Abraham Was Like a Tree That Could Not Be Repaid for Its Gifts

There is a specific kind of gift that cannot be repaid, not because the giver is too elevated for ordinary thanks, but because what was given is so complete that no equivalent response exists. The tradition recognizes this situation and has a name for it: a gift that can only be answered by the prayer that its giver will continue to give to others what it gave to you.

This is the image at the heart of a teaching in Yalkut Shimoni that uses a traveler and a tree to describe Abraham's relationship to Torah, and it is stranger and more beautiful than it first appears.

The Story of the Traveler and the Tree

Yalkut Shimoni on Nach, section 617, preserves a teaching attributed to Rabbi Yose that begins with the verse from Psalms: "And he will be like a planted tree." The verse is about the righteous person, the one whose delight is in the Torah of God and who meditates on it day and night. What is this person like?

Rabbi Yose tells a story. A traveler is nearly overcome by thirst in a desolate land. He finds a tree unlike any he has encountered: its fruit is sweet, its shade is deep, and a stream of clear water runs beneath it. He eats, he rests in the shade, he drinks from the stream. When he is revived and ready to continue his journey, he wants to thank the tree. He looks at it, considering what to offer. What can a revived traveler give a tree that already has everything? The streams flow to it. The fruit grows from it. The shade extends from it without effort.

So the traveler offers the only gift available: "May it be the will of God that all the saplings planted from you be like you." A blessing for the tree's future generations. A prayer that what this tree gave to this traveler will be given to everyone who comes after.

The 3,205 texts of the midrash-aggadah collection use parables like this one throughout, as the primary mode of making theological abstractions emotionally accessible. The parable is not decoration added to the teaching. It is the teaching, compressed into an image that carries more freight than the corresponding doctrinal statement could.

Abraham and the Torah He Discovered Before Sinai

The identification of the tree with Abraham is not left implicit. Yalkut Shimoni spells it out: the traveler who finds everything he needs in the tree is the student who finds everything they need in Abraham. But what did Abraham give? He lived before the Torah was given at Sinai. He had no scroll, no Talmud, no codified law. How is he the tree of Torah?

The answer is one of the more striking claims in rabbinic literature: Abraham observed the entire Torah. Not because he had received it but because he reasoned his way to it. He discovered the divine will through the exercise of his understanding, perceiving through the created world the nature and expectations of its Creator, and then structuring his life accordingly. The tradition says he observed not only the written Torah but the oral Torah as well, not because it had been transmitted to him but because he arrived at it independently.

The Legends of the Jews develops this at length. Abraham as a young man living in Ur of the Chaldees began questioning the idol worship around him, recognizing its absurdity, and reasoning toward monotheism through observation of the natural world. He noticed that the sun and moon, each appearing to rule at different hours, each yielded to a higher power. From the alternation of cosmic authorities, he inferred a single authority above all. This was not revelation. It was philosophy, the most independent and demanding form of Torah study.

Why the Blessing Must Be for the Saplings

The traveler's prayer for the tree's future saplings is theologically precise. A prayer that the tree continue to give what it has given would miss the point; the tree already gives continuously. A prayer that the tree be rewarded for its generosity would also miss the point; the tree's nature is to give, and its giving is not conditional on reward. The only fitting response is a prayer that the gift be transmitted, that what the tree produced be produced again and again by those who come from it.

Abraham's relationship to Torah is identical in structure. He discovered it and lived it before anyone else. He gave it, through his life and his teachings and his children, to all the generations who came after him. The rabbis and scholars who study Torah two, three, four thousand years after Abraham are the saplings of his tree. The traveler's blessing is the blessing of every Torah student for every predecessor: may what you were continue to be what comes from you.

This is why Yalkut Shimoni connects the verse from Psalms about the righteous person who delights in Torah to Abraham specifically. The Psalms verse describes an ideal. Abraham was not the description of an ideal; he was the original instance. He was the tree that existed before the saplings, the one from whom the entire tradition of Torah study, transmission, and transformation descends.

What Torah Gives That Cannot Be Repaid

The kabbalistic tradition, especially as developed in the Zohar of thirteenth-century Castile, holds that the Torah is not merely a legal or ethical document. It is the blueprint of creation, the template according to which the world was made and according to which it is sustained. God looked into the Torah and created the world. Abraham, who discovered the Torah through his own reasoning about the world, was in a sense reading backwards from the created world to the template from which it had been made.

This reverses the usual picture. The tradition teaches that God created the world using the Torah as a blueprint. Abraham examined the world and found the blueprint. He arrived at Torah the way an architect might arrive at the plans for a building by studying the building itself carefully enough. The plans were always there; he just had to see them.

The Traveler's Return

The Tanchuma midrashim, the homiletical commentaries on the Torah portions associated with Rabbi Tanchuma bar Abba, return repeatedly to Abraham as the paradigmatic seeker, the one whose quality of attention to the world was so refined that he could perceive divine intention in natural phenomena. This is a demanding portrait. It does not allow Abraham to be simply a recipient of divine revelation. He had to work for what he found.

The traveler in Rabbi Yose's parable did not create the tree. But he had to be thirsty enough, and lost enough, and attentive enough, to find it. The tree gave what the tree gives unconditionally. The benefit to the traveler depended on the traveler's willingness to stop, sit down, eat, and drink. Abraham stopped. He sat down. He ate and drank from a Torah that was already there in the fabric of the world, waiting to be noticed by someone with the patience to look.

The saplings of his tree are everyone who has ever done the same.