Lech Lecha

Today, here in Israel, we are marking the 11th anniversary of Yitzchak Rabin's assassination. The radio is playing sad songs - I've already heard some Leonard Cohen and George Harrison, two certified depressives - the air waves are full of left-wingers and right-wingers slugging it out over who is to blame, have the necessary lessons been learned and can it happen again, and there are commemorative ceremonies all over. Since the assassination, the gap between the religious and secular communities here is seen to have grown (I happen to be an optimist about this issue, and believe that the media and the professional peace-makers tend to overstate the problem, but a problem certainly does exist), and the two communities may well be moving farther and farther apart. Our work with the Amitim, in which we bring together all kinds of religious, traditional, and secular Jews, certainly gives me hope, but it clearly is not enough. This negative process was exacerbated by the pull-out from Gaza a little over a year ago; some in the religious community have taken it very hard indeed, and are adopting a very aggressive and vocal anti-government, anti-state position, with some even calling on religious Zionists to not serve in the army - a radical step indeed for a community for whom military service has traditionally been seen as a major mitzvah.  READ MORE »

This week's parsha, Lech Lecha, begins with God, seemingly out of nowhere, telling Abraham to leave his home and family and go to the land that he will show him, which, of course, turns out to be Israel. There, He will make him a great nation, and a blessing to all of mankind. The Torah has, up until this point, told us almost nothing about Abraham beyond his genealogy and a bit of the family history. It is the Rabbis who fill us in on Abraham's past; in the Biblical narrative God just seems to pick him at random to start the Jewish people, for no obvious reason. The Rabbis, to fill in this gap, embellish the little that the Torah does tell us about Abraham, and reveal to us a wonderful character - an iconoclastic monotheist, who rebelled against the prevailing beliefs of his place and time - radical paganism - and proclaimed the existence of the one, all- powerful, creator of the universe. Through a careful and creative reading of the end of last week's portion, Noach, which is where Abraham and his family are first introduced to us, Rav Chiyya the son of Rav Ada of Yaffo (Jaffa), in the collection of Rabbinic exegesis called the Midrash Rabba, comes up with the following narrative: Abraham's father, Terach, was an idol salesman. One day, while his father was out to lunch, Abraham destroyed all of the idols in the shop but one. He left the largest one unharmed, and placed a big club in its hands. When Terach returned to the showroom and saw the destruction, he confronted Abraham. "He did it", Abraham said, pointing to the largest statue. "A girl brought a grain offering to the shop, and there was a fight among the gods over who would eat it first, and he destroyed all of the smaller gods." Terach scoffed at this; we all know that statues can't eat, or move, or pick up a club. Abraham than said to him: "Let your ears hear what your mouth has said."  READ MORE »

Lech Lecha is such a comfortable parsha. Coming after the pre-historic pyrotechnics of Bereshit and Noach, one feels that one is on much more solid ground here - the people live long but not THAT long, we can start recognizing 'Jewish' things, and, in general, there is a feeling that we have left behind the world of myth and magic and moved into a much more real and recognizable world of commandment and custom. Rashi (1040-1105) flags this shift for us in an interesting way. Last week's Parsha, Noach, ends, generations after the flood, with the birth of Abraham,and the unexplained move by Terach, Abraham's father, in the direction of Canaan, to the town of Charan, where he and his family apparently settle. The Parsha concludes by telling us that Terach died in Charan. The last letter of Charan is a final nun (it looks like this ï - I just wrote it in Hebrew, hope your computer does, too). Rashi says that traditionally, when we write a Torah scroll, we write this nun backwards, so it's facing the other way (I can't figure out how to do this with my computer, but I hope you get the idea, it would look like this [ , but without the bottom line going to the right). It would then function like the closing half of a parentheses or bracket (when you are writing Hebrew, from right to left), as if to indicate that here, with the death of Terach and Abraham's coming on to the scene, is the end of God's anger (in biblical Hebrew, anger is 'charon af', which sounds like the last word of the Parsha of Noach, the one with the backwards nun, the place name 'Charan').  READ MORE »