Question: Can we say that Abraham changed world history?
Answer: Yes, because Abraham was the first to call on the Babylonians to resist their growing egoism that was flourishing in Ancient Babylon. Egoism prevented them from developing and gradually led the state into a huge crisis, what we call the Tower of Babel.
At that time, Ancient Babylon, located between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, was home to 3 million people. By modern standards, this is not a large population, but for the ancient world, it was quite substantial, practically the entire civilization of that time.
People lived peacefully and calmly. They had everything in abundance. They sowed grains—wheat, rye, buckwheat—planted onions and garlic, raised sheep, and caught plenty of fish. Historical evidence of this can be found in preserved frescoes with dedicatory inscriptions: “I present you with a kilogram of garlic,” and so on.
People lived simple, ordinary lives and everything was fine. But suddenly, competition flared up among them, and they began to “measure” one another by egoistic standards: I give him this much and he gives me that much. While previously one person was like a brother, a friend, and a neighbor to another, now completely different criteria for relationships appeared.
Thus the Babylonians entered a wild, terrible crisis from which they could not escape. They began to build the Tower of Babel, a symbol of egoism striving to reach the heavens, because they believed that in this way they could conquer the Creator and make Him work for them.
The belief that the sky had a solid firmament persisted in humanity for thousands of years. I have even read in Russian manuscripts that people thought if they lived near the horizon, they could dry their grain to prevent it from spoiling. That was their way of imagining things, and this notion only began to fade gradually only in the Middle Ages, with the emergence of various sciences in the 17th to 18th centuries.
Our entire civilization began with Ancient Babylon. Abraham carried out huge revolution in the world, one could even say the only one. All other revolutions were carried out “from an armored vehicle,” but he carried out a real revolution. He gave humanity the key to influencing our world, our own destiny, and through our world, other worlds as well. What he did was incredible.
Of course, there were Kabbalists before him; after all, he lived in the 20th generation after Adam. But it was precisely his generation that managed to bring a method for affecting all of humanity to our world, a method urgently needed in times of crisis, and that the world can make use of it.
Question: Noah lived in the 10th generation, yet it was Abraham who became a revolutionary?
Answer: Noah carried out his own revolution. One could say that he saved humanity, but he did it alone. He did not need a group like Abraham did. He fulfilled his mission by taking his loved ones into the ark. They weren’t actually relatives in the usual sense, but simply people who lived together like one large, close-knit family. In those days, everyone lived that way.
Noah raised this entire group of people above earthly egoism; that is, he saved them from the flood of egoism in the ark, which symbolizes the quality of Binah.
Abraham did the same thing 10 generations after Noah, but in a different state, in a different civilization. He revealed that it was possible to act differently, not through the familial but still egoistic ties as in Noah’s time.
The point is that by Abraham’s time, egoism had already corroded all of humanity. And although it consisted of many different large clans (typical of the ancient world), Abraham managed to convince them that drawing closer into a single family in spite of the egoism ruling over them was precisely their salvation.
They were still not far from understanding this because they had recently lived in peace and friendship, when suddenly egoism flared up among them and they began to hate one another. Therefore, they readily believed him, came together, and realized that this was salvation from the problems they had created for themselves.
In order to return to normal life, Abraham united them into a group in which they began to discover the correct relationships between themselves.
[194598]
From a Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 5/29/16
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Aspiring To Advance
Short Stories: Abraham’s Rough Path
Reaching Heaven
Our desire to receive certainly grows as we acquire the ability to determine its form. If we were advancing along the ideal path of development, that is, had we emerged from caves and gradually received an ever-growing desire to receive and turned it into a desire with the intention to bestow to the Creator, we would never feel the evil contained within us.
