There are idols on my desk at home. There are even idols on my desk at Temple. I certainly don’t worship them, but they’re there. OK, so they’re not really idols. They’re icons, but the two words are synonymous, you know. They’re on your computer screen so you have idols – OK, icons – on your desk, also. They’re just the surface layer, though. Those little pictures, those little symbols, lead deeper, to the programs or documents behind them.

One of the icons on my screen was for a program for editing photos. I didn’t like it. I wanted to get rid of it. Have you ever tried to get rid of one of those icons? When you try and delete it, you get a pop-up message that says something like:

Deleting the shortcut only removes the icon. It does not uninstall the program. If you want to uninstall the program, use Add or Remove Programs…

OK, another click and the icon’s gone. But now you’ve got to go somewhere else, usually Control Panel, and actually remove the program. That takes a few more clicks, and then that’s done, too. But I still wanted to edit photos, so I had replace the old program with a better one, icon and all.

Would you believe that according to our legends, roughly four thousand years ago the first Jew, our ancestor Abraham, went through the same process? In the earliest Abraham story of all, Abraham’s father, Terach, took the family and left what the Torah calls Ur of the Chaldeans, which was probably in ancient Sumer. Ever alert and ever querulous , our teachers wanted to know why. Why did Terach uproot his family? The Rabbis created an explanation in the form of a story:

Terach, Abraham’s father, was a maker of idols. His shop was the largest in the city, filled with idols of every size and description. Terach’s skill as a craftsman was known far and wide.
One day Terach said to his son, “Abraham, I have some business to attend to. You watch the shop for a few hours until I return.”
While Terach was gone, a man came in to buy an idol. “My old one fell and broke,” he explained.
Abraham had already come to realize that there was only one, invisible God, and that the worship of idols was not only wrong but foolhardy. He could no longer contain himself.
“How old are you?” Abraham blurted out.
“I’m 50,” said the man.
“Then you are old enough to have achieved wisdom. Don’t you know that the worship of idols is stupid? They are only pieces of stone and wood. You and I have both seen my father making them. How can you worship such an object?”
The man was highly insulted, and stormed out the door to buy his idol elsewhere. Abraham then picked up a hammer, smashed all of the idols except the biggest one, and put the hammer in its hands.
When Terach returned he was aghast. “What happened? All my idols are ruined! Who could have done such a thing?”
Abraham explained: “Father, while you were gone a woman brought a grain offering. The idols began arguing over who should be the first to partake of it. The words soon became blows, and all of the idols destroyed each other, except for the biggest and strongest one who, even now, holds the hammer in his hands.”
“What are you taking about?” screamed Terach. “Idols can’t speak or argue or move about to smash each other!” I made some of them just this morning.
“Of course, said Abraham. “Then how can you continue to make such useless objects for people to worship?” [Genesis Rabbah, 38:13]

Perhaps Terach took his family away from Ur because Abraham convinced him that there was only one God and that a pagan environment was an unfit place to live. Or perhaps the other citizens of Ur became angry at what they saw as blasphemy and ran them out of town. In any case, the saga of our people began with an act of iconoclasm, with the smashing of idols, the removal of icons.

As you know, the Torah rails against idolatry over and over again. But it was not the worship of pieces of wood or stone that was the primary issue. They were just the icons that represented the horrible pagan demand to sacrifice first-born male children to the goddess Moloch. Her icon, her idol, was in the shape of a pregnant pig.

Our ancestors found that removing the icons wasn’t enough. That was only the beginning of change. Smashing every statue of Moloch they could get their hands on wasn’t enough. They had to get rid of the program of child sacrifice that lay behind it. The most powerful story in all of our literature, the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac that we read this morning, concerns the change from human sacrifice to its prohibition.

“After these things,” says the text, “God tested Abraham.” What things, the Rabbis want to know? There were ten things, ten tests, ten acts of change, ten incidents of idol-smashing of one sort or another. The call to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac was obviously the most difficult.

The real test, I think, was not whether Abraham would kill his son, but whether he wouldn’t. When Abraham believed that God wanted him to take Isaac to be sacrificed, the text says that he was silent. Why? Because it was normal to take the first-born son – and Isaac was the first-born of his mother, Sarah – to be sacrificed. Everyone did it! Abraham was all set to go through with it, Isaac was tied up on the altar, the knife was at his throat, when God told him to stop. God called “Abraham, Abraham.” Twice! You would think that when God speaks to you, once should be enough, no? Why did God have to tell him twice that it was OK not to kill his beloved son Isaac?

Because Abraham wasn’t even listening. The last thing he expected was to be told not to sacrifice his son. Yet even though God’s child Abraham, like many of our children, had to be told more than once, he did pass the test. He listened and put down the knife, unused. The result? Not only did Isaac live, human sacrifice was forever prohibited among our people. We succeeded in removing the program as well as the icon.

But even destroying the icon and then removing the program isn’t enough. That only leaves a moral and psychological black hole which we frail human beings rush to fill with all sorts of aberrations. As the Russian author Dostoyevsky so brilliantly put it, “People who believe in nothing will believe in anything.” There needs to be something to take the place of what was taken away. What?

Look again at the Abraham story. When Abraham didn’t sacrifice Isaac, he noticed a ram that was caught in a nearby thicket by its horns, and sacrificed that. From then on, instead of offering human beings, our people would sacrifice animals. Eventually the rest of the world would come to agree with our teaching that human sacrifice is an abomination, not an act of piety. Abraham passed the test.

Do we pass ours? They can be every bit as difficult. You don’t need me to tell you what they are. We all know better than anyone else the things that try our souls and our patience and our resources, and… Among the many versions of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, that were created over the ages, is a modern one that suggests:

While Abraham was binding Isaac on Mount Moriah he was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Who could this be?” he thought.
“We don’t even own a door,” he cried.
So he continued binding Isaac to the altar. Again, a knock that could make the deaf hear. Abraham had to stop and look for the door.
He yelled, “Leave me alone. I’m doing God’s work!” and returned to continue the Akedah [the binding]. And again a knock interrupted him, and again, and again — Abraham did not know what to do, whether to laugh or to cry.
And then he thought: “This will be the history of my children. When we will be doing our work or God’s work there will always come a knock at the door to interrupt us…whether we own a door or not.” And it came to pass that the history of the Jews is a history of interruptions. [ The American Rabbi, Spring, 1996, pg. 33.]

Interruptions, tests, challenges – call them what you will. They’re always there, always part of our lives. What makes us different from the fundamentalist terrorists who threaten our very freedom is that we believe these tests call upon us to grow, to change, and not to defend the status quo or try to return to an earlier, imagined golden age at the expense of our own lives and the lives of others.

Much of the time the whole process takes place inside of us. The icons are the automatic ways we connect with the world, our assumptions, our prejudices. When our lives are not going the way we want them to, hopefully we come to understand that some of those preconceptions need to be changed. Then the programs, the behaviors and feelings those icons evoke, need to be removed. Then -- and this is the hardest part -- we need to replace the old programs with new ones that work better. I know from firsthand experience, because I’ve had to do it many times in my own life, and expect to do it many, many more, how difficult and painful this can be. When we give up our sacred cows, our cherished icons, to say nothing of the programs behind them, it feels a little like something died inside of us. But as a teacher once said, “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, God calls a butterfly. [From A Path Through Suffering, pg. 132, by Elisabeth Elliot Gren]

If we’re honest in confronting our own icons in order to get rid of them, if we’re insightful enough to admit to ourselves, and often to others, the unsuccessful programs we’re currently using, and if we’re willing to do the very hard work necessary to install new ones, then we have a good shot at passing the tests that life gives us.

Our lives are pretty crazy, and getting more-so. We could really use some Cliff notes to help us pass these difficult courses. There’s a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy says to Charlie Brown

“You know what your trouble is, Charlie Brown? You don’t have a personal philosophy...You need to develop a philosophy that will carry you through times of stress...Can you do that? Can you develop a personal philosophy? Think, Charlie Brown! Think hard!”
Charlie Brown responds: “Life is like an ice cream cone...You have to learn to lick it!”
“THAT’S THE MOST STUPID PHILOSOPHY I’VE EVER HEARD!” shouts Lucy. “I can’t do anything for someone who has a philosophy like that! You’re hopeless, Charlie Brown!”
As Charlie Brown slinks off, defeated once again, he mutters: “It’s hard to develop a real personal philosophy in less than twenty minutes...”

Sure is, or in twenty days or twenty months or twenty years. Our tradition has been developing a philosophy, a program we can use, for almost 4,000 years, and a darn good one at that. Getting rid of the icon, removing the program, and replacing it with a better one, is a process as old as Abraham, and as new as the latest high-tech gadget. It is a tool of great power, a tool we Jews invented, and, I suggest, one we can and should use in our personal life.

Let us then, take the very good advice of someone who said:
When you were born, you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. Live your life so at the end, you’re the one who is smiling and everyone around you is crying.

Abraham, and through him the Jewish people, our people, gave the world a wonderful paradigm for doing just that. Not only at the end of our lives, but all through them, let us use it to bring a smile to the faces of everyone around us, and of course, to our own as well.