Lech-Lecha - Go Forth

“Once or twice in a lifetime, a man or woman may choose a radical leaving, having heard Lech L’cha – Go Forth. God disturbs us toward our destiny by hard events and by freedom’s now urgent voice which explode and confirm who we are. We don’t like leaving but God loves becoming. Blessed are You, HaShem our God, who chooses Your people Israel in love.” (Mishkan Tefillah, Shabbat Morning service)

            Avivah Gotlieb Zornberg, in her book The Beginnings of Desire, presents to us a tension of Parashat Lech L’cha. Abraham is sent forth from his home, the land of his father, to a place he will not know until the “light falls on it with a difference”, that is, when God shows him that this is the right place. Zornberg points out that to go on a journey without a clear destination is madness, and Abraham must be a madman to embark on it. However, she also shows us that this madness is necessary, a new step in creation toward life as we know it. Playing with the same root letters that make up the very different root words for “tear” and “barrenness” (k’riah and akirah), she suggests a total rootlessness for Abraham and Sarah – or Abram and Sarai as they are at that point. They have no children, nothing giving them root and causing them to stay in one place, nothing extending their family tree, so they are able to tear themselves away from what they have known. In this journey where they are torn and rootless, they finally stop on the Promised Land, the first time it is promised; they are promised blessings and descendents, roots and branches for their family tree. In doing so, they are able, as Zornberg puts it, to “create entirely new paradigms of reality.”

            It is a paradigm we still live within today. Most people do not just leave their parents’ homes when it is time to cleave to their spouses. They leave when they feel the need to discover something new, to find or reinvent themselves. Whether the call comes directly from God or from the urging of a good friend or from within, we have come to realize that our own betterment, “enlargement”, real understanding of the world comes from destabilization and re-stabilization. This idea is not unlike Zornberg’s reading of Genesis. Adam and Eve were exiled as punishment, Abraham was sent away from his home in search of blessings, both were hardships, and both created new ways of living, life as we know us, a richer, fuller life of meaning. In Abraham’s new paradigm, we must simply create that new life of meaning for ourselves.