Lech Lecha: The Third Attempt

There we are, over to you. Very good. So, good evening, everyone. Good evening. This week we take up Parashat Lech Lecha. We had already begun this study last year, but this time we are going to follow in the text this new attempt to start — so to speak — the history of humanity through Avraham. There are three attempts. The first is Adam’s. Adam is in an Edenic world. He has everything he wants. He has absolutely nothing to do. He is the tzaddik (the righteous one) who lacks for nothing, yet who would indeed like to attempt his own formation himself, and who would not want to settle for serving G-d unconditionally. It ends in failure; he will serve his apprenticeship outside the Garden of Eden, in time and in space, which is perfectly normal. And, as it happens, the whole unfolding of this attempt ends in the destruction of the world, of the entire universe. G-d regrets what He has done — but what does a regret on G-d’s part mean? A regret on G-d’s part simply means that the first attempt did not work: we cannot reach that intense spirituality of closeness to G-d without personal effort, without having acquired it by ourselves. And so, of course, G-d decides on another pedagogical method, through Noah. I had already told you that there is a very explicit verse in the prayer of Yaakov — three words that we repeat almost every day — which can be read in three ways. Lishuatecha kiviti Hashem: “For Your salvation I have hoped, O Hashem” — that is the first reading. The second reading is kiviti Hashem lishuatecha: “I hope, O Hashem, for Your help” — for Your participation, Your aid. That is to say, the person of Noah is the one who would indeed like to invest himself completely with G-d in bringing about this world as G-d conceived it and as He wills it — but for this he asks for G-d’s help. That is the first covenant concluded between G-d and man. Very well. But this second attempt, too, runs its course after ten generations — and ten generations always represent a unit in the history of humanity; that is how our Sages count it, since ten generations are counted from Adam to Noah, and ten generations from Noah to Avraham — and Avraham undertakes a new approach, so to speak, to G-d. This approach to G-d is […]: that is to say, “Everything I undertake is for the glory of Your Name; it is for You alone. I expect nothing, I want nothing for myself; I give myself entirely to You, and my devotion is completely freely given.”

Avraham is indeed the one who will leave his mark on the history of humanity. It is with him that G-d concludes a covenant that has no limits, neither in space nor in time, since it concerns offspring that will be ka-afar ha-aretz, like the dust of the earth, and ke-chochvei ha-shamayim, like the stars of the heavens — that is, not merely in the sense that they cannot be counted. This is not a quantitative assessment of Avraham’s descendants; it is a spiritual estimate. That is to say, it is the potential of light that the Jewish people could bring to the entire universe through this spirit of self-denial, this spirit of devotion to the cause of humanity. And this is G-d’s first revelation to Avraham.

Let me read you the text. The land is not named. “I will make of you a great nation” — let us hold on to this word, goy. “I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing” — for humanity. “I will bless those who bless you” — those who join you. But “I will do away with all who curse you,” or who persecute you. Ve-nivrechu vecha — and they shall be blessed in you, through you. We have already explained this notion of berachah, which also carries the horticultural sense of layering: it is like a branch that disappears into the soil and gives life to another tree. So are the generations of Israel, and so shall all the families of the earth be. Here we no longer speak of goy; we speak of family.

Mishpechot ha-adamah, the families of the earth. This definition of goy and mishpachah becomes clearer in Parashat Noach. For with Adam ha-Rishon (the first man), once he has left the Garden of Eden and attempts his personal experiment, everything is a rough draft. We do not yet see constituted families; we see only children who live out their time and disappear. There are a few stars in those generations, but they do not adapt at all to the development of their society. I put that in parentheses — so with Adam there is no family. The notion of family takes shape with Noah, in his ark, in his household, because it is the family that must be cultivated first of all. If one does not want to be swept away by the flood that threatens a humanity left to itself, then one must first know how to close the doors of one’s home and begin to build one’s family — et ha-Elokim hithalech Noach, walking with G-d in his spiritual aspiration, with a sense of complete humility.

Indeed, in Parashat Noach, in the generations of Noah, we see families succeeding one another. But in these successive families there are two dimensions. They are spelled out, for example, in chapter 10: “These are the sons of Ham, by their families, by their tongues, in their lands, by their nations.” So you see appearing here the term mishpachah on the one hand, and the term goy on the other. The mishpachah cultivates a lashon — an inner tongue, a language of intimacy, a personal language. That is lashon. And the family, when it is well constituted and develops well, has no need to mark out its borders. On the contrary, exchanges between families bring about a kind of eruv techumin (a merging of boundaries): all the borders are joined, and people live in a shared space.

But when the family fails in its course, then the threat of the goy appears. The goy is defined by its territory — be-artzotam, be-goyehem, in their lands, by their nations. At that point one appeals to the nation, to the homeland, to a narrow nationalism indeed, and as a result each is busy marking out his own living space — and beware, one must not try to intrude upon the other’s borders. And here it is no longer the language of lashon, no longer an inner language; it is that of safah. Safah is the lip: it is an outward language, a conventional language, a political language — a language of getting along, we might say, cosmopolitan and nothing more.

So, in the dor ha-haflagah, the generation of the Tower of Babel — the generation of the split, of the division of families — we are told: “The whole earth had one safah,” the outward tongue, a conventional tongue, a wholly formal tongue. It is not the language of the heart, not the inner language, not the language of spirituality, not the language of the family: it is the language of the goyim, the language of peoples, the language of nations. Now, in what the Holy One, blessed be He, says in this first revelation of G-d to Avraham — Lech lecha: leave this world in which you live, this world of the haflagah (the division) in which you live, leave it! Yet he himself has already left it, as we shall see. But this time Hashem intervenes to say: no — you must constitute yourself as a nation. You must become the goy gadol, you must become the great nation — but to what end?

To the end of restoring to the nations the notion of family. Ve-nivrechu vecha kol mishpechot ha-adamah: all the families of the earth shall be blessed through you. So what must be accomplished is this conversion, this passage from goy to mishpachah. And that is why the Holy One, blessed be He, says to Avraham, Lech lecha me-artzecha u-mi-moladetecha u-mi-beit avicha (“Go forth from your land, from your birthplace and from your father’s house”) — because he could have done it where he was. For where he is now, he is in Haran. In Haran — why? You know, we must ask ourselves a little about our origins. Ask ourselves about our origins: where do we come from? Who are we? Who are we? We are the Hebrews. If we are the Hebrews, we are the descendants of Ever.

We are the descendants of those Habiru tribes that archaeologists and scholars have uncovered throughout history, and who are a people unlike all other peoples, a tribe unlike all other tribes, by virtue of the philosophy it holds. What philosophy? But for that, I must tell you that Ever is a descendant of Shem. We know that Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Yefet. Shem, the embodiment of ethics; Ham, that of economics; and Yefet, that of art. Unfortunately he separated them; in reality one ought to be able to embrace them within a single lineage, a single begetting, a single conception. Shem, Ham and Yefet: one cannot live on Shem alone while remaining dependent on Ham, and neither can one opt for the life of Yefet, which seeks, in fact, to penetrate the inner from the outer — whereas we seek to shape the outer according to our inner sensibility, according to our spirituality.

And Noah understood this in the end, because having separated them, he himself underwent a kind of decline. He was a tzaddik tamim, he was perfect; then he became a tzaddik and nothing more, merely a righteous man. Then he became ish ha-adamah, the man of the earth — in a sense he became secularized, he yielded to the plain demands of life, and so on. So he let go of his aspirations to some degree. And as for his children, when he blesses them […], he speaks of the one who gives himself solely to the demands of material life — because such a one does not realize that this is not the goal.

Art, on the other hand, he does associate with Shem. And we are indeed the descendants of that family of Shem. We are Semites. So where is the other, Hebrew origin, in Ever? U-le-Shem yullad gam hu — I am reading you chapter 10, verse 21: Shem too had a son; avi kol benei Ever, he is the father of all the children of Ever, the Hebrews. I have just spoken to you of Yefet — he is the one in the academy of art, who cultivates art — achi Yefet ha-gadol, and Shem is linked with him, is he not? And then the sons of Shem give us Elam, Ashur, Arpachshad, Lud and Aram. And Arpachshad begot Shelah, and Shelah begot Ever. And to Ever were born two sons. The name of one was Peleg — and the Torah makes a connection between Peleg and the verb palag, which means to divide, to split. And there is that Tower of Babel which split things apart, where people no longer understand one another’s language, no longer understand each other, so absorbed are they in a civilization of technical and industrial discovery that they have no time to think about themselves, to rethink themselves, to ask about the meaning of their lives — why, after all, they are here. So he named this child Peleg. But how did he know that ki ve-yamav niflegah ha-aretz, “in his days the earth was divided”?

If we say that it is Peleg — ki ve-yamav niflegah ha-aretz — then Peleg’s name came to be associated with the division of the society of his time. But if we say that it is Ever who named his son, because he had already sensed that there would be a tragedy in the unfolding of human history, that humanity would split into seventy nations and each would take a fragment of Adam ha-Rishon — Adam ha-Rishon torn apart, with each taking a part of him — how did he know it? We are told: no, careful! Ever was a prophet. A prophet — we know very well what that is, and we have already spoken about this notion of personal searching, of that quest into the depths of oneself that brings about the connection between the root of man and the divine spirit that animates him, so that Hashem speaks within man, through man, through his voice. Consequently, Ever is indeed that man devoted to a personal, profound quest, through which he develops, day by day, different directions of thought, of life, of ideal.

[…] History speaks of these Habiru tribes that were somewhat dispersed among the peoples, because no one could tolerate them in his country. And you know very well: no one wants a concentration of thought that weighs on politics, and one would like, to some extent, to muzzle it. How? Through the phenomenon of dispersion. In that way one hopes, as it were, to weaken its power, its hold on people. And these Habiru are irreducible. There is even a document from a king of Canaan — another king of the region — who complains of the harm these Habiru cause: they will not hand over, shall I say, a slave who has fled his masters; they absolutely refuse to return him to his owners.

On the contrary, they give him asylum, they protect him, they shelter him, because they are beings hungry for freedom and spirituality, who become the defenders of an ideal of life for man. These are the Habiru — these are our origins, the Hebrews. We are from the other side of the river, indeed, and we emerged — we emerged into a world of diversity, of dispersion; yes, of dispersion. So Ever named his son Peleg because he knew very well what was going to happen. This Yoktan, [his other son,] had thirteen children; he is in the Arabian peninsula, living with his tribes, in tribes — and the Habiru are there too, but these are Habiru living in the Arabian peninsula.

But these are people who are unwelcome, persecuted — which explains the fate of Avraham in Ur Kasdim. Avraham in Ur Kasdim: these are people who are sent through the crematory furnaces of that era. No one wants to hear of them; no one wants to leave even a stele that might recall their passage through history. That is the fate of these benei Ever, the children of Ever. This explains Terah — Terach avi Avraham va-avi Nachor, Terah the father of Avraham and the father of Nahor — Terah, who came from that tribe, from those descendants, and who resolved to go into exile of his own accord, no longer to remain where he was. Because what did Terah do? Terah had an idol shop. What would it mean today to have an idol shop? He had a shop of philosophical books of every persuasion.

Today we know very well — just look at how governments are made up of different ideological convictions, and each has its divinity, its philosophy, its way of conceiving life and history; it adheres to it and is indeed ready to sacrifice its life for the triumph of that ideology. And Terah was open to all these philosophies; he was selling them, marketing them, one way or another — until the day Avraham wages war against these various ideologies and smashes them, smashes them, and demonstrates their emptiness. Yesterday I was asked: why do we say, “From Moshe to Moshe there arose none like Moshe”? From Moshe to Moshe there was only one Moshe.

And the essential reason is that Moshe encompassed every philosophical orientation, every sublime ideal one can imagine. He stripped them of their husk; he stripped them of their avodah zarah (their foreign worship), of what was dross, and he integrated them — he gave them, indeed, a single code. In the same way that we say Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad […]: the different currents of thought and conception, however sublime they may be, as long as they have not been brought back to unity, are liable to be avodah zarah. If you wish to avoid that, then try to harmonize them with the whole, with the primordial unity. That is how the Hebrew people was born.

For Terah had three sons: Terah had Avram, he had Nahor and he had Haran. Avram passed through the fire of his age, persecuted as he was by Nimrod, and he came out of it unscathed. Haran, however, was moved only by a spirit of imitation, of competition; he did not come out of it. He underwent the same ordeal, but he failed. So a third of that family disappeared — that is Haran. But Haran nonetheless left descendants: Sarai, who would be Avraham’s wife, and Milkah, who would be Nahor’s wife. We will have three fathers descended from Terah, and we will have four mothers. And these are, if you like, the first sketches of what Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov would be, and of what our matriarchs would be: Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel and Leah.

But this is not the moment to develop that; it is simply to tell you here how Avram presents himself to us. Avram is a survivor of those persecutions that took on exceptional proportions under the reign of Nimrod — of that spirit which is the singular champion of secularism at any cost. He is the one who presided over the movement of the Migdal Bavel, the Tower of Babel: “We will dethrone the divine that weighs so heavily on the spirit of our society, and we will prove that by ourselves we can organize and build a society that would have the entire merit of all it has done, of all it has achieved.” And that is why the Terahites are compelled to go into exile.

They cannot live there. Where do they think of returning? To Canaan. Canaan. To Canaan. That is the land of Ever, because Shem, in the division of the lands, received the land of Canaan, received the land of Israel — but this land of Israel was invaded by the descendants of Ham, Canaan, who occupy it. We understand that the Canaanite had come to occupy the land of Shem. And Terah wants to go back and recover his roots in his own country. […] It is Terah — rather like the secular Zionist who wanted to undertake this return to Israel simply because he wants to flee the pogroms. But he does not reach the end of his mission: he stops at Haran.

Haran — it is a pity I do not have a map to show you the route from Ur to Haran. And Haran is somewhere in present-day Turkey, and that is where Nahor is. Nahor, who is a son of Terah. Nahor found that in Aram, the land of Aram was far more tolerant, that there was room for a life of […] accommodation with the Arameans of the time. And why not? So, rather than thinking of a return to the land of Shem, the original land of Shem, one will settle for living in chutz la-aretz (outside the Land), settle for living in Haran, and try indeed to spread this teaching, this vocation, this ideal through a cosmopolitanism among the nations.

It is an attempt that has also been made throughout history. — “Mr. Benizri, excuse me, I have a map for you, if you like. Would you like me to share it?” — “If you like, yes, that would be good.” — “Can you see it?” — “No, I can’t see it for the moment.” — “No, I can’t manage… Just a moment.” — “Ah, there it is, very good.” — “There we are.” — So you see Ur — that is Ur Kasdim, a little above the Persian Gulf, Ur Kasdim. Now look at Haran: he goes northward, and Nahor is in Haran; that is where Nahor has settled. But he is part of the family, part of the family of Ever; he is of Terah — he too is of Ever, he too is of Ever. We understand why the patriarchs insist at all costs that marriages take place within the family; they do not want to leave that family framework. So when Avraham sends to seek a wife for his son Yitzchak, he seeks her from his own family. But she must come to Israel. He will not hear of chutz la-aretz; he will not hear of that cosmopolitan ideal of which Nahor would like to make himself the international spokesman — no. He wants at all costs to realize his ideal of life through Eretz Yisrael, the land of Canaan, which originally belongs to him because it is Shem’s portion, Shem’s homeland. And indeed, all the patriarchs married descendants of Nahor.

Within the same family — sometimes nieces, granddaughters. So they came as far as Haran. It is there that Avraham receives from Hashem the command to leave Haran and not to remain halfway along the road. One must not lay oneself open to a country that would very gladly welcome us — but on certain conditions: that we do not in the least disturb, with our way of thinking, our ideology, our faith, the other philosophies or the other ways of life. He tells him: no, go and seek your roots elsewhere. So we have understood: Hashem speaking to Avram. Until now there had been prophets; only prophets had been spoken of. And we have given these definitions of the prophet: the man who is searching for his outermost point of communication with the absolute, with the divine, and who feels it so intensely that in the end it asks you to leave the milieu in which you move and to set out on a road — el ha-aretz asher areka, “to the land that I will show you.”

Now you will listen; afterward you will see — the progression goes from hearing toward vision. The vision of the land: for the moment the plan must not be revealed. One does not reveal the plan for a Jewish state that one wants at all costs to create in a country occupied by the Canaanites. For the moment, one must first settle; one must lay the foundations of a family and little by little bring about the flourishing of a people descended from Avraham, as a family. The families of the children of Israel — certainly they are a goy gadol, a great nation, because they must mark out their borders in relation to the rest of the world. It is like Noah, who shuts himself inside his tevah, his ark: the people of Israel, too, sets its own bounds within its borders; it is a goy gadol. But ve-nivrechu vecha kol mishpechot ha-adamah — they shall be blessed, all the families, all the families of the earth, all the families: to make of the other peoples, of the different families, to bring about the joining of these families — that is the true mission entrusted to Avram, and it is the mission of the Jewish people.

I see that I will not be able to go further than this, but if I may give you the floor — if there are questions, if there is discussion, with pleasure, I am listening. — “If I may — I don’t know if it’s my turn — it’s Yoann. Thank you very much, because this is a delight, a real delight; it is the best way to end the weekend. I follow attentively, but unfortunately I don’t usually have the chance to ask questions, and now it is burning my lips — or my tongue, I don’t know yet. The question is this: there are different philosophies, different divinities, and Moshe succeeded in unifying all of that, by making them irrelevant if they were taken individually.

“And on the other hand, there is this movement that interests me enormously, from the safah — this lip, this language of the goy, that is, a polished, cosmopolitan language — toward the lashon of the mishpachah. So, two small questions. First: what are the mechanisms that will allow us to go from the safah to the lashon? And a sub-question: why, then, does it say mishpechot? Why not simply mishpachah?” — “Yes. Have you finished? Those are your questions?” So, to answer the first question, you must know that every person has the benefit of an inner language, his very own — va-yipach be-apav nishmat chayim: when G-d breathed into man the breath of speech — man has an inner breath within him.

This breath of speech is that of his spirituality, that of his essence. Had it not been divided by the fragmentation of Adam, each person would have held it within himself in its entirety. But, as with the Tablets of the Law, it was indeed broken into pieces. So each keeps only a fragment of it, and for this language to recover its unity, there must be communication among the mishpechot, among the different families of the earth, each of which indeed holds […]. That’s it. Well, there it is — a short answer, I think. Another question? — “Perhaps another short answer to my little question. You taught us: ‘[…] ba-goyim al ta’amin, […] ba-goyim ta’amin.'” — “Chochmah ba-goyim ta’amin” (believe that there is wisdom among the nations). — “Ah — […] ba-goyim ta’amin. There are extraordinary scientists.

“So, precisely, do you consider… I really liked the parallel between Terah and the bookseller of philosophy — but for you, is philosophy not a science?” — Truly, I will quote you this definition — I don’t know whether I still remember it. Every philosophy — I can’t recall the exact words, but here is the idea — inasmuch as every philosophy seeks only to demonstrate the emptiness of the other philosophy, and each one, indeed… there is no philosophy that one can [simply] learn. You can learn every philosophy, but you must arrive at saying Mi chamocha ba-elim Hashem, “Who is like You among the mighty, O Hashem?” Ba-elim? The Sages said: ba-illemim, among the mute. Ba-illemim — these are philosophies that remain mute before what humanity is waiting for.

They do not stop at these problems. The philosopher is far from being a tzaddik. He is a philosopher; he is not a tzaddik. He is not the very embodiment of his own philosophy — so how can you give him credence? So chochmah ba-goyim ta’amin: sophia, wisdom among the nations — that is the translation: sophia; philosophy is the love of wisdom; it is wisdom — so believe it: they have that, they have that. But the Torah, which asks you to be consistent with yourself and to realize the whole within yourself, ridding yourself of extremes — isn’t that so? — that they do not yet have, because they are more under the sway of Elokim than under the sway of Hashem. And when one separates Elokim from Hashem, it becomes elohim acherim — it becomes divinities, it becomes other gods. There it is.

Thank you. So, on that note, I leave you until next time. Remember that we have barely touched the first […]. There it is. Thank you very much, and good evening to all. — “Thank you very much again.” — “Good evening, thank you very much.” — “Have a good evening.” — “Thank you very much. Mr. Benizri, thank you very much. Goodbye.” — “Goodbye. Next week.” — “Thank you so much.”