November 4th: Lech Lecha
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
Though “The War of the Four Kings Against the Five Kings” (Genesis 14) was a major event for those involved, it has always been a curious sidebar in the spiritual saga of our Father Abraham.
Abram gets involved when his nephew Lot is kidnapped. Lot has been living in the Dead Sea region, in Sodom, and that region’s five kingdoms are invaded by four kings from the North. When Lot is kidnapped, Abram musters 318 of his men to pursue the fives kings and rescue his nephew.
This twenty-four-verse story is not particularly religious. God does not command anything to Abram, and God does no miracles. It is a secular and military story. The only religious detail is the aftermath: While returning home with lots of plunder, Abram visits a place of religious pilgrimage. “King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was a priest of God Most High. He blessed him, saying, ‘Blessed be Abram of God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth. And blessed be God Most High, Who has delivered your foes into your hand.’ And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.” (Genesis 14.18-20)
Since the Torah is a document of faith—and not really a history, the Tradition senses a need to enhance the story with more spirituality. The Midrash begins by focusing on this cryptic passage about the Priest Melchizedek. Looking carefully at the Genesis genealogies, the Rabbis discover that this Melchizedek is none other than Shem, one of Noah’s sons. (If you live to be six hundred years old, you are around for many succeeding generations.) Further, Salem is none other than Jerusalem. As the Midrash explains, Shem and his great-grandson Eber run a religious center there in Jerusalem, and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all visit there for religious instruction and observance. How could one possibly be a Patriarch without studying at a Yeshivah?!
We are still, however, left with a military story with very little religious substance. Enter Gematria—the art of assigning numerical values to Hebrew letters and from them finding hidden meanings.
Let us look at the text: “When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he mustered his retainers, born into his household, numbering three hundred and eighteen, and went in pursuit as far as Dan. At night, he and his servants deployed against them and defeated them; and he pursued them as far as Damascus.” (Genesis 14.14-15)
It seems a simple description of a military campaign, but someone schooled in Gematria noticed that 318 is the numerical value for Eliezer, Abram’s most trusted servant. (See Genesis 15.2): אֱלִיעֶזֶר
Alef is 1, Lamed is 30, Yod is 10, Ayin is 70, Zayin is 7, and Resh is 200. The lesson or hidden meaning is that Abram does not need 318 troops to defeat the Four Kings. He is such a master of faith, he just needs one soldier, his faithful servant Eliezer, to defeat his enemies!
But, there is more: another Gematria student noticed another meaning of 318. It is the numerical value of the Hebrew word si’ach / converse or speak. שִׂיחַ
Sin is 300, Yod is 10, and Chet is 8. Gematria thus teaches that Abram does not really need to fight physically. All he does to defeat his enemies is to speak God’s Holy Name!
Why would such a claim be made? It is clearly absurd—and counter to the meaning of the text. And yet, one can see in this miracle interpretation an indication of the Rabbinic approach to Jewish survival. After the twin debacles of the Jewish Rebellion (66-73 CE, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by the Romans) and the Bar Kochba Rebellion (132-136 CE, which saw Rome destroy not only the Jewish army but also many of the great Rabbis), the surviving Rabbis made a deliberate decision to eschew physical and military resistance.
They reasoned that the Jewish people could never compete militarily with powers such as Rome—that armed resistance could never succeed and would just invoke more brutal oppression and persecution. Their strategy was to encourage a different kind of strength: a spiritual strength based on faith and piety and the hope of God’s eternal love. It was completely different from the Biblical approach—where faith in God brought military victory—and is vastly different from our modern Jewish fighters who brought to life the State of Israel and defend it. The Rabbinic hope and strategy was to lay low and endure whatever came, hoping that faith and piety would allow a “She’arit Yisrael, a Remnant of Israel,” to survive for the Messianic future. This approach may seem strange to us, but it was the survival strategy that kept our religious community alive for some 1800 years and engendered one of the world’s great spiritual traditions. As Historian Ellis Rivkin used to explain, given that earthly victory over our enemies was impossible, Rabbinic Judaism moved away from the Biblical ideal of an earthly Jewish kingdom to a spiritual quest for “God’s Kingdom within.”
In such a worldview, Abram’s military prowess is irrelevant, but Abram/Abraham as a giant of faith—who could simply speak the Divine Name and conquer enemies—is a much better example.
Another place one can see this transition is in the development of Chanukah. Whereas the story began as a military victory of the Maccabees over the Greek Syrians (165 BCE), the Rabbis of the Talmud (Second and Third Century CE) subsumed the military story in the story of the miracle of the oil. From the Biblical notion of God-supported military strength, the Talmud transitioned us to a more spiritual dimension. Then, in the 1800s, we began to change back with the Jewish Self-Defense Movement—and this, of course, set the stage for and inspired Zionism.
When commentators use Gematria to suggest that Abram, accompanied by a single servant and speaking the Divine Name, was as powerful as an army of 318 soldiers, they are encouraging their people to be spiritually strong—to ground themselves in faith and piety and observance. It is very different from our modern worldview, but it was a meaningful and successful spiritual approach to the centuries our people suffered unrelenting oppression. It is a monument to Jewish adaptability and creativity—and, as we face our own struggles in life, perhaps there are lessons we too can learn about spiritual strength and hope.