The Torah portions for the past few weeks have dealt with Avraham, who is considered to be the first Jew. Actually, Avraham was not only the first Jew, but the first monotheist. Everyone at that time worshipped Idols, and it was Avraham who discovered, at the age of three and through his own reasoning, that there was one G-d who created the world and who was responsible for everything. In those times, people worshipped the sun and the moon, but three-year-old Avraham looked up at the sky and thought “The sun needs something else, something greater than it, to make it shine. Who created the stars? They didn’t create themselves.”
This reminds me of how, for much of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, many philosophical and political movements emerged that denied the existence of G-d. With the Industrial Revolution arrived a kind of hubris that Man was the Measure of all Things, and with our technology, the human race was invincible.
Out of this attitude arose Communism, which purported religion was nothing more than an “opiate of the masses” and purported to impose morality without G-d, when it only deepened injustice and oppression. Nazism also arose from this general attitude, as Germany desired to create a master race. Now it is all-too-apparent that the only thing they accomplished was to commit the most heinous crime of the Twentieth century.
Those “thinkers” believed religion and faith were somehow backward and barbaric. But look at Fascism and Communism now and look at how many people believe in G-d. Avraham at the age of three discovered the existence of G-d through his own logic. And it was the simple logic of a child.. He knew that faith is not something primitive and compulsive, but is a process of the heart that involves the mind.