Bamidbar Rabbah preserves a tender moment in the imagined inner life of the Holy One. When God decided to bless Abraham, He paused.
“What shall I tell him?” the Holy One asked Himself. “With what shall I bless him? Shall I say, ‘Be perfectly righteous’? He is already righteous. Shall I say, ‘Let your wife Sarah be righteous before Me’? She is already righteous. Shall I bless him that his children be righteous? They are already righteous.”
Every blessing God considered, Abraham had already earned on his own. The patriarch had outrun the usual vocabulary of reward.
So God chose a blessing that only God could give. “I will bless you so that all your children — in every generation, in every age to come — shall be just like you.”
The rabbis pointed to the verse in which God takes Abraham outside the tent: “And He said unto him, So shall thy seed be” (Genesis 15:5). The simple reading is about the stars: as many as those points of light. The deep reading is about kind: as righteous as you, Abraham, for as long as the stars shine.
The blessing that fits Abraham is the blessing no one else can give themselves — a lineage of character running forward through time.