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Our Entrepreneurial
Forefather, Abraham

34i 2 0'49, 404.

'.:41

Parshat Chaye Sarah: Genesis 23:1-
25:18; 1 Kings 1:1-1:31.

H

aving succeeded in his
assignment to procure a wife
for Isaac, Abraham's senior
servant returns home from his mission
with the young Rebecca.
Upon arrival, the bride-
to-be spots a man she will
presently discover is her
future groom. "Who is that
man walking toward us?"
she inquires, to which the
servant responds, "That is
my master"
In this exchange, the
careful reader will deduce
that the founder of the
Jewish people has died
sometime in our parshah,
when Abraham's servant was on his
mission.
Abraham's life ends as it began, lost
in the lacuna of the text. As for his early
years, the Torah reports only the birth,
marriage and first migration of the chief
patriarch. By contrast, the initial exploits
of our other ancestors are conveyed
in colorful detail: the crucible of the
young Isaac, the conniving of Jacob, the
sequence of dreams in the aspiring ado-
lescence of Joseph.
If we are so well apprised of the early
experiences that informed the later
lives of these leaders, why barely a word
about the formative first 75 years of our
founding father? Living in today's media
market where biographies of 17-year-
old pop stars sell millions of copies, one
imagines that a tale or two of the young
Abram would have fetched at least a
modest audience.
The gap in Abraham's story inspired
our sages to theorize on what trans-
pired in those primordial years that
prompted God to select Abraham over
other candidates for his position. The
midrash imagines Abraham quite
literally as an early iconoclast, whose
rejection of the idols that populated his
world and his father's shop caught the
attention of the Hoary Headhunter. A
millennium later, Maimonides hypoth-
esized that Abraham was a young
monotheistic philosopher who applied
for the job on his own.

Imaginations aside, the biblical sto-
ries themselves reveal characteristics
that made Abraham an ideal candidate
to be the first leader of the Jews. He was
a man of character and virtue,
willing to argue with his own
boss on deific business ethics
(Genesis 18:16-33). He was a
warrior, willing to go to battle
for family and faith (Genesis
14), and a loyal employee of
the Divine (Genesis 26:4).
He was also an entrepreneur.
Embracing risk is central to
the entrepreneurial spirit. In
a world fraught with uncer-
tainty, no less so today than
in biblical times, it is the rare
individual who is willing to leave the
familiar and start up again, merely on
the prospect of greater return. A fine
businessman, when Abraham journeys
to Egypt shortly after his promotion, he
is able to leverage a difficult and dan-
gerous situation to amass a consider-
able fortune (Genesis 12:10-19).
In Chaye Sarah, realizing that his life is
drawing to an end and God's predictions
of property and progeny have not yet
been realized, Abraham uses his remain-
ing strength and influence to acquire
both a parcel of land in the promised
land and a wife for his son. Not content
to rely on faith alone, these final initia-
tives prove to be essential investments in
the future of the Jewish people.
The entrepreneurial attribute of
Abraham has gone mostly unnoticed
and unnoted by generations of Jews.
Perhaps, like certain Christian theolo-
gies, we harbor a bias that money and
enterprise taint purity and piety. But
key to the success of the Jewish people
is that we have invested in both heaven
and earth, striving simultaneously to
serve God and succeed in His mate-
rial world. The principle of promoting
both prophets and profits is part of the
inheritance left to us by Abraham when
he set out on his final journey. I1

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• Do you think the roles of religious and secular leadership are better off
separated or combined in one individual?
• What other characteristics do you think are important to being the
founder of a nation?
• What other leaders in the Bible or in the contemporary world can be
described as entrepreneurs?

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