L. Fox
Rabbi Jeff Salkin engages the reader and explores a lens by which we might understand the whole of Jewish experience. This powerful story of Abraham and the idols is accessible to all and perhaps that is its power. We step in with our memories of that key story and with Salkin's guidance, understand it's psycho-social-spiritual impact on individuals and Jewish culture. His writing is smooth, research thorough and his humor hits home. Salkin leaves us with more questions, re the current 'broken gods' and serious religious responses.
On another vein, more usable research for sermons and teaching by Jeff Salkin. Thanks!!
Rabbi Karen Fox
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Profound insights....
By Norman J. Harris
Salkin presents us a compelling discussion of the first patriarch. The significance of Abraham's story is clearly and concisely presented. The author's style is direct and his explanations are immediately accessible. This is a must read... and model... for anyone who wrestles with Biblical texts.
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