The importance of Abraham's discovery lies not so much in its scientific or conceptual innovation, although for his time both were absolutely radical. Rather, the primary significance of his discovery lies in its social aspect.
Indeed, Abraham's motivation for asking the questions that eventually led to his discovery was as much social as it was intellectual. He noticed that his townspeople were becoming increasingly alienated. For a long time, Babylonians nurtured a prosperous society that allowed multiple belief systems and teachings to coexist in harmony. But in Abraham's time, people were growing intolerant, conceited, and alienated from each other, and Abraham wondered why.
Through his questions and observation of Nature, he realized that the world that appears to our senses is but a superficial blanket that covers a complex and magnificent interaction of forces. When these forces interweave in a certain way, they induce a certain type of physical or emotional reality to appear, such as birth, death, war, peace, and all the states in between. This interaction exists not only on a large scale, as between countries, but in every element of life, from the subatomic to the interstellar, and from the very personal to the international. In the latter part of this book I will explore the social implications of Abraham's discoveries, but to do that we need to understand more of the nature of the discoveries themselves.
Abraham's thought process in discovering these forces is evident in his questions, which to him were, as Neil Postman put it in The End of Education, “the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings.” [38] In Maimonides’ writings, Abraham asked, “How was it possible for this wheel [of reality] to always turn without a driver? Who is turning it, for it cannot turn itself?” [39] Later, his insights helped him defeat Nimrod in the debate, when Nimrod kept ordering him to serve this or that element, and Abraham kept showing him that those elements were all offshoots of something higher, without real power of their own.
Thus, through repeated pondering and observation, Abraham came to realize what really makes the world go ’round, and like all great truths, it was as simple as can be: desires, two desires, to be exact. One is a desire to give and the other, to receive. The interaction between those desires is what makes the world go ’round; it is the wheel that drives all things and the force that creates all phenomena. In Kabbalistic terminology, the desire to give is referred to as “His [the Creator’s] desire to do good to His creations,” [40] and the desire to receive is described as “the desire and craving to receive delight and pleasure.” [41] For short, Kabbalists refer to them as “desire to bestow” and “desire to receive.”
This simple realization is what Abraham was trying to convey to his fellow Babylonians, but Nimrod tried to prevent him from doing so by trying to kill him. And when he failed to do so, he sent him away.
Alas, deporting Abraham did not restore the Babylonian spirit of camaraderie and union. Eventually, “The Lord [Creator, meaning Nature] confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth” (Gen, 11:9).
This did not happen to the Babylonians because some vengeful and powerful old man called “The Lord” was holding a grudge against them. It happened to them because the desires that Abraham discovered possess a certain direction of evolution. There is no random interaction here, but a set of rules that unfold by a rigid cause-and-effect order.
When Abraham discovered these rules, he realized his local folk were headed in the wrong direction, which could only lead them to eventual destruction, so he tried his best to warn them. As we will see, these desires are as perpetual and as rigid as gravity, or the positive and negative poles of a magnet. But like gravity and the poles of the magnet, both forces can be made to work to our benefit.
To understand the similarity between the current state of humanity and the state of the Babylonian society, and hence the relevance of Abraham's discovery to the current global crises, we need to understand the direction in which the two desires evolve. And for this, we need to start from the very beginning.