This week at school, as we do for each of our students as they mark their transition into adult Jewish life, we celebrated an in school Bat Mitzvah. This student was among the first classes I guided through the process of learning to chant Torah back in the fourth grade. As she chanted the first verses of parshat Lech L’cha, where Abraham and Sarah begin to forge their relationship with God and set off across the desert into the unknown, I was struck by the piece of this student’s journey through her Jewish education that I have been privileged to accompany over the last several years. I recalled the courage and determination and the trust that it took to take on the challenge of mastering a previously unfamiliar skill, and took pride in how far she has come.
When we talk about Parshat Lech L’cha, with its imperative to go, we tend to think about journeys; physical journeys, metaphorical journeys, “Jewish journeys”, journeys to become who we were meant to be. The parsha has a lot to say about all of the courage it takes to go, to explore, to become. But as it begins, the imperative is not to go to a place. In fact, Abraham is not even told where he is going. The imperative is to go away from, to leave. This is emphasized in the first verse of the parsha, as Abraham is told to leave, “your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house”. These are a lot of words for the Torah to use to say “go”, and as the midrash points out, in order to leave one’s land, one would first need to leave one’s birthplace, and before that, one’s father’s house. The text is not just saying, “get up and go… keep going … keep going”. There is more to it.
There is a similar textual device used later in Abraham’s life, when he is told again, “Lech L’cha”, go. In that case God tells Abraham to take “your son, your only son, the one that you love,” to sacrifice on the mountain that God will show him. In both formulations, the three words used, seemingly to clarify God’s intent, do not really make things clearer. Instead, they make things dearer. The repetition serves primarily to emphasize the emotional connection to that which God is asking Abraham to separate from as he faithfully follows God into the unknown. Leaving for another moment the ethical conundrum raised by the later command to take Isaac to the as yet unspecified mountain, this reading puts a point on Abraham’s courage at this moment that we celebrate as really the founding of the Jewish endeavor.
Abraham is able to become the parent of the Jewish people, not only because he was willing to physically get up and go, but because he was prepared to leave behind what he thought he knew about how the world works. He is able to trust in the Divine to guide him and trust himself to recognize a new reality, a truer way of seeing the world, beyond what he had been taught, beyond the ways that people around him thought, beyond the comfort zone of his “father’s house”. This is what we celebrate, when we see Abraham and Sarah as the paradigm for those who choose to be Jewish, leaving behind not their affection for their family or previous community, but a piece of the world view of their previous lives, in choosing a new community and system of faith.
When I think about it, I believe this is actually what we ask students to do, on a micro-level, each time they approach a new area of study. They need to stretch beyond what they are comfortable with, beyond what they understand, into new ways of thinking. We hope that there will be something in their previous knowledge that they can “hang” the new learning on, and that the ways that they have understood the world will remain dear to them. But to some extent there is a necessary leap, where the student cannot see where they are going to land, where it is at least temporarily, “a land that I will show you”. That kids are asked to make these leaps over and over, and that they do it, is actually astounding. And it explains the pride and joy that we, as parents and teachers feel, when we see them go from uncertainty, frustration and struggle to confident, skillful, understanding and articulate people.
As we grow into adulthood, we are asked with decreasing frequency to make such leaps in our understanding, and we may begin to think that we are finished, that we have arrived, that our journey is complete. And then, it occurs to me how, in recent years, the necessity of striving to guide and teach my children and students has led me to let go of things I thought I knew and that were comfortable to believe.
Abraham is understood as a figure who stands out for the courage he has to go, leaving behind the familiar and exploring the unknown. And he is known as a figure of great integrity, who stands for justice, truth and consistency. In Abraham and Sarah’s journey to become the parents of one child, and a great nation, they set an example of the path of lifelong learners and teachers. They leave us a legacy of both unbending commitment to our most deeply held values, and openness to finding truth and values that we had never before known. They leave us an imperative not to be swayed by everything that surrounds us and cries out for our attention, but also not to close ourselves off to learning, and achieving deeper understanding, from our teachers or our students, our contemporaries or our children.