The Journey Beyond

This week’s Torah portion is Lech Lecha, the first historical portion in the Torah, it being about a real person. The portion relates God’s call to Abram, his going forth out of Mesopotamia to Canaan, God’s promise that the land will be given to Abraham’s descendants, the birth of Ishmael and the prophecy of the birth of Isaac, the covenant between God and Abram in which Abram and Sarai receive their new names, Abraham and Sarah, culminating in their promise to worship only God, and the rite of circumcision.
This portion famously begins, God said to Abram, Lech Lecha, go for yourself, from your land, from your relatives and from your ancestor’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing.” The first few words, Lech Lecha, go for yourself, have intrigued scholars for centuries. Lech, go, would have been sufficient. The addition of lecha, for yourself, makes the sentence mysterious. Lech lecha can also mean: take yourself, go into yourself, and also, go beyond yourself. It is interesting that Abram needed to leave behind his family and the influences of his society in order to grow spiritually. In our lives, we are guided by our upbringing first, and then by the messages society continually tells us, In our upbringing, a tremendous amount of information was imparted to us, some of it vital, true, loving, and valuable; some of it false, misleading, and perhaps even detrimental to our further development. The society was different in our parents’ times. The assumptions were different and often they had beliefs that came from the society their parents lived in. Part of being an adult is testing, evaluating, retaining, and disregarding information from our past. Through Abraham, we are taught that, even as an adult, even an adult well past middle age, as Abraham was, it is possible to go beyond ourselves to be a greater blessing than we have thought is possible. The first step is to have the courage to leave the confines of the teaching of our society. I am always impressed that Sarah, without hearing God’s voice, as Abraham did, left the good shopping to live in the hinterland, the sticks, leaving civilization for a rude and crude existence. But their existence was much richer on the inside than on the outside. Society will always stress the outside at the expense of the inside. Abraham and Sarah chose the path of elevating and testing their inner abilities, rather than being concerned with the values their society fed them. They chose the path of inner growth and an attachment to the Divine. Many sages write about the potential of aligning ourselves with the Divine force in the world. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson writes: Real spiritual progress requires that one leaves one’s current state behind. Yet as long as an individual’s growth depends entirely on his own power, his progress will be limited; nobody can exceed the bounds of his own understanding. The quotation, “Go out of your land, your native land and your Father’s house” is an instruction to abandon one’s ordinary way of thinking, to go to levels beyond and to transcend one’s own limits. With progress that is guided by God, there are no limits to the potential of growth.” By separating from the commonplace we can transcend our upbringing and cleave to the Divine force for goodness and purity in the world. It is a matter of identification. With what do I identify myself? How do I define myself? What is my mission and purpose? The S’fat Emet commented that the opening verse mentions the words, which I show you. He says this refers to that which a person cannot see on his or her own. The story of Abraham leaving home teaches that Divine guidance is there once we take the first steps to separate ourselves from the habitual. This includes habitual thinking as well as habitual action. We can cause blessings to flow when we align ourselves with the greater purpose of the world, transcending our upbringing as Abraham did, going beyond the self we think we are in the present, attaching ourselves to the root of goodness, service, and harmony, by becoming one with our inner spiritual potential. God chose Abraham, because of his inner goodness and potential, to be the instrument through which God’s presence and teachings became known in the world. We, too, can bring the Divine presence into the world and make the teachings of the Holy Scriptures manifest. May we take the journey, for ourselves, going into and beyond what we think we are, to the land God will show us, where the landscape is not quite familiar, but is filled with great promise and great blessings.