Encountering NIMROD,
Clarifying Values

I didn’t realize for some time, that the name of the camper was actually the name of a person. At some point I picked up a general sense that this was a famous hunter. Shrouded in mystery, I assumed this Nimrod was a quite a camper, surely sleeping on the ground, probably not very happy to be associated with those who didn’t.

the one who wanted to throw the young Avram into a fiery furnace for rejecting his countries dogmas, for daring to be an iconoclast, literally smashing his father’s idols on his way to following one creator God in whose image all people are created equally. I worried for Avram, seeing something of myself in his familiar stubbornness and insistence on following what he believed to be right.

In reading of Nimrod this year, I thought of a teaching of
the Slonimer Rebbe, that all of the Book of Genesis is meant to help us clarify
values, to purify qualities and ways of being and behaving in the world. It is
all about taharat ha’middot/clarifying of
values. I began to wonder about Nimrod, about the values we are to learn,
remembering what he tried to do to the young Avram, feeling the tension between
the evil I sensed of him and the trailblazer in the woods who beckoned to me,
the young camper who wanted to swing an axe and handle a knife and be a hero.
It begins simply enough, and yet there is something
mysterious, as though pushing us to ask, but who is he really? The Torah says
simply, Cush begot Nimrod; he began to be
a hero upon the earth/hechel li’hi’yot gibor ba’aretz (Gen. 10:8). Just
what is a gibor, what is the nature
of his being a hero? Gibor can be a
hero, a mighty one, someone of strength. But what is the nature of that
strength? Much of the latter part of the portion of No’ach offers a lens through which to consider how we use our
gifts, our strength, how we use technology and intelligence, whether to build a
tower of Babel to storm the heavens or to create an ark in which to ride out
the storm, offering a model of harmony, lion and lamb together, a way yet to be
realized after the flood.
We are told next that Nimrod is a gibor tzayid lifnei ha’shem/a crafty hero before God. Most
translations translate tzayid in its
more usual meaning as a hunter. In translating gibor tzayid as “crafty hero,” Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th
century Germany) is drawing on a root meaning of tzayid as deceit and deceiver, tzad.
The hunter needs to be secretive and quiet, to utilize stealth and wiles.
As
much as I disdain hunting, except by those for whom it is truly for the sake of
sustenance, I can respect those who respect the animals, even in the course of
hunting them. This is not the way of Nimrod as seen through the lens of a
tradition that saw the mistreatment of animals as a precursor to the
mistreatment of people. Establishing himself as a great hunter, Nimrod sowed
fear with his prowess, gradually turning to people as his pray.

Yitzchak Abravanel, a fifteenth century commentator of both
Portugal and Italy, writes that until Nimrod all people were equal, hayu b’nei ha’adam kulam shavim.
Abravanel goes on to say that the statement “he
became a mighty man in the land,” means he
became a tyrant. In a conversation across centuries, that all of this was
“before God,” becomes the source of a powerful warning from Rabbi Samson
Raphael Hirsch: “Nimrod began to oppress his fellow ‘men’ in the name of God.
He was the first to misuse the name of God, to surround brute force with the
halo of Divine approval…. Nimrod became the prototype for all those dynastic
rulers who craftily crowned themselves with the halo of pseudo-sanctity and
whose power, politics and hypocrisy were characterized by the saying, k’nimrod gibor tzayid lifnei ha’shem/like
Nimrod, a crafty hero before God.”

Rabbi Victor H. Reinstein
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