Lech Lecha: Faith in Motion

We are approaching a phenomenon that pursues us throughout history, namely this covetousness of the feminine. But first we will finish with this notion of lech lecha el ha’aretz — “go forth to the land” — which is the founding element of emunah (faith). Faith, properly speaking, is never frozen. It evolves as our discoveries and our revelations unfold. But it also allows us never to come to rest on an idea that has been revealed, and to project ourselves toward what that idea hides behind it or deep within itself. And so the lech lecha toward the land is first of all a movement of walking, which will lay bare the riches of the land, because what the land presents on its surface is only, let us say, a glimpse —

a glimpse of the riches it may still bury within. And that is why we say that the Torah of Eretz Yisrael is beyond comparison. Why? Because that is where the root is, the source. And indeed, one should never go far afield in search of further revelations; it is always better to probe in depth what sources the land hides within itself, what treasures. And we said that this notion of the land preceded the revelation of G-d at Mount Sinai. First a land was destined for us, and to that land one had to go with the utmost faith. Generally, we see that when people have to move from one place to another, the tendency is first to go and look at what the chosen place has to offer, and only afterward to undertake the move under the best conditions.

Will this place be a source of fulfillment for us? Avraham, however, sets out on the march toward the Land of Israel without asking any questions. And that is true faith, because when everything is obvious, when everything is within reach, there is no problem of faith. But when there is no problem of faith, what is the danger? It is to hold on, at all costs, to acquired ideas, to our patterns, to our prejudices, to the certainties we have tested and built up around ourselves, and which secure our intellectual and spiritual comfort. And there lies the danger of idolatry: in the principles we have fixed, from which we refuse to budge, obstinate in our way of seeing things.

And that is terrible. There is no possibility of opening, no possibility of correction, no possibility of teshuvah (repentance, return). And so there is no possibility of revelation either. “Go to the land” — and there, there where I will reveal to you things that today you do not suspect, that you do not understand. Perhaps there will be doubts that call your received ideas into question; well then, one must be able to set oneself upon this walk, an uninterrupted walk. Did Avraham cultivate and uncover everything by himself? If, in the end, we hold to this idea of an Avraham who, from the age of three, asks himself questions, then we have before us a prodigy endowed with phenomenal intelligence, who can indeed come to grasp this vision of a Master of the universe, a Creator of the universe, in whose name he combats all the received ideas of his day.

There were, after all, men such as Chanoch and Metushelach, and Noach, who also walked with G-d. It is said that Chanoch walked before G-d, and that Noach spoke with G-d; for the moment Avraham has not yet spoken with G-d — it is G-d who reveals Himself. So there was already a body of inquiry carried out by men before him, and there were even two academies that trained disciples: the academy of Shem and that of Ever. Shem was the one who sought the name of G-d through the attributes. Ever was the one who founded his teaching on the discovery of G-d through one’s fellow man. So there was a whole chain of study in these two academies, with very precise objectives, and it is they who initiated Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov — all of them were disciples of these schools. Now, what did they learn?

What, our Sages say, was the first element of their search? Paradoxically, ibbur. Ibbur: when we say of a woman that she is pregnant, she is me’uberet. She carries an embryo within her, a life that is different from her, and to which she will give birth. Now, in time, there is what is called ibbur hashanah, which is translated as the embolismic year — that is, a year that carries within it a thirteenth month. The calculation is a matter of making up the time by which the moon’s year falls short of the sun’s. It has to be caught up; one has to try to set the sun and the moon back on the same course. And we have already said that the solar year is a cycle that is equal to itself and begins again.

Shanah: repetition — precisely so. There is no change. There is a cycle of seasons that repeats itself. And the cyclical year of the moon is calculated according to a number of lunar months. And we know very well that it is not identical to that of the sun; it falls behind. But it has something of its own that is original, namely renewal, the chodesh (the new month). It is a year of months; it is made up of months. And this notion of newness, which means that things do not repeat themselves automatically, but that an effort of adjustment must be made as we go along, with each calculation we make, each operation we perform — this is called the secret of conception.

The secret of conception in time is the same as the one that exists in the study of Torah, because it is not a matter of reciting one’s study by rote, nor of taking the text as it is; it is a matter of trying to see what it hides in its depths. And the same holds for the land. Avraham walked the length and breadth of the land, but in walking it he already knew what its toledot would be — what stages of history the Jewish people would pass through. And therein lies the movement Avraham undertook once and for all, since he is the one who dared to destroy all the other frozen and preconceived ideas, all the ideologies. And it is he who, in sum, innovated — who established the innovation of his time, namely in attachment to the land and in attachment to spiritual values,

in attachment to the values of the Torah. And that is how this mitzvah of lech lecha is the founder of a history. “Do not read behibar’am, ‘when they were created,’ but read be-Avraham, ‘through Avraham.'” History begins with Avraham. With Avraham begin the new two thousand years, since there is a total of six thousand years, divided into portions of two thousand, two thousand, two thousand. Two thousand years of tohu: the first are chaos, emptiness. Everyone clings to the various forces that surround him, forces that, in sum, lie beyond him; and it is precisely because they lie beyond him that they became objects of worship, that a cult grew up around them.

But this worship proper to idolaters means that the god they serve is at their convenience, for their use. For their use — we have an image of it in Pharaoh: “and Pharaoh dreamed, and behold, he was standing over the river.” The Ye’or, the river that feeds all of Egypt, is his god. But it is he who stands over it, he who manages it. Whereas with the tzaddikim, no: “And behold, Hashem stood over him, and said” — this is said of Yaakov Avinu. That is, G-d stands above us. If, then, we have taken in this important notion of lech lecha el ha’aretz that Avraham undertakes with determination — when he could have done like Nachor his brother, who thought of going as far as the foot of Canaan but stopped halfway and said, “Life is good in Charan,” and could have stayed there — no.

He goes; everything is uncertain, but he is convinced that he is truly setting out to discover the unfathomable — and that is true. As we emphasized last week, “Hashem appeared to Avram”: the Eternal reveals Himself to Avraham. He accepts another mode of knowledge. This land, promised to him in a first revelation and destined for the generations to come, for his future descendants, is a land in which heaven and earth coordinate their energies, such that hunger — or rather the need for bread, man’s basic food — has as its counterpart the hunger for the revelation of the word of G-d. Man shall not live by bread alone, but that bread is itself the channel, if you will, of another nourishment, the spiritual nourishment of one’s being, since the Land of Israel, it is true, has no agricultural resources of its own.

There are no rivers running through it that can ensure, as in Egypt, the irrigation of the land. No. One must lift one’s eyes to heaven and pray that heaven coordinate its energy with that of the earth. But then Avraham is overtaken by a famine. He has barely settled in the land of Canaan. And we are going to read this text to understand it better: while Avraham pursues his course to bring to light the heavenly Jerusalem, “and there was a famine in the land” — a famine strikes the country, strikes the land. We are told that this famine strikes only the Land of Israel. There are so many promises in this land, for this land — at first there is enough to shake Avraham’s faith.

We are told that he took the initiative of his own accord to go to Egypt. For what reason? He himself could well, let us say, endure this trial of hunger, but he would not want to impose it on his companion. We sometimes hold certain convictions that pose no problem for us; they are perfectly easy, obvious to us. One must never try to impose them on others. And he relies on the principle of “He who makes peace within your borders satisfies you with the finest wheat”: whoever truly wants to secure peace in his immediate surroundings must secure its livelihood. And so Avraham decided, for the sake of his companion, to go down to Egypt. Another commentary gives us a different line of thought, namely that Avraham does not want to present a Judaism of poverty.

We know very well that wherever he goes he is spreading faith in G-d, in a Creator of the universe, and that he has many followers; Sarah likewise succeeds among the women disciples. How, then, were the needs of all these newly gained souls to be met? So he decides to go and seek food wherever it can be found. At that time Egypt was still a great granary of grain — as it was in the days of Yosef, as we see — because this idea of a famine that strikes in Avraham’s time, that recurs with Yitzchak and returns again with Yaakov, is no accident. There is here a determined will of G-d to move history forward. And history cannot move forward without crisis. Because if we settle into the everyday and forget ourselves, woe to us. Then indeed a multitude of idols, of ideologies, of beliefs destroy society from within. The crisis aims at the course of history, to allow it to advance, as though giving it a new thrust, a new acceleration. And what does this new acceleration aim at? It aims at sharing Avraham’s faith with other civilizations, other cultures. And Mitzrayim was known at that time as the country at the forefront of all civilization, and Egypt considered itself truly the Empire, the great Empire […], which was to absorb into its bosom, by drawing every culture into its orbit, all the other tendencies — and in particular the one Avraham carries, which is no small matter. One must suppose that Pharaoh held in great regard everything that Avraham [and Sarah] undertook, and he truly wanted the womb of the Egyptians to be that of what Avraham’s wife represents, so that the Egyptians, by their conception, would be Jews in due form — since everything follows the mother — but that each one’s identity would be Egyptian.

This is the whole dialectic between a French Jew and a Frenchman who is Jewish, of the Jewish faith. Either we are bearers of the values of a Greco-Roman civilization tinged with our Jewish values; or else we are first and foremost — we claim first and foremost — our Jewish values, and we have adopted as a sister, “Say, please, that you are my sister,” as a sister. Then we have indeed adopted Egyptian civilization, or Greco-Roman, or European, or African, it does not matter; the nations, for their part, develop a certain culture. Not everything is to be rejected. There is indeed reason to integrate certain values, which will find their place in the puzzle of Jewish thought. Well, that is the dialogue. The famine that strikes the land of Canaan forces Avraham to pass through a stage of crisis.

He takes Lot with him, his nephew, who was, let us say it, an orphan. He is adopted by his uncle Avraham, and so he follows him — but he follows him, Lot, who, as his name indicates, is a veil. It is said that he closely resembled Avraham, that he had Avraham’s face, but a face that was, let us say, overdone. People could indeed be mistaken about Avraham by looking at Lot, whose conduct did not meet the demands of Avraham’s morality. Now, what does this crisis, or this exile, make possible? It makes it possible to sort things out. What will happen? Lot will go down, will accompany Avraham to Egypt; and when he accompanies him — pay attention — there is an order within the family by which he is even mentioned first; but when he comes back up from Egypt…

Lot too has made money there, has gained a certain recognition, has become somewhat independent, and consequently he can assert himself before his master. But that is only a manner of speaking; rather, it is the occasion for Avraham to tell him, “Separate yourself, please, from me” — it is time for you to part from me, so that there are no false interpretations, so that you do not drag me, do not drag my morality along in your wake. That too is a danger when one takes under one’s wing people who do nothing but imitate and copy, and who do not seek to reach the depths of things. Between Pharaoh and Lot there is a difference, because Pharaoh, in the end, does not succeed in taking possession of Avraham’s wife — that is, of what she represents, of what founds the house — for do not forget that the woman is regarded as the bayit, as the house. She is the dwelling place; she is the one who puts the whole Torah of Avraham into practice. Consequently, if that Torah has no laboratory where it is put into application, it will remain entirely theoretical. And the particular strength of a woman is to give reality to her husband and to what he represents. So we see the relationship between the promise of the land and the safeguarding of Avraham’s house against any danger of seizure. The danger of a seizure of the feminine threatens to make Avraham’s whole journey fail. This will recur in history: at the birth of the Jewish people we will see the very same thing, namely that Pharaoh wants to make Egyptian civilization pass through the Jewish womb, saying, “Every son that is born, you shall cast into the river” — you will sacrifice him to the divinity — “but every daughter you shall keep alive.”

There is a turn of phrase here that can lead to confusion. When Avraham says to his wife, “I know that you are a beautiful woman,” it is not that he notices now that she is beautiful. That he knows, since he says it in the past tense: I know it, I do not dispute it. But we are arriving in a country where beauty is not inner beauty but outer beauty, of which it is said, “Grace is false and beauty is vain.” That is a beauty which will afterward fade, wrinkle and pass away. Inner beauty, on the contrary, only takes up more and more room and asserts itself ever more. [The text] speaks of this inner beauty, and each time beauty is spoken of in the sense of the Torah, it always refers to this beauty that characterized four women in biblical history: Sarah,

Rachav, Avigail and Esther. Of Esther it was said that she was greenish, pale — that is, to look at, she was truly nothing much. But all her beauty, all her charm, is within. This brings us back to the idea of inner value, as against the wisdom that carries or governs the other peoples, the other civilizations. So he says to his wife, “Say that you are my sister.” This too is a new — pardon me — a new dimension in the relationship between man and woman. Remember that the first relationship began with “zachar u-nekevah bera’am,” “male and female He created them,” just as with the animals. Then, when G-d presented the woman, fully adorned, to Adam, he gave her recognition; he recognized her by his own attribute, ishah: “She shall be called ishah, for she was taken from ish.” This is the relationship of ish and ishah. There remains something somewhat ambiguous in this relationship of ish and ishah, even though it was later covered over, or sublimated, by that of “Adam called his wife’s name Chavah, for she was the mother of all living” — the man who called his wife the mother of all life. But here the relationship is ach ve-achot, brother and sister. Brother and sister — those were the bonds reserved for the blue-blooded elites, who did not want to mix with the people and who kept and cultivated their intimate ties within the family. No. Here, on the contrary, the relationship is forbidden. The love is pure. It is not conditioned by physical attraction. Just as Avraham regards his wife: “Say, please, that you are my sister.” One has arrived at this state of relationship — that is, what truly governs our intimate life most of all is a notion of spiritual family that we want to bring to its fulfillment. “Say, please, that you are my sister” — and in Shir haShirim (the Song of Songs)…

precisely, the woman says to her beloved, “Mi yitencha ke-ach li” — would that you might one day be my brother. So that is how the beloved is perceived, and that is the important idea the text suggests to us here. And of course, if we take the text literally: “so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my soul may live on account of you” — so that I may be well regarded because of you, and that I may go on living, since they may indeed do away with me in order to keep you. But here again, as I say, in the search for the hidden meaning of the text, no: “so that it may go well with me because of you” means so that I may indeed take what there is reason to take from Egyptian civilization, and that I may give life — give life to all that you represent for me. We will see this again in Egypt, at the Exodus from Egypt, with the Children of Israel: “and every woman shall ask of her neighbor, and of her who dwells in her house” — each woman asked her neighbor, and the one who lived nearby, for jewelry. Did they need this gold and this silver to take with them?

No — but the gold and the silver here have another resonance, another tone; it is not… And indeed this is confirmed by what Pharaoh does. What does he do? He gives one of his daughters to Avraham, Hagar: here we have the phenomenon of conversion. What he had not succeeded in doing himself, by keeping Sarah in his grasp — since an affliction struck Pharaoh’s house and Pharaoh himself; so there was misfortune, an impossibility of correspondence, of shared life, between the two: the way Pharaoh wanted and all that Avraham represented. And now what he will try to do is to infiltrate his daughter Hagar into Avraham’s house, so as to carry out the opposite movement and cause Avraham’s spiritual values to pass through Hagar’s womb. And when they pass through Hagar’s womb, what comes of it? What does she produce? She gives Yishmael — Yishmael, who will be precisely, let us say, the other side of the coin in Avraham’s house, since he will raise the problem of ownership of the Land of Israel; he will, in sum, withdraw into the desert, but he has never lost sight of his share in Avraham’s house. There — I will stop here; if you would like to ask questions, with pleasure.