(Delivered November 1, 2025)

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! 

This joke is unfunny even in the best of times, but downright absurd when talk of hunger lingers at the edge of our conversations. Nonetheless, this inane joke pops into my mind whenever I am facing a sustained challenge. In such times, I find myself thinking, Once this is finished, life will get back to normal. I tell myself, I just need to get through this one thing, and then it will be smooth sailing. Everything else will fall into place.

That’s not exactly how life works.

I know this isn’t news to you. The truth is, it also isn’t news to me. And yet for some reason, it’s a lesson we have to keep learning and have to keep teaching one another. The Torah is full of moments that look like endings, but which are really continuations.

This has rung especially true to me this week as I’ve been thinking about Parshat Lech L’cha. With its famous beginning: 

וַיֹּאמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ
אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ׃
God said to Avram: Get going! Leave your homeland, your birthplace and your father’s house
and go to the land which I will show you.

It sounds as though it’s a thunderbolt! Here Avram is, minding his own business, and God says go go go. But if we look a little more carefully, if we remind ourselves that the Torah wasn’t written incrementally, parsha by parsha, but rather that it is a continuous scroll, we see something different. 

As a triennial congregation, it’s particularly easy for us to miss this because, like Bruce Wayne and Batman never being seen in the same place, the third triennial of Parshat Noach, and the first triennial of Parshat Lech L’cha are never heard in the same year. 

But if we bring ourselves into a scroll mindset, we can see the story as more continuous, less dramatic in a way.

The final few verses of Noach say that Terach (Avram’s father) takes Avram and Lot as well as Sarai, Avram’s wife, and they depart from Ur Kasdim, Avram’s birthplace, to go towards Canaan. And then, they get as far as Charan and they settle. The last line of Noach says.

וַיִּהְיוּ יְמֵי־תֶרַח חָמֵשׁ שָׁנִים וּמָאתַיִם שָׁנָה וַיָּמָת תֶּרַח בְּחָרָן׃
And Terach lived 205 years and Terach died in Charan.

What comes next is וַיֹּאמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ …

Without a week separating them, it becomes clear that God’s grand pronouncement of Lech L’cha is not so much a grand pronouncement at all, but rather… a noodge. God is saying to Avram keep going, don’t lose your momentum. You stopped in Charan to rest, your father has died, it seems like you’re at an ending place, but there’s no such thing. 

It’s all there in the first letter of the new parsha: the magic vav—meaning and—which says: what looks like the end is so often the middle. Whatever has happened has happened, and now something else will happen.

And indeed, just a few verses later, Avram actually arrives in Canaan. That’s right, the journey that the division of parshiot makes us see as a big, dramatic, Long Term Project in fact is resolved within a fistful of verses. It isn’t anticlimactic, though, because no sooner have they arrived in the land of Canaan, and begun anticipating the eventual inheritance of that land by Avram’s descendants yet to come, when a famine takes hold in the land.

And despite his great wealth and position of privilege, Avram again picks up stakes along with his family and travels down to Egypt to wait out the famine. The matter-of-fact mention of famine in this week’s parsha hits hard. As the government shutdown grinds into its second month—with the attendant furloughs of at least half a million federal employees, and with the evaporation of SNAP benefits for many families—starvation seems anything but theoretical. As of today, over 1 million Massachusetts residents, including 277,000 school-aged children, will not receive their SNAP benefits for the duration of the government shutdown. 

Given the many hot-button issues before the public nationally and globally— from antisemitism to the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, from unrest about swirling authoritarian trends to hurricane destruction in Jamaica and Cuba, from ICE immigration raids to war in Ukraine to the whitewashing of American history to an unfurling genocide in Sudan to a contentious mayoral race in New York—it’s easy to develop a sense of fatigue and overwhelm for all that is unfolding. 

But there’s a distinction, that comes with a call to action: all of those big trends I just named are unlikely to be influenced by our actions. But here on Cape Ann, food pantries, which had already ramped up their operations in recent months, are bracing for an onslaught of need. As members of a small, diverse island community, we have no choice but to be attuned to our neighbors in need. And indeed, already there are local businesses such as the Common Crow Market that are implementing efforts to provide extra support to the Open Door Food Pantry. And here in our own TAA community, two individuals independently and unbeknownst to each other—Mara Capello and Noa Lewis—have spearheaded fund drives to support the food pantry’s important and holy work. It is not my way to talk about money on Shabbat, much less to fundraise. Let me just say that these efforts are ongoing, the need is anticipated to be acute, and we are a community of deeply caring individuals.

It’s curious to me, as I mentioned in introducing the second aliyah, that the parsha makes a point of Avram’s wealth. If he’s so wealthy, why does he even need to go down to Egypt to ride out the famine? It suggests to me that even people with an abundance of resources have limits and need to make changes when conditions worsen. Given that, how much more so for folks whose lives are already on the margins, folks who were already strapped enough to need government benefits? 

Everybody deserves to eat.

God’s prediction for Avram at the beginning of the parsha is that when he keeps going, moves on to Canaan, he will be rewarded with blessing, the most precious of which will be children and grandchildren, a line of descent that leads to this very room. And God says, וֶהְיֵה בְּרָכָה—and you shall be a blessing. The Kedushat Levi, also known as the Berdichever Rebbe, plays holy anagrams with this phrase to comment on it, noting that וֶהְיֵה—vav hey yud hey—reorders the letters of the unpronounceable representation of the name of God. The Berdichever talks about how until Abraham, there was nobody to complete the circuit of blessing that God was offering. 

מִשֶׁבַּא אַבְרָהָם וְהָיָה הִתְעוֹרְרוּת הָשֶׁפַע מִלְמַטַה
Since Avraham came, the flow [of blessing] was awakened from below

In other words, something in Avram / Avraham sparked humankind’s capacity to receive and give blessing in the earthly realm. To read the opening of this week’s parsha, spoken to Avram (later Avraham), implicates all of us as his descendents. Like Avraham, we are urged to receive God’s blessing and to be a blessing. Like Avraham, we are called to keep going, when the road ahead seems unpassable. And like Avraham, we are blessed and privileged to be in divine covenant, to listen for the voice of God and to use it as our guiding star.

Shabbat shalom!