On my recent trip to Israel, I boarded a Delta flight and saw a familiar stewardess. It took me a minute, but then I remembered: she had served on my flight to Rome the year before. She had become memorable because when she saw my hostage tag, she told me how much she, a non-Jewish woman, was praying for our people and how deeply she cared about Israel.
I was taken aback, expecting hostility or judgment and encountering kindness instead. Then I felt sorry for myself and for all of us who have come to see compassion toward Jews as something exceptional. It changes us. As we enter our post–October 7th healing and rebuilding, we need to consider what it has done to us and who we want to be.
There is so much noise around Jewish chosenness, yet the Torah never tells us why we are chosen. A striking midrash offers a clue, describing Abraham, the hero of this week’s parashah Lech Lecha, as God’s partner:
This may be compared to one who was traveling from place to place when he saw a palace in flames (birah doleket). He said: “Is it possible that this palace lacks someone to look after it?” The owner of the palace looked out and said to him, “I am the owner of the palace.” (Bereishit Rabbah 39:1)
Abraham is the one who sees the blaze and says, “The world is aflame; there must be a Creator,” and then steps forward to help put out the fire. Rabbi Sacks held on to this teaching: Abraham as a man of agency who sees a broken world, resists indifference, and realizes that to be human is to share responsibility for creation with God.
I love this midrash. I think of our ancestor Abraham as a man of action. But lately I’ve been wondering about an aspect of this teaching I had never considered before.
What does it mean to be the only one who notices a palace in flames and tries to save it? How do others see Abraham? What about those who saw the fire and did nothing? Did they admire him, or resent him?
In my experience, it can go both ways. There can be gratitude and inspiration, but also resentment born of the discomfort of being confronted with moral responsibility. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called this ressentiment, a corrosive resentment that arises when people feel morally indicted by those who act righteously.
When someone puts out the flames while others stand by, the bystanders face an uncomfortable truth about themselves. Rather than accept responsibility, they redirect their frustration outward, toward the moral exemplar. The person doing good becomes a target, not despite their virtue, but because of it.
If Abraham becomes a paragon of morality through his actions, it likely invites persecution from a world that prefers indifference to responsibility. I’ve been thinking about this both because Jew-hatred remains all too alive and because Abraham embodies a unique calling: to be both part of the world and apart from it. God tells Abraham:
I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing… and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you (Bereishit 12:2–3).
What struck me this year, in light of this paradoxical and complicated journey, is Abraham’s faith in humanity. Abraham faces constant adversity: his nephew’s shepherds cheat his own, Lot is kidnapped, he flees to Egypt during famine, his wife is forcibly taken. The brokenness is alive and well.
Yet these experiences don’t numb or harden him. In next week’s parashah, we find him by his open tent, waiting for strangers he can transform into guests. Throughout his life, he forgives and reconciles. He creates treaties after previous abuses. He negotiates for Sarah’s burial plot with neighbors who still see him as a stranger, insisting on finding common ground.
Abraham remains unexpectedly optimistic about the possibility of human connection. He is truly apart from the world and part of it; he has faith in God and faith in people. Perhaps this also explains why Abraham was chosen and what it means to be a Jew.
To be a Jew is to see a palace in flames and become God’s partner in putting out the fire, knowing that others may respond with hostility or suspicion, and still to welcome them into our tent and aspire to have our name be a blessing.
This is not easy. I sense it in myself: a crust of fear and suspicion. Much of it is deserved. We must not be naïve; we must fight Jew-hatred, stand up for our rights, and have no illusions about the threats confronting us. But even as we fight, we must never lose sight of our aspiration: to be Abraham’s descendants.
This is where Abraham challenges and inspires us: to be moral exemplars willing to be ridiculed, while embodying his radical openness. We need both, the moral clarity to name injustice and hold the world accountable, and the faith in humanity that keeps our tent open, still seeking common ground, refusing to let hatred harden us completely.
This is the impossible, essential balance: to be both vigilant and vulnerable, fierce and faithful, knowing that the covenantal promise will be fulfilled if our name becomes a blessing, if we remain both apart from and a part of the world.
Dr. Mijal Bitton is a spiritual leader, sociologist, Rabbi Sacks Scholar, and one of our Partners in Wisdom. You can read more from Dr. Bitton on her Substack, Committed.