(Delivered November 9, 2024)

For most of human history, the size of the known world was small. People were rooted in place, often for generations, unless a violent rupture upset the established order. We were thickly woven together, for better and worse. Many generations lived under one roof or close by; we knew our neighbors well; we lived lives of interdependence. Communication was in-person and travel was primarily by foot, with an animal and maybe a cart. As such, we might have known what was happening in our own village or the next one over, but that was it—that was as big as the “big picture” got. In contrast to the way many of us live our lives today—taking vacations that bring us all around the globe, spending half the year in one state and half in another, or even schlepping back and forth from Gloucester to Newton on a weekly basis—for most of human history, our existence was mainly about staying put.

So in Parshat Lech Lecha, when God says to Avram—he was still Avram then—

לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ

Go—go!—from your land, the your birthplace, from your ancestral home,
to the land that I will show to you

this is truly momentous. What God is asking of Avram is to have the courage to leave everything that makes sense, everything that is familiar, because some unknown destiny awaits. To pick up and go, not because something is chasing you, but because something is calling you. This is the experience our Torah invites us to reflect on. Unlike Adam and Chava leaving the Garden of Eden, Avram is not going into exile. And unlike the Israelites leaving Egypt in Sefer Shmot—the Book of Exodus—he is not leaving because conditions have become intolerable. Rather, he is subject to what the biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg calls a divine imperative. God says it’s time to go, so he goes. 

And as I said last night, God sweetens this instruction with the promise of blessing: that God will make Avram’s descendants into a great nation, that God will bless Avram and magnify his name, and that Avram himself will become a blessing. This reassurance of blessing jolts Avram, his wife Sarai, and their nephew Lot, and they set out. The journey will take them places they were expecting to go, but also to places they weren’t expecting. When famine strikes in Eretz Canaan—the Land of Canaan—Avram gathers himself again and takes his family down to Egypt for the sake of survival. Over the course of many decades Avram amasses wealth and position, so when he and his ever-growing entourage return again to Canaan, he and Lot find that they have become too wealthy to share the land together. They agree to split up and as they contemplate who should stay where, who should take which parcel of land, the forward motion that has characterized the parsha gets a revealing sliver of an interruption.

In chapter 13 verse 10, Lot looks around the land and, seeing how well-watered and fertile it is, compares it to two things: Gan Adonai and Eretz Mitzraim—God’s Garden, and the Land of Egypt. With this comparison, the text pumps the brakes on all this relentless movement. With this comparison, our Torah acknowledges that with every step forward there is an equal and opposite impulse within us to look back. At moments of change, we paraphrase the divine messenger that speaks to Hagar in the portion we heard chanted today:

אֵי־מִזֶּה בָאת וְאָנָה תֵלֵכִי

Where are you coming from? Where are you going?

At moments of change, something primal inside us says, why can’t things be the same as before? We long to go back to a simpler time, and we idealize even the places we needed to leave. 

At moments of change especially, the words we chant every time we place the Torah scrolls back in the aron ring in our hearts, maybe even make our voices falter:

חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם

Renew our days, like before

When the inexorable unfolding of time and history catches us in its grip, we imagine that there was a time when the path was different. We imagine perhaps that the past held us more tenderly than it did. But it was a hunger for life that made Eve test the fruit, which ultimately led to banishment. And it was conflict in Egypt that led to Avram continuing on his journey, doubling back to a land that ultimately held his fate as religious innovator, the father of three traditions. 

This week, this historic week, the inexorable unfolding of time and history has us sharp in its grip. Political division; another antisemitic attack, this time in Amsterdam; a government shakeup in Israel—all these events and more conspire to tell us, there is change and journey ahead, and it’s going to be harder than we thought. Our unity will be tested in ways that we can’t imagine. Yet in the words of the great Leonard Cohen, whose yahrzeit was this week:

The birds, they sang at the break of day, Start again, I heard them say. 
Don’t dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be.

We cannot recapture what is gone; all that is granted us is to move forward. Like Avram our ancestor, we can lean on the divine presence for strength. Like him, we can think critically about the dominant culture that surrounds us and speak up for what feels most true. The blessings that were offered to Avram—perhaps they weren’t promises after all, but consequences. There’s faith and courage in Avram’s story, and that’s where the blessings come from. Those blessings still speak to us today.

וְאֶעֶשְׂךָ לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל

And I will make you a great nation 

וַאֲבָרֶכְךָ

And I will bless you 

וַאֲגַדְּלָה שְׁמֶךָ

And I will magnify your name. 

וֶהְיֵה בְּרָכָה

And you shall be a blessing.

And you shall be a blessing.

And you shall be a blessing.

Shabbat shalom.