Bereshit Rabbah Chapter 39, Part 2: Lech Lecha

Good evening, friends. We are beginning the year with Lech Lecha — “Go forth” — and we will connect it to the midrash and see how, in the end, our Sages understood this journey of the fathers, which is part of our own journey. Or rather, as the saying goes, ma’aseh avot siman labanim: the deeds of the fathers trace the path of the children. So we should not view it as a story from the past, but as something that belongs to our life, to our daily existence. And we always have this call of lech lecha, which is the equivalent of vayehi or — “and there was light” — of the first utterance of creation. We know that ten utterances founded creation, and that ten trials determined the choice of Avraham and bore it out […]; and just as the light of the first day is unique — “And there was evening and there was morning, one day” —

so “Avraham was one.” Since we are attached more closely to Yaakov — much more to Yaakov: the House of Yaakov, the House of Israel — one might have expected otherwise. It is from Yaakov that we claim our descent; and yet it is not with Yaakov that we conclude the prayer, that we seal it, but indeed with Avraham: Magen Avraham, “Shield of Avraham.” What is Avraham’s particularity? We will see it through the various trials by which the Holy One, blessed be He, presents Avraham to us. He does not give us Avraham’s résumé, as He did for Noah, telling us ish tzaddik tamim hayah bedorotav — that he was a righteous man in his generations. Here there is no praise of Avraham to introduce his personality. G-d speaks to Avraham, but He invites us to discover Avraham’s virtues through his journey.

So the midrash takes the verse: “And Hashem said to Avram, lech lecha” — go, for yourself — “me’artzecha,” from your land, your territory; “umimoladetecha,” from your birthplace; “umibeit avicha,” from your father’s house; “el ha’aretz asher ar’eka,” to the land that I will show you. He could have said “to the land of Canaan” and specified the destination. The destination is intentionally left unstated. What, then, does the midrash say? Rabbi Yitzchak opened his discourse with this verse from Psalms: “Listen, daughter, and see; incline your ear; forget your people and your father’s house.” Rabbi Yitzchak said: this may be compared to someone who was traveling from place to place, and he saw a palace in flames. He wondered: is it possible that this palace has no one in charge, no one who gives some thought to putting out this fire? The master of the palace glanced out at him and said: “I am the master of the palace.” So too, since our father Avraham was wondering whether this world could be without anyone guiding it, [G-d] said to him: “I am the Master of the universe.” “So shall the king desire your beauty.”

“For He is your lord” […]. “The king desires your beauty”: to make you beautiful in the world. “And bow down to him” — or, as one might also translate it, so that you bow down to him. And therefore: “And Hashem said to Avram.” So first, let us try to understand this midrash. We know very well that up to this point there had been Adam HaRishon, then Noach — ten generations, ten attempts made over the course of history, to see whether someone would take up the torch of this humanity and lead it to its ya’ad, its destination, its original purpose. For that is what Bereshit means: for the sake of reshit. For the sake of a reshit there are first fruits, there is a starting point — and if there is a starting point, there is a purpose. The world is not the product of chance; it cannot be. Were it the product of chance, our life would be a tragedy on every level. There is an original will presiding over the destiny of this world, just as I have parents. When a child is conceived, a responsibility is engaged, bound up with a will to bring this fruit of love to fulfillment — and the world is love. Olam chesed yibaneh, “the world is built on lovingkindness.” Indeed, the world was founded on love. What is particular to love is that it establishes a very strong connection, an intimacy between people, and in this love there is necessarily a giving of oneself. That is not the case with justice, because there each one simply claims what is due to him. If there are questions, you may ask them as we go along. So, in short, two attempts were made.

Noach did indeed discover G-d, the Master of the universe, the Creator, but he walks with Him in a way that is — I would say — somewhat naive at first, seeking rather to protect himself, to withdraw into an ark while everyone around him is vanishing, while the world is running to its ruin. He has a window up above, toward the sky, but it lights only his own dwelling. This kind of divine service G-d does not want. And indeed it ends in failure with Noach. There will also be the attempt of the dor haflagah, the generation of the Tower of Babel, who wanted to reduce G-d to their whims and to find themselves a single language — here too, trying to make humanity and its way of thinking into a single mold. G-d does not want it. He broke that dor haflagah apart into seventy nations, and each nation must ultimately cultivate its own distinctiveness; and Avraham is called precisely to establish a language between these different nations, after having absorbed all their distinctive traits.

To do this, there is a lech lecha, a movement of walking. But there is either a walk with a defined stage, or a walk with no defined direction. And that is why, when G-d invites Avraham to set out toward the land, He asks him to regard his walk as uninterrupted: “el ha’aretz asher ar’eka.” So He does not give him laws, He does not reveal a Torah to him; He tells him: first, try to discover yourself — but you must discover yourself in relation to a place on earth. Do not play the angel, and do not play either the person who shuts himself inside well-defined borders.

You must remain open, both on the level of thought and on the level of your very perception of the land. And that is why Rabbi Yitzchak says: shim’i vat ur’i, “listen, daughter, and see.” The difference between shemi’ah and re’iyah, between listening and seeing, is this: when one listens, one waits; until one has reached the end of the listening, one does not know where it will lead. Whereas when one sees something, one sees it as outside oneself. Listening is inward, while vision depends on the angle: it uncovers, it reveals before us the object on which we fix our gaze.

But here, no: what is meant is a listening that will lead to a vision. And even when it has led to a vision of things, that is not the end. One must go on seeing what the nuances of this message are. And what are the nuances of this message? One must detach oneself from the commonly accepted language — amech, speaking the language of the people; beit avich, speaking the language of the house. No: you must break with these discourses you have heard. And here the midrash tells us: be careful — the idolatry in question is not a crude idolatry of people who bow down before the phenomena of creation. Rather, they bow down to currents of thought, to philosophical ideals that they represented either by a tree or by the moon, some phenomenon of nature. But that phenomenon of nature is simply a symbol; to halt a movement of thought and make it into a cult or a force — that is idolatry. So when one sets out on a path of hesed, on a path of kindness, on a path of love, there is no recipe for this hesed, no recipe for this love. That is why Rabbi Yitzchak probably needed to give us an example: le’echad shehayah over mimakom lemakom, someone who was passing from place to place — that is, from one belief to another, from one milieu to another. But he sees that everything ends up fading away, that nothing holds, and that new currents come to supplant the earlier beliefs. So he says: is there not a guiding idea behind all of this, behind all these movements of thought, all these philosophical currents? And then comes the ba’al habirah, the master of the palace. It is not HaMakom; it is ba’al habirah — the One who can encompass everything, possess everything. Amar lo: ani hu ba’al habirah — “I am the master,” but I am not recognized as such, since each person makes his own cult, his own deity. So how is one to discover the true Master of the universe? The One who unites in Himself all these currents, and who establishes a link between the spiritual and the material, between the Olam HaBa and the Olam HaZeh, the World to Come and this world. For the ideal of life lies first and foremost in our Olam HaBa.

We dream of our ideal of life. But when we want to put it into practice in this world, if we meet difficulties, either we fail, or we are tenacious and pass through the trials until we discover, or attain, what we were seeking. That, then, was Avraham’s way of proceeding. That is to say, this lech lecha, this forward march, was part of his way of thinking. He did not want to stop at partial considerations, at currents of thought that one person or another advocated and that failed. So He says to him: no, be careful — I am the Master of the universe, and “the king desires your beauty.” What is that? Beauty lies in the mosaic, in the harmony of colors,

and in this inner perception of things, which does not wear out. On the contrary, this beauty we only discover day after day; we only renew it. And what truly makes the beauty of a thought is that it never resembles what it was yesterday or the day before. It is in perpetual becoming. And why so? So that it keeps its power to captivate: leyapotech ba’olam — “to make you beautiful in the world” — vehishtachavi lo, “and bow down to him”: so that you can truly marvel before it. So the first idea of the midrash that Rabbi Yitzchak develops is man’s break with all preconceived ideas, all stereotypes of thought, all ideas, all currents — and to see first what speaks to you, what speaks to us, what sets me in motion, what spurs my advance, and what truly captivates me.

So that is the first idea. As for “the king desires your beauty”: generally, people always believe that faith is something one cultivates oneself, and that one arrives at a certain stage. In reality, one is searching for this faith all the time. And every day a veil is lifted, and that is a way for G-d to draw closer to man, to hold out His hand to him, to help him discover Him. So from the moment we are truly in search of this truth, in search of spirituality, in search of the divine, this spirituality reveals itself to us from above; it answers our expectation without our knowing it, and it convinces us. This is the path Avraham is bound to open before the whole world. For, as I said at the outset, in general all the nations refer to one driving idea, to one father, one culture, one current of thought. We do not have a single trajectory. We have three trajectories: we have Avraham, we have Yitzchak and we have Yaakov. Even though we claim descent from Yaakov, as I said earlier, we remain attached to, we lay claim to, and we take first and foremost the path of hesed: it is the path by which G-d created His world, and the path by which Avraham must make himself recognized by all peoples. In short, what Avraham comes to do is a work of recovery: he will recover all these currents that were lost, filter them, and keep whatever can truly be absorbed without distorting the true will of creation.

But for that, one must first step back — step back from the land, step back from the moledet, the birthplace, step back from the father’s house, step back from all these inheritances we were given, with which we were bludgeoned throughout our upbringing — call them into question and see to what extent they are not doomed to become the prey of fire, the prey of failure, the prey of the fury of nations that fight one another over their way of thinking, their way of making claims, of withdrawing behind untouchable borders. And that is the first teaching of this midrash. I will move on to the second midrash — do you have any questions?

— I would like to ask you a question, Rav Benizri. — Me too. — Well, quite simply: yesterday morning, before the Shacharit prayer, I made a mental note that Bereshit can be read as the letters of tish rebbe […], and that bara, the word that follows, is in fact bar alef — that is, man. So first the rebbe’s table, and then bar alef, the one who masters the divine Name. Now, you spoke of attempts — it was that word that caught my interest at the start of your talk. And I remember that long ago we spoke of attempts: we know very well that where there is a creation there are also attempts. Were there not, before the creation of the world, attempts at creating other worlds that did not come to fruition?

The second part of my question concerns lech lecha. I have just discovered this while listening to you: in small gematria you have twice five: lech gives 3 and 2, and lecha again 3 and 2. Could it be that Avraham’s lech lecha is a prefiguration of the Ten Commandments? And the last thing: you said — I don’t know whether I misunderstood you in relation to your talk — you said that there is no recipe for kindness, no recipe for hesed. Yet if I remember your teaching from our early youth, let us say, you used to tell us that the recipe was, let us say, kindness regulated by din.

Is that not the recipe? There you are — a set of reflections. — Well then, first remark. Bereshit: I translated it as lema’an reshit, “for the sake of reshit” — as in vaya’avod Yaakov beRachel, “Yaakov worked for Rachel,” that is, for the sake of Rachel, for the sake of Leah. That is the be-reshit: the bet is not part of reshit. Reshit is truly a noun, and it is what determines the acharit, the purpose. It is Kohelet who said: “The wise man has his eyes in his head, and the fool walks in darkness” (Kohelet 2:14). Where else would one have one’s eyes? The point is that the wise man has his gaze focused on the rosh, on the starting point. For him there is a starting point. But the kesil, the fool, does not begin the story of creation with Bereshit; he begins it with “vehaaretz hayetah tohu vavohu vechoshech al penei tehom” — “the earth was formless and void, and darkness hovered over the surface of the deep.”

That is the black hole. Are we, in the end, going to begin thinking about creation from the black hole? We will begin from a reshit. Reshit is a starting point that comes after 974 failed experiments in creation, doomed to failure. So here the door is open to all the Darwinian and other evolutionary theories — it makes no difference, it does not concern us. That we do not recognize ourselves in Neanderthal man is entirely normal. There is an evolution; in any case it obeys this movement of lech lecha, because we set out from a reshit and we want to reach that purpose of acharit hayamim, the end of days. That answers the second question. As for the third question, it is hesed. It is true that to be constantly benefiting from hesed does not give worth to any creature. What gives it worth is being able to say: I do not want to live like a beggar; I want to accomplish things by myself. The difference between Avraham and those who came before him, Adam and Noach, is this: Adam was in a dreamland, in the Garden of Eden. There he would delight in G-d’s closeness, and he had everything at hand; others worked for him. He had to be sent away from that Garden of Eden. It is not good, it is not wholesome. Noach undertook the opposite movement. He wanted to innovate, to be ish ha’adamah: he wanted to be the man of the soil. But beware of excesses: if one becomes the slave of one’s own successes, then here too one does not escape the mabul, the flood, and one does not escape losing afterward all the benefit of the newly opened path and of the grace we found in the eyes of Hashem.

What marks Avraham’s approach is that he undertakes his discoveries of G-d by himself. He walks before G-d, not with G-d. He opens the royal road before G-d and relies on his own merits. They do not call for miracles — and that is a fact: the Avot did not benefit from miracles. They wanted to obtain things by themselves. They asked for […] — they asked for G-d’s benevolence, G-d’s favor, and that is all. And this is what we will see with Avraham, and it is the path of success. The path of success is when people see that everything you do is truly out of a hesed for which you expect absolutely nothing in return. Now, hesed, you know — it is not possible to do hesed without stripping yourself of everything. Hesed brings about a lack sooner or later. One cannot always keep on giving and giving.

In practice, one no longer has the strength. Where is true hesed proven? True hesed is when one light kindles another, but after kindling the other it has lost nothing of its essence. It has kept everything. When someone studies and truly sets out on a quest […], in search of G-d, he is searching for himself — but in reality, within this quest there are unsuspected revelations. And that is what this lech lecha suggests. That is what G-d invites Avraham to, for let us not forget that this revelation of G-d to Avraham comes when he is seventy-five years old. Yet we are told that already at the age of three, Avraham was being somewhat ironic about the practices and beliefs of his time. Not that he ridiculed them, but he demonstrated their inanity. And that is, in a sense, the purpose of the Jewish people in the face of the other nations: to show the incompleteness in the various forms of belief, and to lead to the recognition of a master of the palace who gathers all these tendencies within Himself. Because if we took only hesed, we would lean somewhat toward Christianity. If we took only din, we would side with the justice of Islam, where theft is indeed punished harshly, and where morals and excesses are punished without any leniency. But we are on neither side.

The hesed we practice and the din we practice — hesed with din, din with hesed — mean that the giving of oneself is, of course, delimited: it requires a certain measure in this hesed, so that it does not go astray. For we know very well that hesed can be an expression of debauchery, of total openness, of the total abdication of the self. And these are the landmarks, the control one imposes on oneself. — I have a very small question, Rav Benizri. The midrash speaks of Rabbi Yitzchak. Is it the same Rabbi Yitzchak whom Rashi cites on the first verse of Bereshit? — No. You know it is said that Rashi is Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki;

his father was Yitzchak, so he wanted to pay homage to his father, and it is said that this “amar Rabbi Yitzchak” was really the homage he paid to his father. Now, whether it is the same Rabbi Yitzchak who made the comment and who illuminated Rashi’s exegesis — that is possible. — All right. […] Hello, hello. You spoke of integrating the seventy nations in connection with Avram. If you speak of integrating the seventy nations, I would rather think of Yosef, for example, who knew all the languages and had encountered all the civilizations. Or else I would think of Adam, who contained all the nations within himself. How do you actually connect Avraham to the different nations, rather than Adam or Yosef, who would seem more apt to bind all the nations together?

— Quite simply: the first answer is that Avraham appears on the stage of history just after G-d divided humanity into seventy nations. That is the first thing. The second thing is that Avraham does not, strictly speaking, bring us into the Jewish world. Avraham is the father of Yishmael; Yitzchak is the father of Esav. We have two great currents of thought, great religions, that Avraham channels on one side and Yitzchak on the other. But Avraham is the one born of idolatrous parents; Yitzchak, after all, had the benefit of a believing father. There is also Avraham as the descendant of Ever. You know that every Jew has three identities. There is the Ivri, the one who stands on the other side of the river, or the one who builds a bridge between the different tribes, the different cultures. The second is the Yehudi. The Yehudi already carries a religious connotation. And then there is Israel. The Yehudi is the Jew of exile; indeed, this term Yehudi, this descriptor, appears only in exile. But the name Israel, which was given to Yaakov — “ki sarita im Elokim ve’im anashim vatuchal,” “for you have striven with G-d and with men, and you have prevailed” — is the one who engages in a struggle. A struggle: the one who will not go seek refuge, the one who does not flee, but who confronts difficulties, does he not? Even to the point of coming out of the struggle diminished. But despite everything, he is the one who will be crowned with a fourth title. And the fourth, universal title is that of Yeshurun — Yeshurun from the verb yashar — the one who bears witness to the path of uprightness.

Note well: we are not speaking here of religion; we are speaking of values, […]. All the nations are not called to embrace Judaism, to become gerim (converts) — they may do so — but to respect the seven Noahide laws, the seven universal laws, as a program, as a law dictated by the Creator of the universe, and not simply out of philosophical conviction. That is how the Rambam defines the adherence of the other peoples to the faith of Israel. So we situate ourselves, in our way of thinking, between this starting point of Avraham and […]. There is a sage who gave a remez, a hint: the gematria, the numerical value, of Yisrael is equivalent to that of Yaakov, Moshe and David.

Yaakov, who founded the people; Moshe, who gave it its law; David, who came to assign it its land definitively. So we are within this triangle of Yaakov, Moshe and David — Israel — searching for our own path, our own ground to cultivate. There you are. — Thank you very much. Excuse me, Rav Benizri: is it rigorous enough, in your view, to say that lech lecha makes five and five, and that this would be the prefiguration…? — Well, the midrash — the midrash did not reduce it to five and five; it reduced it to fifty and fifty, saying that in lech lecha there is a sum of a hundred blessings that the Jew takes upon himself every day, that he recites every day, and with which he bathes the world every day, because blessing is man’s first act upon waking: Modeh ani. In French I translate it as je remercie, “I thank” — but no: the “I,” the ani, comes after modeh. It is in gratitude, in this expression of gratitude, of acknowledgment, that my self recognizes itself. It is the opposite of Descartes’s idea, “I think, therefore I am,” where he puts the “I” first: “I think.” If you have put your “I” first, you do not need to say “I am” — you have already affirmed it by saying “I think.” But to define yourself through this gratitude, to efface yourself before this universe, before the Creator of the universe, and so to affirm your “I” — that is what gives value to our prayers, to our blessings.

I will leave you now, if there are no questions. We have made progress, we have covered a little ground; I hope that next time, if it pleases you, if it captivates you, we can continue. — Absolutely, absolutely. — I will prepare the continuation for you, then. Good evening […]. — Good evening. — I am happy to be with you again. May I ask you a question? I don’t want the answer now. […] I just wanted to know whether at some point you would return to it, because you mentioned Neanderthal man. — Yes. — And I don’t want the answer now, but perhaps it could be the subject of something more complete. I would like to know what view we, as Jews, can take.

Do you reject Neanderthal? Is it part of a reality that we accept because we know there is more? Do you understand? I did not quite grasp that, but I think it calls for something. — If I refer to my own rough draft of being, I am Neanderthal man. — There’s a question that still leaves me puzzled. — But there, at any rate, we meet: he sometimes dwells within us, but the whole point is to go beyond him. — Thank you. That was a very short answer, but a very clear one. Thank you very much. — There you are; have a good evening. — Thank you very much. Goodbye. — Goodbye. — Goodbye. Thank you very much. Goodbye.