A woman came into Terah’s idol shop, carrying with her a bowl filled with flour as an offering to idols. Abraham took an axe and shattered all the idols except for the biggest one. When Terah returned and saw the destruction in his shop, he shouted, “What happened here?”
“Why should I conceal the truth from you?” Abraham answered. “While you were gone, a woman came in and made an offering of flour to the idols. Every one of the idols exclaimed that he wanted to eat it first. The biggest idol grew angry, grabbed the axe, and shattered all the others.”
“What is this nonsense?” Terah asked angrily, “You know as well as I do that idols don’t eat and don’t move, to say nothing of fighting.”
“Is that right?” Abraham countered. “But if what you say is true, why do you serve them?”
Here your Abraham springs into action. He begins to explain to your other desires, great and small, men and women, about the ego that rules over you. That is, the first time Abraham is revealed in you, it is as a teacher. He says to you the following: “The ego cannot protect you; it cannot raise you or fulfill you. It cannot!”
What’s interesting here is that Abraham appeals to you, an egoist, saying that your egoistic desires will never be fulfilled. Or rather, he appeals to the ego to seek out new ways to fulfill itself. The search for self-fulfillment is egoistic, to be sure, but it is precisely this search that will bring you to the Creator. Essentially, the ego willingly embarks on the path of self-destruction.
The Awakening of the Human Degree
The great Kabbalist, Baal HaSulam, says the same thing when he explains how emptiness (lack of fulfillment) emerges within man, who then begins to ask, “What do I live for?” “What is the meaning of my life?” Though the questions are egoistic, they end up bringing man to a new way of using his desires, which is no longer egoistic. This is how the ego leads itself toward the goal of its correct utilization.
Why and how does this happen inside you? It’s because you are special in that the point in the heart has already awakened within you. You have the quality of Bina, which lives inside every one of us. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to grasp this material. It is this point of Bina that’s called the “human” (Adam) within you.
So, the quality of Bina gradually begins to point at your ego and tell you that you’re using it incorrectly. This is done by the Abraham in you. “You aren’t working with your nature correctly, so it cannot protect you or give you anything. It is inanimate, like all of these idols, made simply out of clay.”
Let’s face it, you understand perfectly that you deify the ego, which you can never fulfill. You understand that these are inanimate desires, which means the Light simply cannot enter them, since the Light’s very nature is opposite to them. The Terah in you understands all this, just as you understand that these desires dominate you and you cannot escape them.
You also understand that Abraham is the degree that follows Terah. And that is the most important thing to understand. You understand that you are born an egoist, and you already feel that the only way to defeat your nature is to reveal the Abraham within, the Creator’s quality of love, the desire to bestow.
Two Forces Originating from One Source
There are two forces within you, battling one another. One says that this is your world, everyone lives this way and there’s no escaping it. It is how you were born, and so you must continue to sell and buy “idols,” meaning use your ego to receive pleasures, however shallow and transitory they may be. Conversely, the other force is persuading you that all this is a lie, that the whole world, which deifies the ego—the pleasures and all these “idols” that have no divinity to them because they are not connected in any way to the Creator—is false and fictitious.
You don’t yet see that inside and behind every single thing in this world stands the Creator, deliberately confusing you. But you are ready to accept the degree of Abraham as a more progressive degree; you understand that it will help you make sense of everything.
Abraham Separating Us from Our Egoistic Nature
Nimrod (your Ego) is sitting on the throne because it’s your nature, your “I,” your essence, which comes down to everything working for your benefit, a foundation that appears unshakable. But your Abraham doesn’t want to bow before this ideology of exploiting others for self-gratification.
He admits that his nature is such that he desires pleasure. However, he wishes to use this desire for the sake of others, rather than for himself. He wishes to learn to bestow. And you are with him. This marks your step-by-step breakaway from the egoistic desire, which will later become an order directly from the Creator: “Get thee out of thy country,” which means to reject your egoistic desire. You no longer wish to receive any egoistic pleasures.
What’s happening here is that your Abraham wants to show your Nimrod that your ego controls neither itself nor Nature. For all of its confidence in being a god, it knows not the forces that govern it.
Now Abraham is exposing this delusion, making it clear that you have no control over your actions or fate. Indeed, this is a revelation for your Nimrod.
It follows that without Abraham it is impossible to see your true limitations. And this discovery is far from pleasant.
“What Is the Meaning of Abraham Shattering the Idols of Terah in the Bible?” is based on the book, The Secrets of the Eternal Book: The Meaning of the Stories of the Pentateuch by Semion Vinokur.
