This lecture begins with a difficulty of arithmetic in the narrative of Lech Lecha: the Torah announces Terah’s death before Avram’s departure, when in fact he still had sixty-five years to live. The midrash answers in two ways: one concerns what a life that does not count really is, the other the exemption granted to Avram from the honor due to his father. From there the lecture turns to a broader question: how does G-d speak to a human being, and what makes a person capable of hearing? The answer revolves around hesed (loving devotion), around a vision that pierces the surface of things, and around love as it appears for the first time in the text.
Rav Raphaël Benizri first sets side by side two classic positions on the nature of these divine manifestations: that of the Rambam, who places them in a prophetic dream, and that of the Ramban, who holds them to be real. He then adopts a third path: the Divine Presence speaks from within a person’s throat. This path presupposes that the person has first set himself aside, and the attribute through which he achieves this is devotion.
The lecture then follows the chapter’s second midrash, the one that counts “go for yourself” twice and portrays Avram as a man at first frightened by his own idolatrous past. To this are added the image of the dove that folds one wing in order to fly with the other, and the account of the two gazes Avram cast upon two lands. The audience’s questions concern the painful character of love, and then the merit that made Lot the origin of a royal line.
What this lecture teaches
Sixty-five years are missing from the count, and the midrash erases them. Avram is seventy at the Covenant Between the Parts and seventy-five when he sets out on his journey toward Canaan; Terah, who fathered him at seventy, dies at two hundred and five. Yet the end of the preceding parashah (weekly Torah portion) announces his death before the word is addressed to Avram. The midrash answers that the verse must be read differently: the wicked are called dead even in their lifetime. According to the definition given the previous week, these are the people who see through their eyes only the reality of this world, and whose sight is for that reason atrophied.
A second reason is given: Avram feared he would desecrate the Name. He said to himself that if he left his parents at that age, people would say he had abandoned his father in his old age, just when the old man needed his help. He is told in reply that he, and he alone, is exempt from honoring father and mother, but that no one else is exempted. And he is promised something singular: Terah’s death will be recorded ahead of its time, at the very moment Avram leaves him.
It remains to understand how G-d speaks to a human being, and how that human being answers Him. The Rambam holds that all these manifestations take place in a prophetic dream, and that what the Torah does is submit Avram’s dreams to our analysis; the dialogue about the righteous of Sodom, the coming of the angels and the intervention at the binding of Yitzchak would then all belong to the same order. The Ramban disagrees: things happened just as the Torah relates them, even if this surpasses our understanding and belongs to the realm of prophecy.
A third answer places man at the center: the Divine Presence speaks from within his throat. G-d borrows the person’s voice, to the point that he is no longer in control of himself, no longer himself, and the dialogue that takes place through him is a transcendent language. But this intrusion of the divine occurs only on the basis of an initiative taken by the person himself, who stops looking at the world as it is and looks at it beyond its images and clichés. Events speak in a coded language, and to interpret it one must set oneself aside. This is done through the attribute of hesed, that total devotion by which a person exists only for the mission assigned to him.
What sets Avram apart is that he received nothing from above. Adam is placed in the Garden and told that he may enjoy this world, within limits not to be crossed, and he does exactly as he pleases. Noah, the second archetype, found favor in G-d’s eyes, and G-d saves him in order to save His world. Avram, by contrast, enjoyed no favor at all: he discovered G-d by himself and traced his own path before him. That discovery was not easy, since he had to pass through the fiery furnace as though he were re-creating himself. He yields his own rights; he is ready for every compromise for the benefit of others. What matters to him is to sanctify the Name, that language of the Absolute which he seeks to share.
The fruit of his womb is marked by laughter, because sadness is a veil. The Zohar says of one who weeps, of one who is sad, that his sight is atrophied, weakened by a veil that keeps him from looking far ahead. In Hebrew that veil bears the very name of Lot, as in the expression for fog. Avram lifts the veil by setting himself apart from Lot, who is no more than an ape in his spiritual life and seeks to espouse his image from the outside. Only then can he give rise to a posterity that will extend his path, and he gives it through laughter. One laughs at this reality that stifles and prevents us from seeing beyond. This is what Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi reported of his ascent to the other world, when his companions questioned him: I saw an upside-down world.
The erased years are those that carried no quest. If we cast a glance over our own lives, we find a great deal of dead time in them: not everything can be added up. These are the moments when we let ourselves be caught up in the reality of things, blinded to the point of being unable to see past it. Terah’s sixty-five years are easily deducted from his lifespan because they carry neither that quest nor that mission, even though Terah, at the end of his days, was somewhat overtaken by events and by his son. Then the question of honoring parents arises, the commandment that forms the hinge of the Ten Commandments. It links the commandments concerning G-d to the obligations toward one’s fellow: it is a matter of lineage within the tradition, of forging the link in the chain. For there are three partners in a human being: the father, the mother and the Divine Presence. And if the lecture speaks of the father rather than the mother, it is because the mother’s hold on the child she carried is natural, whereas the father’s attachment to his son, so that the heritage may continue through him, is an attachment to supreme values.
The verb “to love” appears for the first time between a father and his son. It does not appear in the relationship with a wife: that will come later, with Yaakov, who loves Rachel before marrying her. With Avraham and Sarah we see no such thing, and with Yitzchak love comes after marriage and develops within it, following an identification with his mother’s virtues that binds him strongly to Rivkah. The first occurrence is the one in which Avraham is asked to raise up his only son, the one he loves, to the level of a burnt offering.
Etymology sets taking against destining. Man generally seeks to take, and the word that says “give me” recurs everywhere, down to the two daughters of the leech, who demand nothing else. But when one truly loves, what is mine, what I desire for myself, I am ready to give, to share, to cede to the other. That is why it is written “You shall love Hashem your G-d” without a preposition, whereas it is written “You shall love to your fellow”: to G-d you give nothing, but to your fellow you destine what is yours.
Rachel embodies this love, and that is why her monument stands apart. She is the only woman whose tomb is separate from all the others, patriarchs and matriarchs alike, and she stands at the meeting of the ways, at the crossroads, watching over her children. What distinguishes her is that she first served her sister, to hide her tears and console her, yielding the love she longed for, yet without renouncing it: I give it to you for now, I will manage afterward, I am waiting. She is at the end of the road. It is this inner vision that makes it possible, through Lot’s incest with his daughters, to glimpse in the distance Moav, then the line of Ruth, then that of David, and at the end of the process the Mashiach (Messiah) son of David.
In Avram’s case, lineage is transcended because there is a re-creation. The convert is not the continuation of a being but a new being, a new allegiance, and that is what happens here: the bond of father and mother is dimmed for him alone, not for others. For from the moment Avram commits all his posterity, we are his sons, and not only we: all who have shown generosity have inherited this virtue, and today we see Christian and Muslim peoples claiming Avraham as their own. The book of Bereshit is the book of uprightness: one does not learn laws from it; one takes from it the measure of man in his fulfillment.
This love is painful, and the text shows it precisely where it names it. The verb appears at the moment Avraham is put to the test and must carry his son onto the altar. Yaakov, for his part, suffers for having loved Yosef, whom he favored and who bears the consequences of that preference. It is therefore a love that hurts, but one that achieves something lasting and marks all the generations that follow. On this point Rabbi Bunim of Pshischa reads not “the chosen songs” but “the remnants of the songs.” What is preferred is not the completed melody but what was not said, not sung, what remained in the shadow. We undertake extraordinary things and are left unsatisfied, without reaching the goal; but there are children and grandchildren, a whole progeny who will try to give them substance. It is in this sense that the people bears the name of Rachel’s grandson, Ephraim, in which one reads the word for ash: the ashes of the binding of Yitzchak, who was not burned but whose fire accompanies us, and the ashes of the challah that we separate and burn ever since the Temple was destroyed. From these ashes another universe will blossom.
There are two “go for yourself” commands, and two departures. Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Nechemiah note the repetition: one from Aram Naharayim, the other from Aram Nachor. The second is explained by a transport from the Covenant Between the Parts to Haran. The verse that accompanies the passage says that your people offer themselves freely on the day of your might: that generosity asserted itself in the struggle he waged and at the moment the Name was sanctified, when he was cast into the fiery furnace; the example he set edified many people, who embraced his faith.
Avram was afraid of being overtaken by his own past. He said to himself: You will say that I too am guilty, that I too was an idolater, that at forty I gave in to those beliefs and followed the current. He is answered with the image of the dew of his youth: just as dew quickly evaporates, your sins will evaporate, and like dew, which carries within it a sign of blessing for the world. Trials are formative: they remain negative as long as we have not redeemed them, but once we redeem them, they contribute to building the self.
The dove folds one wing and flies with the other. On the verse that asks for a wing like the dove’s, to fly away and be at rest, Rabbi Azariah in the name of Rabbi Yehudah answers that all other birds, when they tire, come to rest on a rock or a branch; the dove, however, folds one wing and continues with the other, so that when the first tires it carries on with the second. The same passage adds that it is better to spend the night in the deserts of the Land of Israel than in the palaces of other lands. And the dove’s message is already that of Noah’s ark: it prefers the bitterness of the olive to remaining dependent on anyone, and it carries far afield a message of serenity and peace.
Avram looks upon two lands, and he does not ask for the more pleasant one. If he did not leave earlier, it was because he had not yet received permission; as soon as he obtained it, he set out in accordance with the word, and Lot joined him, although in principle he was to go alone. Passing through Aram Naharayim and Aram Nachor, he sees the inhabitants eating, drinking, making merry and amusing themselves, and he says: May I have no portion in this land. Arriving farther north, he sees them busy hoeing and weeding in the proper season, and he says: May my portion be given me in this land. He is told that this land will be given to his descendants. For one does not come to this land because life is pleasant there. The move toward Canaan is not made without hardship, and however much a person proves his dispositions, as long as he has not received the call, the land remains closed to him. One does not come there to flee antisemitism, nor because it is convenient: one must feel that call, that spiritual dimension. Hence the double journey we must make: the Covenant Between the Parts condemns us to integrate Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome within ourselves, and to return with all these elements and invest them in a land, so as to strip it of the submission that the name Canaan implies and raise it to a dimension of holiness.
It is not love that is painful, but its trial. In love you give more than you need, and your aim is to give; this is a heavy trial, because sometimes you do not receive in return what you expected. There is a disproportion; yet on your side it is love, while on the other side it may fall short, or come late: love does not mean an immediate exchange. The brake on this love is Yitzchak, the man withdrawn into himself, whose tent we do not see open on all four sides, nor his distress at having no passersby. His measure is that of the limit, and that is how the patriarchs differ from one another, even as they must walk together.
Lot’s merit is that he did not denounce Avram in Egypt. The midrash itself asked what merit could produce such a posterity. When Avram, fearing he would lose his wife, reduced their relationship to that of brother and sister, Lot could have denounced him and shouted the truth from the rooftops, which would have suited him, for things were already going badly between them: earlier, Lot is mentioned after Avram and before his wife, whereas on leaving Egypt he is mentioned after the possessions. The separation was already brewing, and yet he kept silent. This was not lost for him, just as it was not lost that Yehudah, who could have contested Tamar’s claim, did not do so. Nothing is lost.
Full transcript of the lecture
Good evening, everyone. I will begin, then, by reading this midrash and its translation. You have it in English, which is good. “Hashem said to Avram, Lekh lekha, go for yourself”: we are still in Lech Lecha. A question arises here about what precedes this passage. What is written there, as I will tell you, is that Avraham’s father died. Rabbi Yitzchak said (and Terah still had sixty-five years left to live) — Rabbi Yitzchak finds that there is an error in the calculation. For if we calculate carefully from Avraham’s birth up to this point, Avraham is seventy when G-d reveals Himself to him at the Brit Bein HaBetarim, the Covenant Between the Parts. At seventy-five he sets out on his journey toward the land of Canaan. But Terah, his father, died at two hundred and five. Now, if we take into account Avraham’s seventy years, and what really matters here is that Avraham was born when Terah was seventy, that makes one hundred and forty.
If Terah died at two hundred and five, then sixty-five years are missing. How can this be? We are told of his death already, before Avraham arrives in the land of Canaan at the age of seventy-five. But it must be interpreted according to the saying, “The wicked are called dead even in their lifetime”: these perverse ones, or unbelievers, or wicked ones. Last week, however, we gave another definition: those who see through their eyes only the reality of this world are called dead in their lifetime, because their sight is atrophied. “Because our father Avraham was afraid”: there is a second reason. Our father Avraham was afraid and said: If I leave my parents at the age of seventy, I will desecrate the Name of G-d. Why? Because people will say that he abandoned his father in his old age, just when his father needed his help. So the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Avraham: “I exempt you from honoring father and mother,” from honoring your father and your mother, “but I do not exempt anyone else from honoring father and mother.”
“And not only that, but I will do something particular, something singular”: that is, I will record that Terah has already died while he is still alive, at the very moment he parts from you. And indeed, the last verse of the preceding parashah says, Va-yamot Terach be-Charan, “And Terah died in Haran,” and only after that, Va-yomer Hashem el Avram, “Hashem said to Avram: Lekh lekha.” Now, several questions arise. First, this calculation of years that forces us to set aside sixty-five years. Next, this dialogue between our father Avraham and the Holy One, blessed be He, who tells him: very well, I will exempt you from honoring your parents, and I will record that your father is already dead when you set out on your journey toward the land of Canaan.
The first question is: in what way does G-d speak to Avraham, and how does Avraham actually enter into conversation with G-d — “I will desecrate Your Name”? The Rambam, who raised this question, says that we are obliged to say that all these divine manifestations take place in a prophetic dream, and that what the Torah does, in essence, is to present, to submit, Avraham’s dreams to our analysis. The question then becomes how to interpret these narratives, how to see them: are they real or fictitious? Take only the discussions between Avraham and G-d about the righteous of Sodom; the angels who come to Avraham and go on to Lot, who speak, who intervene, who step into the Akeidah, the binding of Yitzchak: all of this, in a certain way, calls for an explanation. But the Ramban opposes this interpretation of the Rambam.
He says that in reality things happened exactly as the Torah relates them. This does indeed surpass our understanding; it belongs to prophecy. But what is prophecy in itself, what is its substance, in what way does a human being gain access to prophecy? Here there is an interesting answer from Rabbeinu Bachya and from Rabbi Levi ben Gershon: in reality, the human being himself is at the center of this revelation; it is G-d who speaks through the person. Shechinah medaberet mitokh gerono, “the Divine Presence speaks from within his throat.” If the Shechinah speaks from within his throat, then we must understand when the Shechinah speaks from within his throat: how G-d speaks by borrowing a person’s voice, to the point that the person is no longer in control of himself, is no longer himself, and the language, the dialogue that takes place within him and through him, is a transcendent language.
And so the key to this enveloping, if you like, or to this entry, this intrusion of the divine into a human being, is an initiative taken by the person himself. He no longer looks at the world as it is; he looks beyond the images, the clichés that the world presents to him, and he is able to interpret them differently. It is a vision far greater than the artist’s. Over the surrounding world there is a coded language of events, and he must be able to interpret it. To interpret it, he must at that moment set himself aside. Through which attribute? Through the attribute of hesed, the attribute of that total devotion by which a person exists only for the mission or the vocation assigned to him. Indeed, that is how Avraham’s path begins, for what characterizes Avraham is that he received nothing from above. There was no grace, as there was for Adam. Adam is in the Garden of Eden; the Holy One, blessed be He, reveals Himself to him and tells him: “You may enjoy this world without any difficulty; there are limits not to be crossed, there are red lines.” But he did just as he pleased.
The same is true of Noah, Noah who is the second archetype of man. Noach matza chen be’einei Hashem, “Noah found favor in the eyes of G-d,” and G-d, so to speak, saves him in order to save His world […]. Avraham, however, enjoyed no favor at all from G-d. Avraham discovered G-d by himself; he traced his path before him, and everything flows from this discovery of G-d, which was not easy, because he has to pass through a fiery furnace as though he were re-creating himself. He is forever yielding, conceding his own rights; he is ready for every compromise for the benefit of others, and it matters little to him. What is essential for him is to sanctify the Name of G-d, that language of the Absolute which he tries at all costs to share with people.
So we understand that the fruit of his womb is marked by tzechok, laughter: a re-creation. Laughter, says the Zohar: a being who weeps, who is sad, has sight that is atrophied, weakened, a veil that prevents him from looking far ahead. And one who removes that veil… That veil is called lot. In Hebrew we say lot ba’arafel, “veiled in fog”: we have a veil in the fog. By lifting that veil, by setting himself apart from Lot, who is nothing but an ape in Avraham’s spiritual life and who seeks to espouse Avraham’s image from the outside, Avraham can then come to give a posterity that will extend his path. But through what? Through tzechok, through laughter.
We laugh at what goes on here below. We laugh at this reality that stifles us and prevents us from looking beyond what would be the reality of a world. For the Talmud tells us that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi had a moment when he ascended to see what was happening in the other world. He was a man who had access to the hidden world. And when he returned from that hidden world, his friends questioned him and said: What did you see? What is there? What is his answer? Olam hafukh ra’iti, “I saw an upside-down world.” We think that what is here below is reality.
No: reality is something else entirely; only one has to see it, one has to have a vision of that beyond. And it is this inner vision that reveals itself to our father Avraham […]: a divine presence to which he gives reality. It is this that constitutes the essence of his dialogue, and that ultimately makes every other dialogue, every other consideration, a matter of the ephemeral, of the mortal. We can see this in a way if we cast a glance over our own life: how much dead time is there in our life? There is a great deal of dead time; not everything can be summed up, not everything can be added together. These are the moments when we let ourselves be caught up in the reality of things and blinded to the point that we could not see past it. And that is what the text says of Terah: Terah’s sixty-five years must be erased, even though Terah, at the end of his days, was somewhat overtaken by events, by his son. So there are sixty-five years that were erased, which are easily deducted from his years of life because they carry neither this quest, nor this mission, nor this search. And then the problem of kibbud av va’em, honoring father and mother, arises.
What, then, is honoring one’s parents? Honoring parents is the commandment that establishes the link, within the Ten Commandments, between the commandments toward G-d and a person’s obligations toward his fellow […]: that is, this lineage within the tradition, which forges the link in the chain, since there are three partners in a human being: the parents, father and mother, and the Divine Presence. The Divine Presence: let us situate it within this love. How do you say love in Hebrew? Ahavah. The verb ahav, to love, appears for the first time in the Torah concerning Avraham and his son Yitzchak. G-d invites him to raise his son Yitzchak up to the level of a burnt offering, and He says: “your only son, whom you have loved, whom you love.” The verb “to love” appears for the first time.
It does not appear in the relationship of a husband to his wife; that will come later, with Yaakov the romantic, who loves Rachel before marrying her. With Avraham we did not see this with Sarah, and we did not see it with Yitzchak either, since there love comes after the marriage; it develops after the marriage. And there, after identifying with what his mother’s virtues had been, he becomes strongly attached to Rivkah. So I return to this idea of ahavah, of the love that binds a father to his child. And I do not mention the mother simply because, in a natural way, a mother has a hold over the child she carries within her; that is not the case for the father. The fact that the father attaches himself to his son so that the tradition, the heritage of the fathers, may continue, extend and be perpetuated through him: that is an attachment to supreme values. That is to say, this child is awaited; he is awaited, he is conceived in holiness, he is a miracle, he is a prayer within one’s life, and therefore I must make sure that this prayer is accepted. That is love; there is a dimension to it.
Now Rabbi Shimshon […] offers an interesting etymological inquiry. He says that in general man always seeks to take, and havah, hav, means “give me.” Even Yaakov uses this term havah when he says “give me”; man wants to take. La-alukah shtei banot, hav hav: “The leech has two daughters, ‘Give! Give!'” She seeks only ever to take. But when one truly loves, then what is due to us, what we would ask for, I am ready to give to the other, to share with the other […]. What is due to me, what I want, what I desire for myself, I share with the other; I cede it to the other. And that is why the notion of ahavah par excellence was embodied by Rachel, the only woman who was granted a monument of her own, separate even from all the others, patriarchs and matriarchs. And Rachel is there, at the meeting of the ways, at the crossroads; she seeks, she watches over her children.
Now, you know, Rachel distinguished herself in this: the love that was due to her and to which she aspired, she first used to serve her sister, to hide her tears, to console her. But she did not cede it without expecting anything; she goes on waiting. That is: I give to you for now, and I will manage afterward, I will take my turn afterward, I am waiting. And indeed […], says the midrash; but she is at the end of the road, she is waiting for the Mashiach. And the Zohar says that Rachel’s name is found in u-masbi’a le-khol chai ratzon, “and You satisfy the desire of every living being”: ratzon gives the resh, le-khol the lamed, chai the chet; these are the letters of Rachel. A play on letters, you will tell me, but that is not the essential point. The essential point is first of all the idea hidden behind it.
So if one wants to have a vision that belongs to the divine, one must truly show this hesed, which induces an inner vision of things. And this inner vision of things means that already, through Lot’s incest with his daughters, the child Moav appears on the distant horizon; there will be a line of Ruth, and at the end of the thread the line of David, and at the end of the thread, at the end of the whole development, the Mashiach son of David. That is to say, in the inner vision of what lies beyond things, there is a whole movement of history for a person who has done this work of hesed on himself, this work of ahavah that he gives to others. That, incidentally, is why there is a difference between Ve-ahavta et Hashem Elokecha, “You shall love Hashem your G-d,” and Ve-ahavta le-re’acha: to G-d you give nothing, but to your fellow… We do not say ve-ahavta et re’acha but le-re’acha, “to your fellow”: that is, you will destine it to him.
What is yours: this is the theme that explains why the honor due to parents is here truly transcended. For with a ger, a convert, because this is a re-creation, he is a new being, a new allegiance, not the continuation of a being. A re-creation: that is what happens with Avraham. And when there is a re-creation, the bond of father and mother is dimmed for him alone. It is dimmed, but it is not dimmed for others, because from the moment Avraham commits all his posterity, we are the sons of Avraham. We are the children of Avraham, and not only we. All beings who have shown generosity have inherited this virtue of Avraham; that is a fact. And indeed, today you have an entire Christian population that claims Avraham, an entire Muslim population that claims Avraham, and not only the Jewish people. That is what this midrash suggests we retain, in this identification of ourselves with Avraham’s path. For I must tell you that the book of Bereshit is the book of rectitude, of uprightness; we have no laws to learn from the book of Bereshit, but we have to take the measure of man in his fulfillment and, note well, in his dimension of love. And this love is not easy; it is painful; one suffers.
Look where this verb ahav appears: when Avraham is put to the test, to carry his son onto the altar. Look how Yaakov suffers for having loved Yosef. He favored him, but Yosef will bear the consequences of that love. So it is a love that is painful, but one that will accomplish something marvelous and lasting, and that will mark all the generations after it. That is the first lesson, but it does not stop there. For one may well wish to say, Matai yagi’u ma’asai le-ma’asei avotai, “When will I merit that my deeds reach the deeds of my forefathers?”, and the aspiration is noble in itself.
There is a wonderful interpretation by Rabbi Bunim of Pshischa on the words ha-bocher be-shirei zimrah. Ha-bocher be-shirei zimrah: G-d loves songs, melodies. But he does not read ha-bocher be-shirei zimrah, “who chooses melodies.” He says that G-d prefers shiyarei zimrah, the remnants of the song. The remnants of the song are what was not said, what was not sung, what remained in the shadow. We have indeed undertaken extraordinary things, but we were left unsatisfied; we did not get to the end. But what did not reach its end — well, there are children, there are grandchildren, a whole progeny who will try to give it substance. And it is in this sense that Rachel’s grandson is called Ephraim, and we have inherited this title. Everyone knows this song taken from the prophet: Ha-ven yakir li Ephraim, im yeled sha’ashu’im, “Is Ephraim My precious son, My delightful child?” Ephraim is the people of Israel. Why is the people of Israel called Ephraim?
What is in the word Ephraim? The word efer, ash. After everything has burned, ashes remain. There are two kinds of ash. The first are the ashes of the offering of Yitzchak. He was not burned, but the fire that brought that child to the altar is there, it is present, and it accompanies us throughout our history, so that yes, we are chaim, we live: we live to sanctify the Name of G-d. We do not want to die for the sanctification of the Name of G-d, far from it. That we leave to other religions.
We want to live for the sanctification of the Name of G-d. And there is a second kind of ash: the ashes of the challah that we separate from the dough and burn, because the Temple was destroyed, nothing remains of it, and we have no kohen. But note well: from these ashes of the challah, from these ashes of Yitzchak, another universe will blossom. And that is ha-bocher be-shirei zimrah, be-shiyarei zimrah: the shirayim, the remnants. So the death of Terah, which stands there, muffled, premature, mentioned before its time: this is because through Avraham we will indeed undertake a journey that starts from the fiery furnace, from the passage through fire, and leads to the making of a family that will be the focus of the nations’ gaze: Ve-ra’u kol amei ha-aretz ki shem Hashem nikra alecha, “All the peoples of the earth will see that the Name of Hashem is called upon you.” You carry it within you; it is there on your face, it is there on your tefillin. And tefillin are not reason; they are beyond reason. Tefillin, you know, comes from the word hitpallel, to pray. The author of HaKetav VeHaKabbalah gives a definition of tefillah, prayer, quite different from the one generally accepted: for him, to pray is to distinguish, to sort, within the confusion of feelings, between what is blurred, what belongs to desire, what belongs somewhat to base emotion, and what belongs to nobility of being.
That is it, and this allows us now to move on to the second midrash that follows, which we will understand much more easily. So, if you like, let us move on to this second one. We still have time, yes. So where is this second midrash, Luc? Manu, it’s your turn. — You mean the following midrash? — Yes, the following midrash. — All right. — So: Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Nechemiah (I’ll read it myself to save time), Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Nechemiah: Lekh lekha, there are two times “go for yourself”: one from Aram Naharayim and the other from Aram Nachor. […] Yes, thank you. There are two lekh lekha: one from Aram Naharayim and the other from Aram Nachor.
It is the same lekh lekha, but for the second one: she-hifricho mi-bein ha-betarim ve-hevi’o le-Charan, for the Holy One, blessed be He, carried him in flight from bein ha-betarim, from the Covenant Between the Parts. That covenant took place in the land of Canaan, “and brought him to Haran.” […] It is said: Amcha nedavot be-yom cheilecha, “Your people offer themselves freely on the day of your might.” Imcha hayiti ke-she-hitnadavta li-shmi laredet le-kivshan ha-esh: “I was with you when you volunteered, for My Name’s sake, to go down into the fiery furnace.” Amcha nedavot: your people is full of your generosity. And that generosity asserted itself in the struggle you waged, when you gave proof of it, at the moment you sanctified the Name of G-d, when you were thrown into the fiery furnace. And when you fought, the example you set caused many people to be edified by your personality, by your faith, and they embraced your belief.
Be-hadrei kodesh me-rechem mishchar: “in the splendor of holiness,” the splendor of this world that I consecrated; me-rechem mishchar, “from the womb of the dawn,” from the womb of the universe; I sought you out, I set you apart for Myself; lecha tal yaldutecha, “yours is the dew of your youth,” of your childhood. Why? Because hayah avinu Avraham mitpached ve-omer, our father Avraham was afraid and said: Tomar she-yesh be-yadi avon, “you will say that I bear a sin”: that I too am at fault, I am guilty; I too was an idol worshipper. When I was forty, I gave in to those beliefs, I followed the current. And the Holy One, blessed be He, tells him: it is the dew of your childhood; like this dew…
Quickly it flies off, it evaporates: so too your sins will evaporate. And like this dew, which carries within it a sign of blessing for the world… This shows that, in the end, the trials we go through, and even the failures we experience, are formative, are they not? […] They remain in the negative as long as we have not redeemed them. But from the moment we redeem them, they contribute to building ourselves up. […] And he says: Mi yiten li ever ka-yonah, a’ufah ve-eshkonah, “Who will give me a wing like a dove? I would fly away and be at rest.” Why like a dove? Rabbi Azariah, in the name of Rabbi Yehudah […].
Rabbi Azariah, in the name of Rabbi Yehudah: because all birds, when they tire, rest either on a rock or on a tree branch; but the dove […] folds one wing and flies with a single wing […], so that when it tires with one wing, it resumes with the other. And archik nedod, “I would wander far off”: I would find myself in a desert and lodge there. It is better to spend the night in the deserts of Eretz Yisrael and not in the palaces […]; it is better to spend the night in the deserts of Eretz Yisrael than in the palaces of other lands. And if you ask why Avraham did not hurry, did not hasten, rejoicing at the word […], why he did not leave long before, why he waited so long: it is because he had not yet obtained permission. But from the moment he obtained that permission, “Avram went as Hashem had spoken to him,” in accordance with the word of G-d, “and Lot went with him.”
And Lot joined him. In principle he was to go alone, but he nonetheless agreed that his nephew Lot should accompany him; […] we shall see. Be-sha’ah she-hayah Avraham mehalekh be-Aram Naharayim u-ve-Aram Nachor: when Avraham was walking through Aram Naharayim and through Aram Nachor, he saw them eating, drinking, amusing themselves, making merry. He said: may this not be the land, may I have no portion in this land. When he reached the Ladder of Tyre, in the north of the country, he saw the inhabitants busy weeding around their trees, hoeing at the time for hoeing. […]
“May my portion be given to me in this land.” […] The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: “To your descendants I will give this land.” […] Well, we no longer have time to analyze this midrash in detail, but what should be retained is that the move toward the land of Canaan does not happen without hardship. A person may give proof after proof of his dispositions, but as long as he does not receive this call… For one does not come to the land of Israel because we are fleeing antisemitism, because life is good there, because it suits us. No: we feel this call of the divine. We may have waged a struggle for Zion, we may have […]; but nonetheless, as long as this call of G-d, this spiritual dimension, does not summon us, the land of Canaan remains forbidden to us, it remains forbidden to us. And what message must we carry? The message of the dove. We have already seen the dove in Noah’s ark, have we not? And it is the dove that says: I would rather feed on the olive tree, on the bitterness of the olive, than remain dependent on any man, even Noah. And there is this will of the dove to carry far away a message of serenity and peace.
And that is what carries us toward Israel. And it is not, no, in order to eat, drink and amuse oneself to one’s heart’s content. No, he says: a land like that is not what I am looking for, not what I am looking for. I am looking for the land where one must help the tree to rise upward when it is weeded, when there are stones that prevent it from drawing water. I want to go and work these lands, develop the land, bring it to fruition; and that is the land destined for the descendants of Israel. That is why we have a double journey to make, from Aram Naharayim to Canaan. First, the Covenant Between the Parts, which condemns us to integrate Babylon and Persia and Greece and Rome within ourselves, and to return with all of that, with all these elements, to invest them in a land: to strip it of this Kena’an, this hakhna’ah, this idea of submission to the land, and to raise the land toward a dimension of holiness.
I will stop here and wait for your questions. — Good evening, Kevod HaRav (honored Rabbi). — Good evening. — If I may, I would like to ask you two questions. You said earlier that love is painful. In my understanding, love is unity, ahavah and echad. It is division that is painful, not love; love is the opposite of division. So as I understand it, what is painful is the trial, the evolution, the change, like trials, like […]. But it is not love itself that is painful. — It is the trial of love that is painful, not love; love is the opposite of pain. It is a trial insofar as, in love, you give more than you need. And your aim, your awareness, is to give that love.
So it is a heavy trial, because sometimes you do not receive in return what you would expect from this love. There is a disproportion, but nonetheless, on your side it is love. On the other’s side it may not be up to the same level, because he receives it, he gives it; perhaps he gives it late, perhaps he will give it, not in that very moment; but in any case, love does not mean an immediate exchange. We first showed that this verb ahav appears for the first time with Avraham, who is called to place his only son on the altar, asher ahavta, “whom you love,” and he no longer understands anything. He sees the Holy One, blessed be He, who fills the world, he sees Him from afar, and still he walks. He walks, because a brake must be put on this love.
Who will put the brake on this love? Yitzchak. Yitzchak is the man withdrawn into himself; he did not follow his father’s way. We do not see with Yitzchak that tent open on all four sides, nor the distress at having no passersby, no guests, and so on. No, he belongs rather to gevurah, to the realm of limitation; it is a withdrawal into oneself. And that, incidentally, is why the patriarchs differ from one another. And when it comes to walking together, then this love is a justice that returns from the other side and that, in a way, seems to put a brake on your love. That is it. How does the text end?
Va-yikra Avraham shem ha-makom ha-hu Hashem yir’eh… be-har Hashem yera’eh: “Avraham named that place ‘Hashem will see’… on the mountain of Hashem He will be seen.” Look: seeing and being seen. Vision becomes clear from the moment this love is there, with Yitzchak walking, walking with his father, while sensing something and asking, Ayeh ha-seh le-olah?, “Where is the lamb for the offering?” This ayeh recalls another ayeh in the first part of the parashah: Ayeh Sarah ishtecha?, “Where is Sarah your wife?”; and Ayeh mekom kevodo?, “Where is the place of His glory?” Ayeh: where? We are searching; we do not understand. But in the end this does not hold back the other love, because one wants to see the beyond. And look at the midrash that steps into this walk: when Avraham asks his companions (who were his companions? his disciple Eliezer and his son Yishmael), when he saw the place from afar, he says to them: Do you see something?
Do you see a point of light at the summit of the mountain, at the summit of Moriah? What do they answer? We see only a crevasse in the distance, a pit, a hole. So what does he tell them? Shevu lachem po im ha-chamor, “Stay here with the donkey”: you are a people likened to the chamor, the donkey. You do not see; you do not have this gift of vision from afar. But this vision from afar is the fruit of a love that indeed unites father and son in one and the same walk, and that is where this unity is realized, a unity that is not of the same substance in the one and in the other, since in the one it is hesed and in the other it is gevurah. There. Other questions?
— Another question, if I may. How is it that Lot, whom you described as Avraham’s ape, and Lot’s daughters, born of a Sodomite woman and of Lot, Avraham’s ape, come to bring the Mashiach? — The midrash asked that very question. You see, in the end even you can ask the midrash’s question; you can reconstruct the midrash through your question. The midrash asked: what was Lot’s merit? When Avraham found himself in Egypt and was afraid of losing his wife, he could have said, “No, she is my wife,” but he declared, “No, she is my sister”; he reduced, in a way, the relationship of husband and wife to that of brother and sister. Lot could have denounced him, could have shouted it from the rooftops, because things were not going well between Lot and Avraham. Indeed, when Avraham separates from Lot, or Lot from Avraham, it is on leaving Egypt; that is, something was already brewing. And we are told: note that before, Lot was mentioned after Avraham and before his wife; on leaving Egypt, Lot is mentioned after the possessions Avraham brings with him from Egypt. That is, there is already a separation, and Lot asks for it, or at least consents to it. But this merit of not having denounced Avraham, even though it could have suited him and he could have profited from it, was not lost for him. And this will be found again later with Yehudah.
Yehudah could have said to Tamar: No, it isn’t true. He could have contested. He did not contest; it was accepted. So these merits count […]; nothing is lost. — That is fine, thank you very much. — All right? No more questions? Come, I will leave you. I hope we have spent this time well. We did not make use of our psalm, which is cited precisely: the verse given is from Psalm 110. It is a psalm dedicated, our Sages say, to Avraham, in which one finds Avraham’s whole personality and Avraham’s whole path; but there are others who interpret it as words of David: from Avraham to David. Avraham is the starting point of history, and David the culmination of that history.
So you may say to yourselves: but Tehillim was written by David, so what is the connection with Avraham? Did he simply embroider a text on Avraham’s personality, rather than something relating more to his own time? No: Avraham’s personality runs like a watermark through the whole of history, and it is never in the past. It plays out in the times to come. That is the true symphony. There. Shavua tov, until next week. — Thank you very much. — Shavua tov, thank you. — Thank you so much for your generosity. — Thank you very much, it was simply exceptional. — Yes. Sometimes the questions cannot come just like that, because the thought is very intense. We can sometimes begin the class with questions on the previous class. That does not bother me.
But sometimes the questions stay within us and make their own way. Perhaps we do not always need answers. You will find the answers for yourselves. — We have a week to write them down, and we will come back to you, Rav Benizri. Thank you so much. — With pleasure, thank you very much. — Thank you, goodbye everyone. — Goodbye. — Thank you very much, goodbye everyone. Goodbye everyone. — What a marvel, what a marvel. It gives strength for the whole week, I find. Especially since he was in great form today. — But he always is; the intensity of his thought… What he says about sadness, about the veil of sadness and about laughter, is so beautiful, so beautiful. — Absolutely.
Thank you. Thank you for organizing all this. — You’re welcome, you’re welcome. — Thank you, Manu. Have a good week. — So, until next week. I hope the link will work better next week. In any case, I will send it to you quickly so that we are not stuck in the waiting room. I have had requests from several students asking whether there is a way to keep the same code, so that it does not have to be sent again every week […]. — I think it is possible for you to keep it; if you like, we will discuss it; it is possible for you to keep the same code. — I will look into it, but then I suggest we use the next one and always keep that same one.
I suggest making a code that is easy to remember: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, something in that style, or A, B, C, D. — That’s great. — Good, Rav Benizri. — Ah yes, for the code, as far as the code is concerned; but above all for the link, it seems to me. — The link is a number, but the code number is something we can choose. — I think we can keep the same code number, absolutely. Absolutely. — So you just have to keep it, that’s all; there is no problem. You can use it as many times as you like; there is only one problem. — That’s fine. — It would avoid problems, yes.
Some people could not follow this week, because there were too many problems with this week’s link. — Yes, that’s right. I will run some tests during the week, and then on Wednesday or Thursday I will send you the new code and the new link. — Great. — There we go. Thank you very much, have a good evening. — Thank you, thank you. Goodbye. Shavua tov.
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