Parshat Lech Lecha

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Synopsis: God commands Abram to take a leap of faith and promises Abram progeny and a meaningful existence for generations to come. Ishmael is born.

Our Text: Genesis 12:1: “The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from (leave) your country, your birthplace, and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

Our Question: How can God command Abram to go somewhere when he hasn’t been told clearly where? How can someone “go” somewhere if the somewhere hasn’t been revealed? Shouldn’t God have just said, “Leave your house and go to such-and-such a place...”?

Our commentator: Sefat Emet: Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter,1847–1905, also known by the title of his main work, the Sfat Emet, was a Hasidic Rebbe who became the Rebbe of the Gerer Hasidim. Under his guidance and leadership Ger became the largest Hasidic group in Poland. He was also a proponent of expanding the Hasidic community in the land of Israel.

Commentary: Why didn’t God right away reveal to him the destination? Maybe God didn’t even know (decide it) it yet? (Or, rather:) to completely annull the (personal) senses and wishes to direct them to God’s will alone. As it is written, “Leave your homeland.” That is to say, to cast out all external connection/ belonging in favour of seeing God’s will. Only then God will reveal the Divine Will. And this is the general rule: this needs to be a person’s desire always, only to hear and receive that which he/she doesn’t already know, because there is no measure to that which God knows, so its fitting for a person to always be “empty”...

Explanation: In this portion, Abraham becomes the prototypical wanderer. Did God really tell him to leave everything he knew and go to an unnamed place to become the father of a great nation, or was Abraham believing—and manifesting—that this was his destiny? Is Abraham understanding the need to “go forth” and leave everything else behind in order to really affect change in his own life and in others?

Sfat Emet is suggesting that in order to be “filled” with the knowledge of God one has first to be empty. And in order to be empty one has to disengage with the things that fill him or her.

This sounds a little Zen, doesn’t it? Detachment from all material things? We shouldn’t be surprised because in the early Hasidic teachings detachment (called “bitul” in Hebrew) was a goal. In order to attach to something, we first have to detach from something else.

The wanderer is a detached person. No fixed address, no fixation on a place. Few belongings. The Sfat Emet is suggesting that only when Abram detached from the familiar— his birthplace, his ancestral home, his family —could he forge a totally new identity.

So why didn’t God give him a fixed goal, an address at which to arrive? Sfat Emet is maintaining that a fixed goal would have given Abram a sense of mission to a specific place that would have left him unable to be open to whatever God decided for him. In other words, real trust is being ready to receive that which we do not know already. Knowledge is limitless and God is infinite; to understand the enormity of this we must be able to disengage from our own limited experience and be totally open to the unknown. When we are that open, and that able to acknowledge that we don’t know that much, we will be able to hear God’s command and go forth.

Concluding Thoughts: Sfat Emet’s first comment seems strange, even blasphemous. God didn’t know where Abram would be sent? Perhaps Sfat Emet means that God knew the ultimate destination but hadn’t decided the route yet; the journey would be one of real trust in which one puts one’s hands in the hand of a parent and goes with them to an unknown destination, knowing they will get you there safely. To be truly open to God, Abram had to trust that God might change directions mid-course and go somewhere else. And God needed to decide midway if Abram was the right choice to create the nascent Jewish nation; if he wasn’t, God could change course. This scene will be repeated soon in the Akedah, in Genesis 22, when Isaac puts his trust in his father Abram (now Abraham) to walk up a mountain to a place he will be shown. Genesis 22:2 uses almost the same words as our portion: “Take your son...and go forth (lech lecha) to the land of Moriah. Offer him there as a sacrifice, on one of the mountains that I will show you.” Blind faith? Or a lifetime of openness to the unknown?

I agree with Sfat Emet that it hard—indeed almost impossible—to receive anything when our hearts are so full of ourselves. And its hard to be totally open to the unknown when we are so attached to our senses and our own desires. One only has to look at the society around us to see that the more we have, the more we want; the more we are attached to “things” the more those things own us. We can never just “go forth” (lech lecha) because we are so weighted down with possessions. Even moving houses takes months of organizing, garage sales, and finally, saying goodbye to all those attachments we thought were so necessary.

How much can we trust in an unknown destination so that when we do “go forth” to a new goal, a new relationship, a new home, a new job, a new situation, we are empty enough of expectations and directions that we can meet God somewhere along the way?

Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Elyse Goldstein