Who is Avraham? — Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father
אַבְרָהָם אָבִינוּ
The first of the Patriarchs · Ur of the Chaldeans, Charan and Canaan
The idol maker's son who broke the idols, left everything, and became the father of every convert.
The facts
- Born
- Ur of the Chaldeans, son of Terach the idol maker
- Called
- "Go for yourself" at age 75 (Genesis 12:1–4)
- Wife
- Sarah
- Sons
- Yishmael and Yitzchak
- Tested
- Ten times (Pirkei Avot 5:3)
- Buried
- Cave of Machpelah, Hebron
Overview
Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father, is the first Jew, the first person in the Torah to whom Hashem says "Go", and the spiritual father of everyone who ever chose to join the Jewish people. He was born in Ur of the Chaldeans in Mesopotamia, the son of an idol maker, and he left everything he knew to follow a G-d no one around him believed in. His story runs from the end of Parashat Noach through the next three parashiyot: Lech Lecha, Vayera and Chayei Sarah.
Three world religions call him father. But in the Jewish tradition he has a special title that matters most to us at Six1Trey: he is the father of converts. Every ger who enters the Jewish people takes the name ben Avraham Avinu or bat Avraham Avinu, son or daughter of Avraham our father. He is the OG of every OG on this list.
Meet the other Jewish OGz on the OGz page, including Rashi and Onkelos the convert.
Avram becomes Avraham
He is born Avram (Genesis 11:26), which means "exalted father". When he is ninety-nine years old Hashem changes his name: "Neither shall your name any more be called Avram, but your name shall be Avraham; for the father of a multitude of nations have I made you" (Genesis 17:5).
The new name adds a single letter, the hei, and changes his mission. Avram was a father of one family. Avraham is the father of nations. His wife Sarai becomes Sarah in the same chapter (17:15). A new name for a new life is a very old Jewish idea, and it started here.
The idol shop in Ur
The Torah tells us almost nothing about Avraham's childhood. The Midrash fills in the picture. Avraham's father, Terach, was not only an idol worshipper but a seller of idols. One day Terach went on a trip and left young Avraham in charge of the shop (Bereshit Rabbah 38:13).
A man came in to buy an idol. Avraham asked him, "How old are you?" The man said fifty or sixty. Avraham said, "Woe to a man who is sixty years old and wants to bow down to something made today!" The customer left ashamed. Then a woman came in with a plate of fine flour as an offering for the idols. Avraham took a stick, smashed all the idols except the biggest one, and put the stick in its hand. When his father came home and demanded to know what had happened, Avraham said the idols had fought over the offering and the big one had broken the rest. "Why are you mocking me?" Terach shouted. "Do they know anything?" And Avraham answered: "Let your ears hear what your mouth is saying."
It's a kid's story, and it's also a serious one. Avraham grew up inside the family business, and the business was a lie. He didn't stay quiet to keep the peace at home. He broke the idols, in front of the one person whose approval he needed most.
The furnace
The story doesn't end at the shop. According to the Midrash, Terach handed his son over to Nimrod, the king, and Nimrod threw Avraham into a fiery furnace. Avraham came out alive.
Rashi tells the rest to explain a strange line in the Torah, that Avraham's brother Haran "died in the presence of his father" in Ur (11:28). Haran had watched from the sidelines and decided to wait: if Avraham survived, he would be on Avraham's side; if Nimrod won, he would be on Nimrod's. When Avraham came out of the fire alive, they asked Haran whose side he was on. "Avraham's," he said. They threw him in, and he burned.
Every block has a Haran: the one who waits to see who wins before picking a side. Avraham went into the fire for what he believed before he knew how it would end. Haran tried to follow the winner, and it cost him everything. Faith that waits for the results isn't faith.
Finding Hashem on his own
How did a child of idol makers come to believe in one G-d? The Rambam describes it in the opening chapter of his laws of idolatry (Hilchot Avodah Zarah 1:3). As a young boy, Avraham began to think day and night: how can the heavens keep turning if no one turns them? He had no teacher. He was surrounded by people who worshipped the sun, the moon and statues. And he kept thinking until he understood that there is one G-d who moves everything, who created everything, and that the whole world around him was mistaken.
The Sages disagreed about when this happened. The Talmud records that Avraham recognized his Creator at age three (Nedarim 32a); the Rambam says he reached full understanding at forty. Either way, his search began young and didn't stop.
Then he did something no one before him had done: he started teaching it. The Rambam writes that he went from city to city, arguing with people, breaking idols, and gathering thousands of followers who called themselves "the people of the house of Avraham".
Lech Lecha: Go
Next week's parasha opens with the first words Hashem ever speaks to Avraham: "Go for yourself from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1).
Look at the order. Your land, then your birthplace, then your father's house. It goes from the widest circle to the closest, and the closest is the hardest to leave. A man can move to another country and still carry his father's house with him everywhere. Hashem asks for all three.
And notice what Hashem doesn't say: where. "To the land that I will show you." Avraham has to leave before he knows the address. Anyone who has walked out of an old life knows that feeling: you know what you're leaving long before you know where you'll end up.
Avraham was seventy-five years old (12:4). Nobody is too old to start over.
The souls they made in Charan
When Avraham leaves Charan, the Torah says he took Sarai, his nephew Lot, all their possessions, "and the souls that they had made in Charan" (12:5). How do you make a soul?
Rashi brings the Midrash: these are the people Avraham and Sarah had brought under the wings of the Shechinah, the Divine Presence. "Avraham converted the men and Sarah converted the women, and Scripture counts it as if they had made them."
So the very first Jews in history brought converts with them. From the first chapter of the Jewish story, the door was open, and the people who walked through it were counted as if they had been newly created. That's how the Torah sees a ger: not as an outsider who moved in, but as a new soul.
Count the stars
Years pass, and Avraham still has no child. He tells Hashem plainly that everything he has will go to a servant. Hashem takes him outside and says: "Look now toward heaven, and count the stars, if you are able to count them… So shall your seed be" (15:5). And then one of the most important verses in the Torah: "And he believed in Hashem; and He counted it to him for righteousness" (15:6).
He believed it before he saw it. He was an old man with no son, looking at the night sky, and he believed.
In the same night Hashem makes a covenant with him, the brit bein habetarim, the covenant between the pieces, and tells him the hard part: his descendants will be strangers in a land not theirs, enslaved and afflicted for four hundred years, and afterward they will come out with great wealth (15:13–14). The promise comes with the exile already built in. The Jewish story was never promised to be easy, only to end in freedom.
A covenant in the flesh at ninety-nine
At ninety-nine, Avraham receives the commandment of brit milah, circumcision, as "a sign of the covenant" between Hashem and his descendants (17:10–11). That same day he circumcises himself, his thirteen-year-old son Yishmael, and every man of his household (17:23–26).
Ninety-nine years old, and he does it the same day. No waiting for a better time, no committee. For adult converts, the bris is often the moment that makes everything real, and many of them say they think of Avraham on that day: if he could do it at ninety-nine, I can do it now.
The open tent
Avraham's signature is hospitality. In Parashat Vayera, sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day, three days after his circumcision, he sees three strangers and runs to meet them (18:1–2). He offers "a little water" and "a morsel of bread" and then serves them a feast: cakes, a calf, butter and milk (18:4–8). He promises little and does a lot.
The Midrash says his tent was open on all four sides so that travelers coming from any direction would find a way in. That is the model for every Jewish home, and for every community that wants to receive people coming from far away: don't make them search for the door.
Arguing with G-d for Sodom
When Hashem tells Avraham that He is about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Avraham does something Noach never did. He argues. "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?" (18:25). If there are fifty righteous people in the city, will You destroy it? What about forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? (18:23–32).
Sodom was the worst city in the world. Its people were cruel to strangers and to the poor. Avraham argues for them anyway. He doesn't know them; he just can't stand by while people are destroyed.
That is the difference between Noach and Avraham. Noach saved himself and his family. Avraham fought for strangers, even wicked ones. If you have come out of a hard life, the Torah is asking you to be an Avraham: don't just get out. Go back and argue for the people still inside.
Sarah, the partner
Avraham never did any of this alone. Sarah left Ur with him, converted the women while he converted the men, was taken captive twice and came through, and laughed when the angels said she would have a son at ninety (18:12). When a hard family decision came, Hashem told Avraham: "In all that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice" (21:12). Rashi comments there that we learn from this verse that Avraham was secondary to Sarah in prophecy. The founder of the Jewish people was told, in plain words, to listen to his wife.
The first Jewish home was a partnership. If you are building a new life, build it with someone whose voice you are willing to listen to, even when it is not what you want to hear.
Ten tests
"With ten trials was Avraham our father tried, and he withstood them all, to make known how great was the love of Avraham our father" (Pirkei Avot 5:3).
The Mishnah doesn't list them, and the commentators count them differently. Most lists include leaving his homeland, the famine that drove him to Egypt, Sarah being taken by Pharaoh and later by Avimelech, the war against the four kings to rescue Lot, the covenant between the pieces, circumcision at ninety-nine, sending away Hagar and Yishmael, and the last and hardest, the Akeida, the binding of Yitzchak (Genesis 22). Some lists also include the furnace of Ur.
Avraham's life was not a straight line to success. It was test after test, many of them involving the people he loved most. The Mishnah says the tests weren't there to break him but to show the world how great his love was.
The Akeida
The last test is the one that still shakes every reader: "Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Yitzchak, and go for yourself to the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering" (22:2).
The words echo the first test. "Go for yourself", lech lecha, appears only twice in the Torah: when Avraham is told to leave his past, and when he is told to give up his future. Avraham rises early in the morning (22:3), walks three days with his son, builds the altar and binds him. At the last moment an angel calls out: "Do not lay your hand upon the lad" (22:12). A ram caught in the thicket is offered instead.
Jewish tradition reads the Akeida as the final proof that Hashem does not want human sacrifice; He stops the knife. What He wants is a person whose love for Him holds even when nothing makes sense. Every Rosh Hashanah we blow the shofar, a ram's horn, to remember that moment on the mountain.
"A stranger and a sojourner"
When Sarah dies, Avraham has to buy a burial plot from the local people in Hebron. He opens with a sentence that every convert knows in his bones: "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you" (ger v'toshav anochi, 23:4).
The man to whom Hashem promised the whole land had to pay full price, in public, for a single cave to bury his wife (23:16). He was a ger in the land that would belong to his children. The Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, where Avraham, Sarah, Yitzchak, Rivkah, Yaakov and Leah are buried, began as a stranger's purchase.
Being a ger is not a stage you outgrow. Avraham called himself one at the end of his life, after decades of faithfulness. It's a description of how a person stands in this world: committed and at home, and still aware that it all belongs to Hashem.
The father of converts
This is why Avraham matters so much to anyone who has joined the Jewish people. When a convert takes a Hebrew name, the name is completed with ben Avraham Avinu, son of Avraham our father, or bat Avraham Avinu for a woman. The convert's spiritual father is Avraham.
The Rambam made this point unforgettable in a famous letter to a convert named Ovadiah, who had been told by his teacher that he could not say "our G-d and G-d of our fathers" in his prayers, since his fathers were not Jewish. The Rambam answered that he absolutely could: Avraham is the father of all who follow his path, and Ovadiah was as much Avraham's son as anyone born Jewish. He told him not to think less of his lineage: born Jews trace their ancestry to Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, the Rambam wrote, but a convert traces his to the One who spoke and the world came into being.
Every convert in history, from Onkelos to the readers of this page, walks the road Avraham opened when he left Ur.
How to be a disciple of Avraham
The Mishnah gives a simple test for who belongs to Avraham's school: "A good eye, a humble spirit and a moderate appetite: these are the disciples of Avraham our father. An evil eye, a haughty spirit and a limitless appetite: these are the disciples of Bilaam the wicked" (Pirkei Avot 5:19).
A good eye means being happy for other people's success, not counting what they have. A humble spirit means you don't need everyone to know who you are. A moderate appetite means you can say "enough".
Notice that the test isn't about knowledge, ancestry or status. It's about character. Anyone can be a disciple of Avraham, and anyone, including someone born into a family of rabbis, can end up a disciple of Bilaam.
Why Avraham is the OG of OGs
He grew up inside a lie and broke it. He went into the fire before he knew how it would end. He left his land, his birthplace and his father's house without an address. He brought strangers under the wings of the Shechinah. He kept his tent open on every side. He argued with G-d for people who didn't deserve it. He passed test after test, and at the end of his life he still called himself a stranger.
That's the whole road from the streets to the light, walked for the first time, almost four thousand years ago. Every one of us who walks it now is his child. Read how one man walked it in our time in G2G: From Gangster to Ger, and follow the parasha with us every week on the Six1Trey blog.
Questions for this week
What idol is in your family's shop? What did you grow up believing that you now know is a lie? What would it cost to break it?
Are you Avraham or Haran? Haran waited to see who would win. What decision are you putting off until you know how it ends?
What's your father's house? Lech Lecha asks for the closest circle last. What is the hardest thing for you to leave behind?
Who are you arguing for? Avraham fought for Sodom. Who in your life needs you to stand up for them, even if they haven't earned it?
לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ
“Go for yourself from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you.”
Books about Avraham
- Abraham's Journey: Reflections on the Life of the Founding Patriarch — Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. KTAV for the Toras HoRav Foundation, 2008. The Rav's lectures on Avraham's search for G-d, his loneliness and his covenant.
- Covenant & Conversation: Genesis, The Book of Beginnings — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Maggid Books, 2009. Weekly essays on every parasha in Bereshit, including Lech Lecha, Vayera and Chayei Sarah.
- Genesis: The Beginning of Desire — Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Jewish Publication Society, 1996. A deep literary and midrashic reading of Bereshit, with long chapters on Avraham and the Akeida.