To See is To Love: Parashat Lekh L’kha

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Parashat Lekh L’kha
Genesis 12:1 – 17:27

Our Torah portion opens with the awesome call by God to Abram to leave his familiar surroundings and go “to a land that I will show you.” (Gen. 12:1) With this call the history of the Jewish people begins and the history of the entire world begins to change.

Many have noticed and pondered over God’s vagueness about where Abram and Sarai should go. Many point out that it is the journeying that counts right now, not the goal, as yet undefined. It is amazing that Abram and Sarai and their group undertake this journey. How did they know in which direction to turn? How did they know which road to take?

We find the answer a few verses later. In verse 5 we are told that “they set out to go to the land of Canaan, and they arrived in the land of Canaan.” This is their choice of direction and destination. It is not dictated by God. So why did they pick this land? As I pointed out last week, the Torah has already told us that this destination had originally been the choice of Terah, Abram’s father. Abram is, indeed, called to leave his father’s home in Haran, the place that represented his father’s relinquishing of his dream to go any further. But Abram decides that he is not being called to abandon his father’s dream of the future that might have been. Unlike his father, who “set out to go to the land of Canaan” but did not make it, Abram and Sarai “set out … and they arrived”! Yet, he does not know whether God will allow him to stay in that place or whether God’s chosen “land that I will show you” will end up being somewhere else. Nevertheless, Canaan comes first, and then Abram is ready to hear further instructions.

We do not learn that it is Canaan that God desires to be Abram’s real home until after Abram gets there. But we learn this message gradually, a step at a time. First God appears to Abram and reveals that God plans to give this land to Abram’s descendants. (v. 7) But it is not clear whether this is also meant to be Abram’s own land. And, shortly afterwards, Abram and Sarai feel forced by circumstance to leave the land and go to Egypt.

It is only later, after returning to Canaan that Abram hears from God that the land is being given to him, personally, as well as to his children after him. (Gen. 13:15) And this revelation includes one more element missing from God’s first promise to give the land to Abram’s progeny. This time God insists to Abram, “lift your eyes and see” the land being given to him. This is finally the literal fulfillment of God’s words at the beginning of God’s call – “to the land that I will show you (ar’eka – literally: “cause you to see”).”

Now we find out that God did not mean to say, “I will show you on a map what land I want you to go to,” or “Of all the names on this long list of possible lands, I will show you which one I have picked.” The “showing” that God promises is not an abstraction. Rather, God promises to Abraham that God will be the One to help Abraham see the land of promise, to take it in in all its reality, in all its specificity and harsh beauty. To see it so as to fall in love with it. Thus, when God tells Abram to “arise and walk through the land, to its length and breadth,” this is not only a gesture of taking possession of the land. It is also essential so that Abram will really see every part of the entire land.

To take possession of the land requires that one see the land because seeing the land leads to loving the land. This is something that we, in the Diaspora, need to take to heart.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Greenstein


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Image: “Galilee” © Molly Ali altered and used with permission via Creative Commons License

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