Parashat Lech Lecha, Genesis 12:1-17:27

Lech lecha is a gamble.

Whenever I think of Abraham I think of vessels, as in containers, not ships. A midrash (Genesis Rabbah 38:13) everyone learns in religious school recounts how the young Abram smashed the clay idols in his father's shop. When asked to account for the smashed idols, he laid blame on one of the idols. His father countered that a clay idol could not do such a thing. Whereupon the youngster asked his father why one would then pray to a piece of clay. Another midrash seeks to explain why Abraham is asked to bind his son (in next week's parasha: Vayera). According to this story, Abraham himself is a clay vessel, the pottery lovingly created by the Divine potter. A potter does not test a flawed vessel, since he knows it would break. Only a vessel capable of standing stress is tested. Yet another midrash, in explaining the command to Abram to leave his home, compares the patriarch to a bottle of the finest perfume:

Said Rabbi Berekiah: What did Abraham resemble? A phial of myrrh closed with a tight- fitting lid and lying in a corner, so that its fragrance was not disseminated; as soon as it was taken up, however, its fragrance was disseminated. Similarly, the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Abraham: ‘Travel from place to place, and thy name will become great in the world’

Genesis Rabbah 39:2, Soncino translation

I've been thinking quite a bit about pottery recently. Well, not only pottery, but also dishes and glasses, and all other things fragile. Some of these we break on purpose, such as breaking a dish for tenaim, the Jewish engagement ceremony, or breaking a glass at the end of a wedding. Some vessels, tradition teaches, break because they cannot contain what is put into them. This is the basis of the mystical concept of shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels, which is found in Lurianic Kabbalah:

Before the world was created, God occupied every inch of the universe. In order to make room for a world, God needed to contract, a process Luria called tzimtzum. After this contraction, God directed divine light into vessels, but the vessels couldn’t contain the light, and they broke, letting evil and imperfection into the world. The purpose of human history is tikkun, fixing the broken vessels. This is achieved by fulfilling the commandments of the Torah.

Overview: Kabbalah and Hassidism, myjewishlearning.com

 

Perhaps the symbolism of such fragile items is on my mind because this coming Sunday is the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass" that marked a major escalation in Nazi persecution of German Jews. The lucky ones managed to leave. We know what happened to the rest.

According to the calendar I checked, Kristallnacht began on a Wednesday night, precariously perched between Lech lecha and Vayera. It will forever cast a shadow on the meaning of leaving your birthplace and offering your child.

In the Torah, lech lecha (go forth) is a gamble. Yes, it is a command from God, but where has this God been? After the story of Noah and the Tower of Babel there is Divine silence for ten generations, which continues into Abram’s lifetime; he is seventy-five years old when he is told lech lecha.

Lech lecha is a gamble because of what Abram gives up. Last year we touched upon the civilization of Abram's origin. Lech lecha me-artzecha, the text reads Go forth from your native land (Genesis 12:1) emphasizing what Abram is leaving behind.

Did the words lech lecha me-artzecha (go forth from your native land) echo in the ears of those fortunate enough to escape after Kristallnacht? Did they feel that God was guiding them as he guided Abram? Or was there only the same Divine silence that reverberated for ten generations from Noah and the Tower of Babel until God spoke to Abram?

Lech lecha in the Torah encompasses promise and fear beyond the imagination. Abram's journey is one of difficulty. Abram is promised a blessing that seems beyond his reach. He gains material wealth but faces mortal danger in his encounter with Pharaoh (Genesis 12:10-20). His kinsman Lot is kidnapped and he must fight to free him (Genesis 14:10-17). God promises Abram land and offspring but also tells him that his descendants will be enslaved for hundreds of years, the latter revealed to him in a covenantal ceremony where there appeared a smoking oven, and a flaming torch. (Genesis 15:17)

Lech lecha is the beginning of the Jewish people. It is a promise. It is potential. It is also peril. How lucky we are! While we have little difficulty in understanding promise and potential, many of us cannot comprehend the notion of a perilous journey. Abram, our ancestor, understood threats and experienced danger. So did our relatives seven decades ago.

Among them were some individuals who experienced their own lech lecha, a going forth with great potential and the gravest danger. The young Hannah Senesh moved from the European inferno to the Promised Land. Then she went back again hoping to help others make the same journey:

A voice called.
I went.
I went for it called.
I went lest I fall.
At the crossroads,
I blocked both ears with white frost
and cried for what I had lost.

Hannah Senesh, translation Ziva Shapiro

Parashat Lech lecha was the reading heard in German synagogues the Shabbat before these buildings were destroyed on Kristallnacht. Seventy years later we are grateful for those who escaped. But we also cry for whom and what we've lost.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Michal Shekel

Parashat Lech Lecha, Genesis 12:1-17:27

Sponsored by Judy Turner, in memory of Kevin Paul Kates.

Society presents many challenges to us and a basic one tests the essence of our religious beliefs: How do we define Torah?

I know people who plan their vacations meticulously for months in advance of the departure date. Then there are those who decide where to go, literally at the last minute. In some European countries you can just show up at the airport and see what trips are available. Whether well-planned or spur of the moment, the toughest part of traveling is packing. How do you know what to pack? It is especially difficult at this time of year when the weather can be sunny and hot one day and rainy, windy and cold the following day.

I've often wondered how Abram managed. He had the best the world had to offer readily available. Abram lived in one of the most civilized places on earth. Mesopotamia had well developed social institutions, legal codes, science, architecture, and art. The oldest music we have is from that general region.

Yet Abram was told to leave all this behind. His trip was a one-way journey: Adonai said to Abram, Go forth from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father's house to the land that I will show you. (Genesis 12:1) Apparently, he did not pack lightly: Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother's son Lot, and all the wealth that they had amassed, and the persons that they had acquired in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan. (Genesis 12:5) But if you think about it, he jettisoned a huge amount of baggage as he set forth on his journey. Abram's Divine tour guide told him exactly what to leave behind: his land, his birthplace and his father's house. In other words he was to shed everything that had molded him into who he was. Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut explains the progression of this command:

It emphasizes the difficulties of the challenge Abram is about to accept. It is difficult to leave one's land and to be an unprotected wanderer abroad; it is even more difficult to abjure all that is most dear in one's accustomed house; it is most difficult of all to reject one's parental values and standards.

There are those who say that Abram's journey was not a physical voyage but a spiritual one. The first two Hebrew words of the portion, lech lecha, can be interpreted as command – "go," but can also be read as "go to yourself." This latter reading is interpreted in Itturei Torah, a collection of Hassidic and ethical teachings, as meaning to look within your "roots and find your potential."

Well, his bags are packed, he's ready to go, there is no jet plane, and he won't be back again. Abram is heading into new territory. Compared to where he's coming from, it is a backwater, but it will be home. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother's son Lot, and all the wealth that they had amassed, and the persons that they had acquired in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land as far as the site of Shechem, at the terebinth of Moreh. The Canaanites were then in the land. (Genesis 12:5-6) This new home was inhabited by a group of people called the Canaanites. This simple statement of fact has led to some interesting commentary because it is so matter of fact. The focus is on the word "then" (az), a simple word that carries much baggage. By saying that the "Canaanites were then in the land," the implication is that the Canaanites were not there when the Torah was written. This is problematic if one believes that the Torah was written by Moses during whose time, according to tradition, the Canaanites lived in the land.

Before we turn to various commentators, let's recall Mark Twain's comment that most people are bothered by the passages in the Bible that they don't understand, whereas he was troubled by those passages he did understand. While he wasn't referring to Genesis 12:6, for the liberal Jew this verse is challenging. With that in mind, let's begin with Rashi.

Rashi explains Genesis 12:6 by saying that the Canaanites were in the process of conquering the land at the time. He takes the Hebrew word az to mean already. Ibn Ezra interprets az as meaning then. "It is possible that the Canaanites capture the land of Canaan from others, but if this isn't so than it is a secret and the enlightened one will remain silent." If the traditional understanding is that Moses wrote the Torah and the Canaanites lived in the land during his time, then this verse was written at some other time and not by Moses. It presents a huge challenge to tradition and so Ibn Ezra advises a voluntary self-censorship.

What Ibn Ezra hints at is an issue that would arise in the nineteenth century: Who wrote the Torah? Biblical scholarship would develop around the documentary hypothesis which views the Torah as having been gathered from four different sources. This is used to explain, among other things, the two creation stories in Genesis, the interchanging usage of the names Jacob and Israel within certain stories, and the repetition of certain stories with some differences. Actually, even prior to the nineteenth century scholars had raised the possibility that the Torah was not written by Moses. This proved to be dangerous. Baruch Spinoza's suggestion that the Torah was written by Ezra the scribe was one of the reasons for his excommunication. Spinoza was deeply influenced by his contemporary society; his journey was an exile from Judaism.

Abram left a sophisticated civilized world in order to establish his relationship with God. For most of us this is not possible. We are entrenched in the modern equivalent of Mesopotamia, a society at the height of knowledge, similar to the one inhabited by Spinoza. There is much that is alluring in society, much that Abram escaped and that Spinoza embraced. Society presents many challenges to us and a basic one tests the essence of our religious beliefs: How do we define Torah? Do we believe that Torah is divinely revealed, dictated by God, while Moses wrote it down word for word? Do we believe that Torah is divinely inspired, the product of an encounter between God and humanity, written by people? These questions are at the heart of modern liberal interpretations of Judaism. While it may seem that revelation and inspiration are polar opposites, they share a common element; each view is described by its adherents as divine. For those who profess a belief in divine inspiration it is possible accept traditional commentators and modern biblical scholars as presenting a spectrum of interpretations that are divinely inspired.

Abram set off on a great adventure. It was his faith that permitted him to do so. We too are on a journey but in very different circumstances. We find ourselves surrounded by the very thing Abram was forced to leave behind, the influence of a great civilization. His challenge was to become a Jew away from any influence, ours is to remain Jews while facing the pressures of society, in our land, our birthplace, our parents' homes.

We each face a Jewish journey and we too must pack our bags. Our challenge is making our way as Jews in a secular society. Often, this means deviating from the standard route, taking a detour:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

As we journey on this less traveled road, what part of that society can we take with us and what must we leave behind? What popular beliefs will needlessly weigh us down? What common values will lead us astray? What must we take along that is essential to our brit, our covenant with God, and what keepsake can we take along from modern society to strengthen our Judaism? Whatever we choose to pack, and however we pack it, one item will be in everyone's luggage – our guidebook – the Torah. And that has, and always will, make all the difference.

Shabbat shalom,
MS