Lech Lecha: Avraham’s Journey

As in last Shabbat’s program, this lecture is also dedicated to the elevation of the souls of Chaim Ben-[…] and […] Rosenberg — Joachim, a member of our community, who passed away unexpectedly. Yes. Let us regard this moment as the minute of silence that would have been fitting for the harsh ordeal the Jewish people is going through. We are all stricken by the fate of the victims and of the hostages, alas; may the Holy One, blessed be He, surround them with His compassion and His consolation. Amen. We are beginning — inaugurating, if you like — the year with a teaching that is not unrelated to the events we are living through right now: the teaching of Lech Lecha. My reflection will be limited to these few introductory verses. I will read them in French. G-d said to Avram: “Go for yourself” — for your own good, for your own flourishing — “from your land, from your homeland, from your parents’ house, to the land where I will show Myself to you.” Not merely “that I will show you,” but where I will reveal Myself to you. “I will make of you a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you shall be the blessing” — for the whole earth. “I will bless those who bless you,” and those who curse you, or who take you lightly, “I will curse; and through you” — they will find their fulfillment in you — “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” And Avraham set out on this journey “as G-d had commanded him,” and Lot joined him of his own free will; and Avraham was then seventy-five years old when he left [Haran]. And he took with him Sarah his wife, Lot his nephew, and all the wealth he had acquired. And what was this wealth? “The souls they had made in Haran.”

All the people he had actually managed to draw in his wake in Haran, during his relentless struggle against the decree of Nimrod, who sought to make all of humanity uniform under a single banner, a single tower, a single city. “And they went forth to go to the land of Canaan”: he did not stop along the way, he did not stray from his path, and he arrived in the land of Canaan. And Avraham passed through the land — surveying the place — “as far as the place of Shechem.” Now Shechem is where Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval stand, where the covenant between G-d and the Jewish people was reaffirmed concerning the charter of the Torah and its observance — but this time with an oath. “And the Canaanite was then in the land.” Yes — whether we like it or not, just as a fruit is surrounded by a peel, and everything depends on the fruit and on its state, so the Jewish people is surrounded by various peels. It always will be, because in the same way that the peel protects the fruit — yes — our enemies are in fact destined to be our protectors, so that we may realize ourselves from within. “And Hashem appeared to Avram”: it is there that G-d reveals Himself to Avraham. Until now He had not yet revealed Himself; but when Avraham reached Shechem — and Shechem represents a genuine turning point in the taking possession of the land of Canaan — “He said: To your descendants I will give this land. And he built there an altar to Hashem, who had appeared to him.” So he understood that this land could not be justified — that ownership could not be justified — except by the altar he raised, and this in order to give greater resonance to his movement, his movement both physical and spiritual.

“He moved on from there toward the mountain.” We have learned that Avraham, compared with the other patriarchs whom he set on their way — Yitzchak and Yaakov — was the inaccessible mountain. Yes: reserved for an elite, just as his name Avram indicates — the father of an elite. “And there he pitched his tent.” We are told, from the spelling of the text, that it is written oholah: the tent in the feminine, her tent, his wife’s tent. It is a tent, but it is she who will accompany him, for it is the meeting place. Before there is an Ohel Mo’ed, a Tent of Meeting — the meeting place of the spiritual, of the Divine, with man — there is first the meeting place of a man and his wife.

That says a great deal. “Beit El toward the sea” — we are given a geographical detail: Beit El on the side of the sea, “and Ai to the east.” Beit El is where Yaakov will begin his stage of exile; and Ai is the place where, during the conquest of the Promised Land, there is an incident — there is a desecration of the Divine Name. For this land, even in its conquest, must be taken with regard for its moral demands, its spiritual demands, and this was not observed by one man, Achan — Achan who afterward instituted the prayer Al ken nekaveh, “Therefore we hope in You,” with which we conclude our prayers three times a day: morning, afternoon and evening, at Shacharit, Minchah and Arvit. “And he built there an altar to Hashem,” we are told. So this is a second altar. The first, “to Hashem who had appeared to him,” was for the revelation; the second is for the promise of the land to him and to his future descendants. “And he called in the name of Hashem”: in the same way that Adam gave names, identifying all the beings around him, here Avraham identifies the place, the makom. The makom is the place where a being comes to flourish. That is why Makom is a divine attribute.

The makom is that which encompasses everything, and Israel is the matrix of the entire universe; as such it is the makom, the dwelling place of G-d — but it is also from there that the Name of G-d is spread abroad. To spread the Name: what does that mean? We shall see. For when one identifies a thing, one names either its project of being or its immediate nature, its nature in the present. “And Avram journeyed” — no, we are told, here it is his future project, because “Avram journeyed, going on and moving toward the Negev,” the south. So he has arrived in this land, but he has not yet found his permanent dwelling; he is still within the movement of lech lecha. He heads south, and what follows will tell us that he always goes in the direction of Yerushalayim.

Wherever he goes, it is in the direction of Yerushalayim. In our thoughts, in our words, in our deeds, Yerushalayim must always be present and always be the subject of our reflection — the subject of our reflection because the first mitzvah given to man was to nourish himself from all the fruits of the garden, of Eden. And the command given to Avraham — about whom, until now, we know nothing; we will learn about him later on, we will discover him — that too lies within Lech Lecha, within Lech Lecha. It is not for us to pass judgment on a person by saying that he is a tzaddik, that he is this or that. No: as long as a man is on the way, we wish him always to be growing for the better. But we do not know what may become of him. There is only one man who merited a divine attribute during his lifetime, and not after his death: Yitzchak. One swears by Pachad Yitzchak, “the Fear of Yitzchak”; and we shall see that Pachad Yitzchak does indeed have a meaning, since he stands — or rather defines himself — as an active element in avodat Hashem, the service of G-d.

And Yitzchak embodied it through his sacrifice, and indeed our sages call him olah temimah, the perfect burnt offering. So one thing we can retain first of all from this first parashah is that it centers on the land promised to Israel, this matrix of the universe, which can give resonance [to the good] — or else, in the same way, amplify evil. And that is why we have learned that there are three gates to Gehinnom. One is in Yerushalayim — there is a furnace there, says Yeshayahu. Another is in the sea — the sea that sought to swallow Yonah, the prophet of Israel, the prophet charged with bringing the word to the nations: the messenger dove — the dove of Noach — which takes up its message again to all of humanity through Yonah, the prophet Yonah.

“From the belly of Sheol I cried out; You heard my voice” — from the depths of the waters, I implored You, and You heard my voice from the depths of the abyss. The Maharal of Prague says: water is formless. It takes the shape of the keli, the vessel, into which it is poured; otherwise it keeps spreading out everywhere, in every direction — but always downhill. For it to take shape it needs cheres, earthenware — it needs earth. The earth is the vessel, the one that holds this source of life, since water is in truth the first principle of life. And our sages, when they spoke of shamayim, the heavens — life as it can be conceived spiritually — said: shamayim is sham mayim, the place where there is water. Now the third.

The third gate of Gehinnom is that of the desert — the desert which, in that earthquake, swallowed Korach and his whole band: the rebellion of those who contest the divine order. For within the thirteen principles of faith that the Rambam laid down — which are, if you like, the keli, the instrument, the tool, of the thirteen middot ha-rachamim, the thirteen attributes of love — there are three fundamental principles that constitute the elements of faith. The first is that the Eternal created the world. There is a Creator of the world; there is a Master who governs creation. This is a faith that is entirely logical, because otherwise we land in the absurd.

Granted, there is this dark spot, which we did not wish for; but if we set it aside, if we project it onto the future so as to decipher it later, why not refer it back to what is self-evident — namely, that nothing can create itself, and that there is a mind, a Being who governs everything? Indeed, I am not sure to what extent one can even call that faith, since it all belongs to the self-evident: when we come upon some work that is perfectly structured, well ordered, running marvelously, we cannot say it is chance, the work of chance; there is truly a genius behind it, hidden behind it, animating it, animating it from within. So where, then, does faith come in? What is faith? That is the problem. But faith, you see, is when one goes beyond the self-evident; it is when one considers that in every thing we have only ever seen, only ever perceived, the outside — never the depth.

The inner depth — we are still in the process of discovering it; but we have faith that beyond what the earth shows on its surface, there are treasures in the sea, in the earth, in the heavens, which call us to work, to search. Like a treasure you set out to find, the effort does not remain without result. Just as scientific investment bears fruit, so does spiritual investment — and this in the study of Torah. For we sometimes content ourselves with a study that merely harvests the Torah and gleans from it, like the ox that grazes — as the ox grazes its grass and, when there is none left, goes elsewhere, seeks another stretch of land where it can find its food; when it has finished, it moves on again.

No: true faith is the faith that does not stop at the natural product set before us, which does not exhaust reality, but that seeks rather what lies buried within. And on this point I will give you a midrash of our sages, who said in effect — for we know very well that Avraham waged a battle against three modes of idolatry. You know that Avraham’s tractate on idolatry had four hundred chapters, whereas we have only five in our possession. This is to tell you that “idolatry” — this French word says nothing, or rather it is limited. But in Hebrew, avodah zarah, avodat kokhavim, is the worship of everything that is foreign. Foreign to whom? First of all, foreign to oneself. How is it foreign to oneself? Because I cannot objectify things if I have not internalized them. I am built of matter and of spirit, and this amalgam is what allows me to grasp this universe that He created.

Now, it happens that I yield to three temptations of the mind. The first is the one that the world of Enosh experienced. The world of Enosh — what is it? “Then men began to profane the Name of the Eternal.” What does it mean to profane the Name of the Eternal? To profane the Name of the Eternal is to focus all one’s thought on the derivatives of creation, on the derivatives of thought, rather than going back to the source. It is much easier — much easier to speak of Elokim, that is, of the plural manifestations of G-d, through ideas as well as through the physical phenomena of nature and through science, than to entrust oneself to the Being who encompasses everything.

I have told you before that we close the day of Yom Kippur by reciting seven times Hashem hu ha-Elokim, “Hashem is G-d”: the Eternal is the sum of the plurality of divinities, or of divine forces. And this was said by the prophets of Baal, by the false prophets: it is an acknowledgment, an acknowledgment of man’s wrongs. Now, this deviation began with Enosh, with Enosh. Then we moved to a second stage of deviation with the generation of the Flood. The generation of the Flood: man must be given free rein, left to what he feels, to what he desires, to what he wants — a loosening of morals.

And people did indeed sing and cry out “democracy, democracy, democracy,” and this simply in order to reject the principle that Elokim is one with Hashem — to want to deny it. Then “the earth was filled with chamas.” Chamas — this is the first time the word appears in the Bible. Violence covered the face of the world. Everyone does as he pleases. Everyone does as he pleases. The world becomes formless, and it returns to the state of the waters in which it lay before creation. I told you the idea of the Maharal: as long as water can be contained, as long as it is in a keli and kept in check, it gives form and takes form; it can sustain man’s body, his health — we too are a flask of water in motion — and it can purify a being; it can indeed be a source of abundance, a blessing. But it can sweep everything away in its path when it has no dike, when nothing halts it. That is the problem. That, then, is the tendency of the generation of the Flood, and what ensued from it. And there is also the sin of the third generation, the dor haflagah, the generation of the Dispersion: the one that separated the spiritual from the material. We shall thwart all the plans of the Eternal; we shall govern ourselves; we shall not remain dependent on a supreme will — no, we shall be able to master the forces of nature and set for ourselves the path to follow, our course of conduct. That was Nimrod, in the time of Avraham; as his name indicates — “let us rebel” — we shall keep up a movement of revolt. And yet they had a common language: they had the language of the sacred. The midrash says that they all spoke lashon ha-kodesh, the holy tongue. They spoke the language of the sacred, they had access to it — and they misused it. They cut it off from its source: that was the misuse they made of it.

They did not consider that this language, just as it was the language of creation, was also the language of revelation. Yes — and so he went out to war alone. The Jewish people, the people of Avraham — “the fewest of all peoples” — is likewise like a lone individual in this sea of humanity, and it must bring its word; and it succeeds — but it is scorned, it is rejected: it will not hold out, it will end up siding with the mass, with the majority — that is how the world sees it. And if it does not, passing through the crematorium furnace will make it think again in the end, and it will shed its Judaism and wish to be a nation like the others, or to give rise to a nation like the others. And Avraham holds firm. He holds firm — why? Because Avraham, we are told, began [his search] at the age of three. The Ramban cites the midrash: “At the age of three” — at the age of three. Yes: and three is when we give the child his first haircut.

It has become a custom at the age of three. As though, in short, one were giving the child an initiation at that moment, a mystical initiation, namely: you must keep your pe’ot. When you cut your hair, when you make a clean sweep of everything, try to keep your pe’ot, this corner, this corner of the head. Try to nurture this portion of spirituality, for it is from it that a new seed will spring. One. But we do not stop there. From the age of three this boy questions everything, and he is called by G-d only at the age of seventy-five. What happened in between? He waged a struggle against these three temptations of avodah zarah, these three modes of avodah zarah, which were current then, as they are today and as they will be tomorrow — because these are the gates of Gehinnom.

The gates of Gehinnom: in water, that which erases everything, which reduces everything to nothingness — there is the gate of the sea, from which [Yonah] addresses his prayer to G-d. Then Korach’s movement of revolt, which contests G-d’s choice of Moshe, G-d’s choice of the Kohanim, and which would like to hand power back to whomever it deems fit, isn’t that so? That is the second stage. And the third: we have said midbar, yam, Yerushalayim — desert, sea, Yerushalayim. Yerushalayim is the dwelling place of G-d, where the Shechinah has taken up her abode. If one holds that there is no Providence watching over the fate of humanity and the course of the world, a Providence whose place of emanation is Yerushalayim, then one turns Yerushalayim into yet another gate of Gehinnom. It becomes the prey of the nations who lay claim to it. Yes. Now, the three fundamental principles of faith, say our sages: first, Borei Olam, the Creator of the world. And it is not because G-d exists that He must reveal Himself. No, no — it is because a world exists that He must reveal Himself: He must give us the formula for how this world works.

And the formula for how this world works is the Torah. And the Torah was given in the midbar, the desert. It enables us to prevent this desert from becoming a gate of Gehinnom for us. [Likewise,] the dwelling place of G-d, the place He chose, enables us to guard against the danger of its becoming the prey of the nations, of all the nations. And finally, the third is ba-yam, […] the sea. And we have said that three times it is mentioned that the people proclaimed its faith in Hashem: when it received the Torah in the desert; when it crossed the waters of the sea; and the third time, when G-d told them: I will bring you — I will fulfill what I swore to your fathers and bring you to the land that is a morashah, a heritage. The word morashah appears twice, as we have pointed out: once concerning the land — and, paradoxically, it comes before the revelation, before the giving of the Torah — and the second morashah, [said of the Torah,] this yearning for that encounter, and so on. And both of them, Torah and Eretz Yisrael, are indeed concentrated in this first call of the Eternal to Avraham, for He tells him that in this movement — toward the land first — asher ar’eka. Asher ar’eka: what does it mean? “I will show you”? No — I will not show you; you know perfectly well how to see things. But you will see things differently; you will discover a new perspective of sight, of interpretation; you will attain an inner vision of things and not settle for an outer vision.

That is it. And when? Now, you cannot attain this vision — and here, perhaps, I will end this lecture to leave room for questions. You cannot attain this vision unless you internalize the oath of the covenant that was made on Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval, where there were six tribes on the left, six tribes on the right and the Levites in the middle, who said: “Blessed be he who has done this and done that,” and the others answered “Amen.” There were eleven of these. But the last one: Arur asher lo yakim et divrei ha-Torah ha-zot — “Cursed be he who does not uphold the words of this Torah.” Our sages asked: but in truth, we were already — […] — we were already bound by the covenant at Mount Sinai; everything had been done. Why now, on the threshold, again — why, as soon as they set foot [in the land], is there a new covenant? They answered: it is not the same. The Torah given at Mount Sinai was always left to each person’s own choice.

One is zealous and will try to perform as many mitzvot as he can; another will take up one part and leave another aside; he will have constraints here and there. Well, there are commitments, certainly, but that does not place me outside the people of Israel if I fail to observe a part of it. But the oath here is nishba — you know that the verb shavua, “to swear,” is always in the nif’al, and the nif’al is a reflexive form, an action that turns back upon oneself. Why? If I am the one swearing, should I not have the simple form of the verb? No: nishba, nishba, because I am carried along, moved by the commitment itself, so that there is no other possible way of life than through the Torah.

So here the vision of the Jewish people in the land of Israel is altogether different: a land that was given to it, and not conquered by it, a land that was not, in short, its original land of cultivation; it was not he who cleared it. So it must feel that this charter of the Torah is part of the land, and that there is no other way to remain in this land and to live in this land than within the framework of the Torah. And that is why everything is contained in these first verses, when He says: “I will make of you a great nation” — you will be the dispenser of chesed, of loving-kindness. Gedulah, greatness, is the creation of the world, the Creator of the world. “I will make of you” — that is you; and you are the chesed. The world — this world is governed by this goodness, this love — that is “the G-d of Avraham.” The blessing — the blessing of “the G-d of Yitzchak” — is that of avodah, the personal investment of each individual in the service of G-d: that is avodah, that is “the G-d of Yitzchak.” “And I will make your name great”: a name means perpetuating an existence. So shall your descendants be, and your name — you will have your name, this name of Israel, which must indeed inspire […] and be spoken of with humility and respect.