Questions for the Shabbat Table: Lech Lecha
A printable study booklet: one question per page, the Rav’s answer, its source, and a lesson to discuss as a family.
After Egypt, a second danger confronts Avraham, and this one comes from inside his own household. Lot is his nephew; he has followed his path; he resembles him down to the features of his face — yet of all his master’s teaching he has retained only a single line, that of justice. This lecture follows the parting of the two men as the parting of two currents of thought, and asks why a righteous path, pushed to the point of excluding every other, ends up destroying itself. The answer runs through a comparison of two symmetrical threats: Egypt and Sodom.
Rav Raphaël Benizri picks up where the previous lecture left off, with the first confrontation with the great power of the age and its will to drown the nascent Jewish entity. He then reads the text step by step: the ascent from Egypt, the quarrel between the shepherds, the dividing of the land while the Canaanite and the Perizzite still occupy it, the separation, and the new promise that follows it.
The lecture widens as it goes: Egypt as the will to dissolve the individual into the mass, Sodom as justice raised into a system, the need for a middle ground, and finally the two messianic figures who each carry one of these logics. Along the way, a participant points out that the recording had cut out at the moment of the war of the four kings against the five; the Rav briefly goes back over this point before continuing.
What this lecture teaches
The second danger is no longer external; it is domestic. The previous lecture had followed the confrontation with Egypt, whose aim was to pass a culture through the womb of Sarah, and at whose heart lay the will to drown the Jewish entity. What now rises on the horizon is of another order: Lot is family, Avraham’s nephew, an orphan. That is precisely why he poisons the beginning of this journey.
Lot’s story begins with the death of his father. Haran wanted to follow Avraham’s path and said to himself: if Avraham comes out of the fiery furnace unharmed, then I will believe that there is divine providence, and I will follow his way. Avraham came out; Haran threw himself into the furnace of his own free will and lost his life. The Rav recalls that we do not all have the same resources in spiritual life, and that the miracle granted to one is not necessarily granted to another — but what we will remember of Haran is that he wished to make himself an example of his faith. And yet at the end of this road the Messiah of Israel will appear, since David will descend from Lot.
What undoes Lot is the plagiarism of a spiritual life. Each person grows in his own way; one is guided by a master, but one does not imitate the Patriarchs. To conform to the laws of Israel and of the Torah — yes; to seek to relive their trials — no. We are not going to marry two sisters like Yaakov, or go down to Egypt because there is famine, or provoke a sacrifice supposedly for G-d’s sake. The Patriarchs only suggested, through their lives, what we are called to face at the stages of our own growth. Spiritual life is collective in the practice of the mitzvot (commandments); in the manner of growing, each person has his own pace and his own sensibility.
The text says that Avram “went up” from Egypt, and the word is not neutral. The Jewish people came out of Egypt; it did not go up from it. Those who went up were the mixed multitude, those who had attached themselves to the children of Israel — and it is they who would later take a path other than that of the G-d of Israel, since they are the ones who would instigate the sin of the golden calf. The phenomenon is already visible here: when Avram goes up from Egypt, he brings Lot up with him.
Lot resembled Avraham so closely that one could mistake one for the other. Our sages say he had the same features and the same face. Avraham regarded him as his child — without, however, asking G-d that Lot be his heir, as he would do for Yishmael. Lot, for his part, certainly regards himself as Avraham’s true spiritual heir, and that is where everything comes to a head.
Judaism has many facets, but a single framework. The Rav takes the opportunity to lay down a general rule: there is no single definition of Judaism — Chassidic, Lithuanian, traditionalist — but there are limits, those of the six hundred and thirteen commandments. And one who does not practice one of these laws is not thereby outside the framework of the Jewish people. An uncircumcised Jew is virtually regarded as circumcised: one who vows to receive nothing from the uncircumcised is not forbidden to benefit from a service rendered by an uncircumcised Jew. He falls short in the practice of the mitzvah, but the sign of the covenant is already engraved in his flesh.
Going up from Egypt, Lot wants his independence. He believes he can stop being subject to Avraham’s hold over him. And what he clings to is one single guiding line of his master: the practice of justice. The Rav does not treat it lightly — to be rigorous in the way one lives one’s Judaism, toward G-d as toward society, is no small thing. But a single line, taken on its own, ceases to be a path.
The conflict breaks out at the level of the shepherds, and it is no mere logistical detail. These shepherds are the disciples of each side. The text specifies that the Canaanite and the Perizzite still occupied the land: may one, without established ownership of a land that is promised but not yet conquered, send one’s flock to graze in the neighbors’ fields? Lot reasons that the land is promised to Avraham’s descendants, that Avraham has no descendants, that he is therefore the descendant and the land is his — a line of reasoning, the Rav notes, that we still see today. Avraham, on the contrary, holds that as long as the land is not conquered and ownership is not definitively established, one must go on living on good terms with the neighbors.
The Jewish people is not here to live alone, separated from the nations. If Avraham brings Lot up with him, and with him the souls he had won over to his cause, it is because he means to associate them in this life upon the land. Ownership remains that of Avraham’s children and of Yitzchak’s descendants, but this does not prevent other peoples from living there, for we cannot conceive of our existence without the other peoples. It is promised that at the end of days a non-Jew will take hold of the hem of a Jew’s garment and say to him: take me with you, for I know that G-d is with you. That does not mean he will practice the whole Torah, nor that he will lay claim to a share of the land.
“A great nation” is not “a holy nation.” Becoming a great nation was promised to Yishmael as well, to whom the angel announces a great nation. Greatness is a matter of standing, not necessarily of numbers. What sets us apart is holiness: we are a holy people, we live in holy time, on a holy land. It is another dimension of life, one that joins the entire universe to a single purpose — and in this respect the Land of Israel remains the spiritual laboratory of the Jewish people.
Egypt, for its part, seeks to dissolve the individual into the mass. It holds other peoples under its sway and grants them autonomy, but they remain colonized. When an all-embracing will sets out to dissolve the particular person into the international community, there is no personality left: everyone must behave like everyone else and eat like everyone else. It is not for nothing that Egypt is said to have drowned: this annihilation of the self for the sake of the whole leads to the annihilation of everything. Each of us is bound to regard himself as having come out of Egypt — but the very name of Egypt is a dual: one does not leave only one.
The second current is Sodom, and it is pure justice. Egypt practices universal exchange: what is mine is yours and what is yours is mine. Sodom lays down the opposite — rigor, justice. Not everyone is born with the same chances, the same faculties, the same possibilities, and it is the Creator who willed it so; why, then, should I oppose it? In this logic, to do an act of charity is to go against the One who decided that a given person would be poor. The Rav relates that when a master was asked what the wicked man in the realm of impurity would look like, he answered: the one who does a charitable deed — because he does it in a spirit of domination and manipulation of the other, and a paternalistic spirit deflects the law from its course.
This system is condemned, but so is the other. One cannot live by the criteria of pure justice; nor can one live by those of Egypt, where everything melts together and where Yosef ends up nationalizing all the land for Pharaoh’s benefit. One must find the middle ground between this movement of openhandedness and this movement of rigor: let each person keep what he has, because he worked to obtain it, without rigor turning into a system. The Rav recalls that a child is made to become independent one day, and a disciple too — but that, conversely, total rigor allows neither flourishing, nor renewal, nor knowledge.
Avraham does not pray for Pharaoh; he prays for Avimelech. When Pharaoh takes Sarah, he suffers the consequences of his act: plagues strike him, and no one tells him to ask Avraham to intercede. The next day he returns Sarah and sends her off with many gifts — which is what makes Avraham rich, just as the children of Israel would later leave Egypt. With Avimelech everything is different: G-d reveals Himself to him while he has not yet touched Sarah, tells him to have Avraham pray for him, and Avraham prays.
“We are brothers” was said in order to part. It is Avraham who asks for the separation, so that there be no confusion. The Rav stresses that this phrase is today taken up in the discourses that run through the Jewish people as a call to come together — whereas it was spoken for the opposite purpose. We share values, and that sharing makes us brothers; but this does not mean we must be identical, going from the same to the same. Each remains on his own path: if you consider that the path of justice suits you, I keep the path of hesed (lovingkindness).
This hesed left its mark even on those who drifted away. The Rav notes that the descendants of Yishmael are strong in the welcome they give their guests, the open door, the practice of kindness — a practice inherited from Avraham, in which one steps aside before the other. And it is indeed for Sodom that Avraham will pray, not for Egypt: because Sodom’s justice can be redeemed insofar as it takes in what Egypt has of exchange and sharing. That will be the messianic era.
Two messiahs each carry one of these two logics. The first, Mashiach ben Yosef, holds that everything should be placed under one single banner — no longer Pharaoh’s, but that of the Creator of the universe, all currents of thought converging toward the idea of a G-d who created the world and watches over it. But he will give way to Mashiach ben David, who sees to it that each person keeps what characterizes and individualizes him. These two movements are found within Avraham’s own heritage: on one side openness and homogeneity, on the other a stricter, more conservative observance. The point is to exclude neither: it is their sum that makes up the messianism of the Jewish people. The Rav adds that Lot, by choosing the plain of the Jordan, distances himself from the Ancient One of the world — from the One who judged that the world could not stand on justice alone, and that kindness had to be joined to it.
The promise renewed after the separation speaks of the land differently. Two readings are opposed as to whether one should have stayed with Lot or parted from him, and Lot’s very name can be translated in two opposite senses. What remains is the consequence for the land: the Perizzite is the one who declares it open, without borders, belonging to everyone; the Canaanite is the one who claims it for himself alone. Now the Land of Israel is indeed a land without borders, yet exclusive to Israel. That is why G-d declares once more that He will give it to Avraham’s descendants forever, and that these descendants will be like the dust of the earth — that which halts the movement of the waves and keeps the land from being drowned. Likewise, when the Eternal chose the least numerous of peoples, our sages understand: the one that knows how to make itself small before the others. One cannot stand firm on shifting sands; one must walk this land — and the place where Avraham will build his altar, Hevron, is the point where the spiritual and the material are joined.
Full transcript of the lecture
Last week we saw Avraham’s first confrontation with the great power of the age, Egypt: the passage of a culture through the womb of Sarai — that was the aim. But at the center of it all there was also the will to drown the Jewish entity. Now a second danger appears on the horizon, and that is Lot. Lot is a member of Avraham’s family: he is his nephew, an orphan, the son of Haran. His father had wanted to follow Avraham’s path, and he said: if Avraham comes out of the fiery furnace unharmed, then I will believe that there is divine providence, and I will follow his way. And indeed Avraham came out of that trial unharmed, and Haran, of his own free will, threw himself into the furnace, and there he lost his life.
Yes, we do not always have the same resources, so to speak, in spiritual life. Not everything is alike, and the miracle that may occur for one person will not necessarily be granted to another. But what we will retain of Haran is this: that he wished to make himself an example of his faith in the G-d of Avraham. And at the end of his spiritual road we will indeed see the Messiah of Israel appear, since David will descend from Lot — Lot, the son of Haran. Yet this Lot poisons Avraham’s life at the beginning. Why? Because this plagiarism of a spiritual life will not do. In spiritual life, each person grows in his own way, after his own manner.
One is indeed guided by a master, but one does not imitate the Patriarchs. Who says we must imitate the Patriarchs? To conform to the laws of Israel and of Moshe — yes, the laws of the Torah. But we are not going to try to pass the Patriarchs’ tests: to marry two sisters like Yaakov, or go down to Egypt because there is famine in the Land of Israel, or wage a war for Lot, who deliberately chose a path other than Avraham’s. We need not provoke a sacrifice, supposedly for G-d’s sake — no, we do not imitate the path of the Patriarchs. The Patriarchs simply suggested to us, through their lives, what we are called to face at the stages of our own growth, each in his own manner, each in his own way. Spiritual life is entirely individual.
It is collective in the practice of the mitzvot, in the practice of the Torah. But in the manner of growing — each at his own pace, each with his own sensibility, each in his own way — it is altogether different. And that is perhaps the first difference we will notice between these two currents, so to speak, with which Avraham grapples. Let me read you the text, because ideas must always be grafted onto the text. Avraham goes up from Egypt. He goes up — whereas the Jewish people came out of Egypt; it did not go up from Egypt. Ve-gam erev rav alah itam — “and a mixed multitude also went up with them”: those who went up from Egypt were the mixed multitude, those who had indeed attached themselves to the people of Israel, to the children of Israel. And it is they who afterward took a path different from that of the G-d of Israel, since they are the ones who would instigate the golden calf, the sin of the golden calf. This phenomenon —
— we already see it with Lot. Va-ya’al Avram mi-Mitzrayim: when Avram goes up from Egypt — note it well — he brings up with him, he takes with him his nephew Lot. His nephew Lot, who until then had been a man who had deliberately chosen to follow Avraham’s path. Perhaps he had no choice, but he did it nonetheless, and Avraham, paradoxically, regarded him as his child. He did not ask G-d that Lot be his heir, as he did for Yishmael — you will tell me that Yishmael was, after all, his child. But Lot regards himself as Avraham’s true spiritual heir. Our sages say that, paradoxically, he resembled Avraham: he had the same features, the same face; one could mistake the one for the other.
Let us pass over that detail. Let us simply say that there are different facets of Judaism, which each person applies in his own way; each follows his own spiritual path or belongs to a well-defined current. We know that it may be a Chassidic current, a Lithuanian current, a traditionalist current, and so on. There is no single definition of Judaism, as though one could pin it down in a definition. We know what the limits are; we know what the framework of the 613 mitzvot is. But one who does not practice one law among the 613 mitzvot is not thereby outside the framework of the Jewish people. Even an uncircumcised Jew is considered — virtually considered — circumcised. Consequently, one who vows not to benefit from the favors of the uncircumcised is indeed forbidden to benefit from anything they offer, but he is not forbidden to accept and benefit from a service rendered by an uncircumcised Jew. For that uncircumcised Jew is already virtually regarded as circumcised; he merely falls short in the practice of the mitzvah.
We say ot berit: the sign of the covenant that You engraved in our flesh. It is already engraved in our flesh. Lot, going up from Egypt, believes that in the end he can become independent and no longer remain subject to Avraham’s hold over him. What is this will of Lot’s to free himself? What has come over him? You see, Lot holds on to, clings to, one of Avraham’s guiding lines: the practice of justice. And the practice of justice — make no mistake — is no small task, if you truly wish to be rigorous in the way you live your Judaism, whether toward G-d or toward society. And it is no accident that Lot comes into conflict with Avraham at the level of the shepherds.
But the level of the shepherds is symbolic here too, for these shepherds are the disciples of each side. And the text says: ve-ha-Kena’ani ve-ha-Perizi az yoshev ba-aretz — the Canaanite and the Perizzite were then still dwelling in the land; they occupied it. So when one has no established ownership of the land — a land that is promised but not conquered — is it permitted to go and send one’s flock to graze in another’s fields? No. But Lot considers that these lands were promised to Avraham and to his descendants; Avraham has no descendants; he, Lot, is the descendant, and consequently these lands are his. This is a practice we still see today: the lands that are there belong to us — even though others hold that as long as the land is not conquered and ownership is not definitively established, one must go on living on good terms with the neighbors.
Why? Quite simply because the Jewish people is not here to live alone, separated from others, separated from the nations. If Avraham brings Lot up with him to the Land of Israel, and brings with him ve-et ha-nefesh asher asu ve-Charan — the souls they had made in Haran, the people he had won over to his cause — this means that he intends to associate them as well in this occupation of the land, so to speak, in this shared life upon this land. Ownership remains that of Avraham’s children, that of Yitzchak’s descendants, but this does not prevent other peoples from living within it — the ger toshav (resident alien), the ger tzedek (righteous convert) — because we cannot conceive of our existence without the other peoples. […] As it is said: Hodu la-Hashem, kir’u bi-shmo, hodi’u va-amim alilotav.
Proclaim the name of the Eternal — but share with the peoples all His deeds, all His actions. And it is promised that at the end of days a non-Jew will take hold of a Jew’s garment and say to him: “Take me with you, for G-d is with you — I know it.” That does not mean he will practice the whole Torah of the Jew, the whole Torah of Avraham, or that he will claim a part of the land for himself. The Land of Israel is the spiritual laboratory of the Jewish people, exclusive to the Jewish people. There is a holiness — and that is the difference with ve-e’escha le-goy gadol, “I will make of you a great nation,” a great nation. That was promised even to Yishmael: of Yishmael, too, the angel declared that he would become a great nation.
We are a great nation. A great nation — that is a matter of standing, because it is not necessarily numerical. But we are a goy kadosh: we are a holy people. We live in a holy time, we live on a holy land. And that is different; it is another dimension of life, a dimension that indeed joins the entire universe to a single purpose. But this idea was not foreign to Egypt. Why? Because Egypt, as we have seen, regarded itself as a people that held the other peoples under its sway: it granted them autonomy, but they were colonized. It cannot be otherwise when we see, on a global, mass scale, a will to dissolve the particular person into the international community.
You no longer have a personality; you are dissolved into the mass. We would then have to behave like everyone else. But behaving like everyone else — it is not for nothing that we were told that Egypt drowned. That is to say, this reduction, this will to annihilate the self for the sake of society, of the whole, leads to the annihilation of everything. We must come out of Egypt. Why must we come out of Egypt? Because we must mark our independence from this global idea of a world, of a humanity in which everyone thinks like everyone else and everyone eats the same way as everyone else.
Each of us must affirm his own self. Be-khol dor va-dor chayav adam lir’ot et atzmo ke-ilu hu yatza mi-Mitzrayim — in every generation a person is obligated to see himself as though he had come out of Egypt. To come out of Egypt — but one comes out of two Egypts, not of a single Egypt. Mitzrayim is a dual. We stand between two currents that threaten us. And what is this second current? This second current is that of Sodom. Sodom, unlike Egypt, does not practice sheli shelach ve-shelach sheli — what is mine is yours and what is yours is mine — where one can, in that case, change and exchange at every level. No. For Sodom there is rigor, there is justice. Not everyone is born with the same luck, the same faculties, the same possibilities.
And it is the Creator who willed it so. And if the Creator willed it so, why should I oppose Him? No — to practice charity is to go against the One who decided that such-and-such a person would be poor. The Baal Shem Tov used to say: zeh le-umat zeh asah ha-Elokim — the Eternal made opposing forces, one set against the other. And in the same way that we can find in holiness a certain spiritual pride, that of a being who advances on his own and fulfills himself on his own, without having to remain dependent on this one or that one — a child is made to become independent one day, and a disciple, of course —
— so the opposite, this rigor, will not allow any flourishing, […], any renewal, any knowledge. That is how it is. For the people of Sodom, then, one had to hold at all costs to this strict justice that G-d had imposed in His name. And a master was once asked: what would be the model of the wicked man in the realm of impurity? He said that the wicked man in the realm of impurity is the one who does a charitable deed — because he does it in a spirit of domination over the other, of manipulation of the other, of binding the other to himself — because “I am his benefactor.” A paternalistic spirit, of whatever kind, is a way of deflecting the law from its pure course. Nevertheless — and this is important — Sodom is condemned to be destroyed; yes, it is condemned to destruction, to annihilation, because one cannot live by the criteria of pure justice. But neither can one live by the criteria of Egypt, that is, sheli shelach ve-shelach sheli, where everything is melted together — as Yosef does in Egypt: all the land will be nationalized, it will all be Pharaoh’s, and even […] will become the possession, the property, of the king of Egypt […]?
No. One must find the middle ground between the two — between this movement to the left on one side and that movement to the right. It is true that each person should keep what he has, because he worked for it, he succeeded, he made his own effort and succeeded. That matters. When Pharaoh allows himself to take Avraham’s wife — for there, even wives are exchanged; why not? — Avraham does not pray for him. Pharaoh suffers the consequences of his act: there are afflictions, there are plagues that strike him. But notice, no one says to Avraham — no one says to Pharaoh: “Ask Avraham to pray for you.”
And Avraham does not intervene at all. The next day, however, Pharaoh returns Sarah to Avraham, and he sends her off with many presents, many gifts. That is what makes Avraham rich — just as the children of Israel too would come out [with great wealth], while plagues were inflicted on the Egyptians from every side and no one prayed for them. Whereas when it came to Avimelech, who likewise took Avraham’s wife, Sarai, Hashem reveals Himself to Avimelech. And while Avimelech has not yet touched her — he is still asking himself whether this story of brother and sister is true — when the Shechinah (the Divine Presence) appears to Avimelech and tells him: “Ask Avraham to pray for you,” Avraham prays for him.
Now, we know very well that Lot will become a hostage in the war that Nimrod will wage — a league of four kings against five. We will study it; we will see it. And someone dear to his heart was taken […]. (A participant: “You were cut off when you said ‘four kings against five.'” — “Excuse me?” — “You were cut off when you spoke of the war of the four kings against the five. If you could go back over it: you were talking about Lot being taken in the war of the four kings against the five, and then your video cut out.”) Well, yes: Avraham intervened, he intervened for Lot; he freed him, he waged the battle — even though he had separated from him. It is Avraham who asked Lot to separate, so that there would be no confusion. That is anashim achim anachnu — “we are brothers” — a phrase that now appears in the discourses between the various currents within the Jewish people. But be careful: it was invoked for a separation, not for coming together.
The verse, right there, speaks of hipared na me’alai, “please part from me”: we are brothers, because we are brothers we must part. What an absurdity, you might say — if we are brothers, surely we cannot part? No: we share values, and the sharing of these values makes us brothers. But that does not mean we must be identical to one another. We must not be — we must not go from the same to the same. Each remains on his own path. If, in the end, you consider that the path of justice is the one that suits you best, because it is the one this man practices — I, for my part, keep the path of hesed.
You know, Yishmael stands out for the welcome he gives his guests […]. It is always the open door, the practice of kindness. The descendants of Yishmael are strong in this — a practice of kindness they inherited from Avraham, in which one steps aside before the other. That is it. Avraham does not pray for Egypt; he prays for Sodom. Why, then, does he pray? Because that reality can be redeemed insofar as it takes in the Egyptian sheli shelach ve-shelach sheli; then it will indeed be the messianic era. You know, for the messianic era, the path has been traced for two messiahs: Mashiach ben Yosef and Mashiach ben David. Mashiach ben Yosef is the one who held that everything should be under one banner, one single enclosure — only it will not be Pharaoh, King Pharaoh, but the Creator of the universe, all currents of thought converging, so to speak, toward the supreme idea of a G-d who created the universe and watches over His universe. That is Mashiach ben Yosef. But he will give way to Mashiach ben David. Mashiach ben David is the one who will see to it that in this messianic world each person keeps what distinguishes him, what characterizes him, what defines him, what individualizes him — and he has, if you like, another current that keeps him from falling into the failings of Sodom.
That is why, in this parashah of Lech Lecha, the Torah chose to set before us two movements of thought over which people will contend, even around the unity of Avraham. For within Avraham’s movement there will be, on the one hand, the Chassidim, who stand for a total homogeneity, […] an opening of the doors characteristic of Avraham […]; and on the other hand a very rigorous movement, that of the Lithuanians, of the world of halachah, of strict observance, but more conservative. And we are not going to exclude either one; rather it is the sum of these two currents that makes up the messianism of the Jewish people. I return to this idea of na’aseh, which lies in hesed, and nishma, which lies in din (strict justice) […].
These two movements, then — we will see them later on; we must not lose sight of them. So this is the separation that takes place at the beginning with Lot. What we will see is that when one takes a single path and insists at all costs on following that path alone, one hastens one’s own downfall, one’s annihilation. It turns out that this is not what should have been done, and people will have to correct it — and we do nothing but correct, time after time, the movements of openhandedness we have had, but also the movements of rigor we have imposed. Knowing how to balance things is much more in the direction of David — of Mashiach ben David — than of Mashiach ben Yosef. For concerning Sodom it is said that it was ke-gan Hashem, “like the garden of the Eternal” […], when Lot chooses the whole plain of the Jordan and moves away mi-kedem, from the east. No, it is not east of Eden: he distanced himself from the Ancient One of the world. The Ancient One of the world considered that the world could not stand through justice alone, and that the attribute of mercy had to be joined to it.
And that is what happened. That is why, when Avraham separates from Lot, there is at that moment a new promise from G-d to grant the land to Avraham’s descendants. But what is said this time? There is a small difference, a slight nuance. [One view:] the Eternal is displeased because Avraham separated from Lot. But [the other:] as long as Avraham was with Lot, [the Divine word] was not altogether satisfied, it was not content […]. So it is one of two things: either one must be with Lot, or one must not be with Lot.
And there are two explanations of the name Lot. Lot as Avraham’s face reproduced — or else Lot in its Aramaic translation: I do not mean “veil”; in its Aramaic translation I mean “curse.” A curse, when one holds on to only one thing — and that risks having disastrous consequences for the land, for the ownership of the land. For at that point, what is Kena’ani and Perizi? The Perizi comes from paruz, open: he is the one who says that the Land of Israel is without borders, that it belongs to everyone. And the Kena’ani is the one who claims it for himself; it is solely for himself […]. But the Land of Israel is indeed a land without borders, and it is a land exclusive to Israel. That is why G-d makes a new declaration to Avraham, saying to him: this land that you see, lecha etnenah u-le-zar’acha ad olam — to you I will give it, and to your descendants forever.
“And your descendants will be like the sand of the earth.” But what is the sand of the earth? It is what halts the movement of the waves that threaten to drown the land. [To read it] as a numerical measure of the Jewish people is not possible. Moreover, it is said: ki atem ha-me’at mi-kol ha-amim — the Eternal chose you because you are the fewest of all the nations. And our sages interpreted: it is the one that knows how to make itself small before all the other nations. And that is the meaning to give the text here: one does not quite stand firm on shifting sands. Kum hit’halech ba-aretz le-orkah u-le-rochbah, ki lecha etnenah — “Arise, walk through the land, its length and its breadth, for to you I will give it” — and this spot where he will build his altar, in Hevron.
Hevron is the point of junction, the junction of the spiritual and the material, of the Land of Israel here below and of the Land of Israel as we […]
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