Devar Torah on Parshat Lech Lecha, Elisa Kukla

“HaShem said to Avram ‘Lech Lecha [get yourself out] from your country, from the land of your birth and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.” (Gen 12:1) This opening verse of Parshat Lech-Lecha is one of the best known and most often
quoted in the entire Bible.  For us, it is intimate family history – after all, God’s call to Avraham is the founding of a line that will eventually become the people of Israel.  However, it also has critical importance for all of Western culture, since it is seen as the birth of monotheism.  It is almost universally accepted in the Jewish community that
Avraham’s notion of one God was a great cultural and spiritual advancement. Yet what makes monotheism positive in and of itself? We rarely ask ourselves just what it was about Avraham’s vision that was great.

To begin to answer this fundamental question there is no better place to begin than through examining the original call of God to Avraham in Lech Lecha. Why was
Avraham commanded to leave his home in order to find a new way of relating to the divine?  This question is of particular importance for us – because like Avraham
Avinu, we have all recently left our ‘father’s houses’, our homes and our communities.  Commentators have long remarked on the unusual order of God’s command. Doesn’t a person first leave her home and only then her birthplace and then finally her country?
The 19th century mystical commentary Haketev Ve’hakabbalah claims that the reverse direction of the injunction points to the fact that it is a spiritual rather than a physical withdrawl that God demands of Abraham, beginning with the periphery and ending with
the most intimate psychological bond – the home. 

Rabbinic Midrashim point to the powerful impact of this decision.  According to Bereshit Rabbah, there are only five ways to change one’s fate: the familiar acts of self-improvement tzedaka, tschuva and tefilla and, more surprisingly, shinuy shem and shinuy
hamakon, changing one’s name and changing one’s residence.  “Moving to a strange place helps annul a Heavenly decree, since one’s heart is humbled when he is exiled from his home,” we read in the midrash. However there is more to this principle than just
humility. 

There is another, more practical reason that Avraham had to leave his home.  Bereshit Rabbah compares Avraham to a flask of fragrance surrounded by wadding and placed in a corner so that its scent could not escape.  Only when it was carried from place to place
and opened could its sweetness diffuse.  No matter how earth shattering the idea of monotheism was, as long as it remained sealed up inside Avraham it was useless. The contemporary commentator Aviva Zornberg translates the verb tiltul, used in this midrash, as agitate. Only because Avraham was willing to be “shaken up”, have his comfortable home and habits “turned upside down”, could his ideas transform the world around him. Abraham’s tiltul, agitation, is illustrated by his willingness to submit to two of the transformations found in Bereshit Rabbah. He begins this parsha with Shinuey Makon, a change of residence, and ends with Shinuey Shem, a change of name from Avram to Avraham.

However, this parsha does not paint Abraham as just a wanderer, or Lech Lecha as a call to simply explore. The very next verse reads – “I will make of you a great nation…” In other words, Avraham’s journey as an individual is within the context of forming a specific people, that will stay together throughout the generations.

Just as a sealed bottle of perfume is worthless, fragrance scattered without direction into the wind also has no impact.  Perfume has the power of completely transforming whatever it comes into contact with, but only if it is applied to a specific, contained area.  By committing to a particular community, Avraham allows the fragrance of his idea to
be concentrated enough to have impact.

This tension between concentration and diffusion is found in both the Lech Lecha command and in Avraham’s vision of monotheism.  “I will make of you a great nation,” we read in Genesis 12:2-3, “And I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.  I will bless those that bless you and curse him that curses you and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves through you.”  Avraham’s path will be a blessing to all of the families of the earth, but it is expressed by the founding of the unique tribe of Israel.  The particularity of Avraham’s monotheism is expressed even more individually in Jewish prayer.   When we recite the amidah we say ‘God of Avraham, God of Sarah, God of Yitzhaq…” because we acknowledge that each of our
ancestors forged a unique relationship with the one God that diverged from that of their parents.

A vision of balancing the simultaneous universality and particularism of Judaism can be found in the central affirmation of monotheism in Jewish prayer -- Sh’ma Israel Adonai Elohienu, Adonaii Echad.  This phrase ends with the sweeping statement God is one for
the whole world, but it begins with a private address to a particular people, Israel.  R. Levi Kelman pointed out to our liturgy class that the individuality of the wording is even greater than that – we say Sh’ma Israel in the singular, not Shamu in the plural, even though this line is derived form a passage in Deuteronomy when Moses was speaking to the whole people.  Likewise, each morning and night when we repeat this utterance it is a declaration addressed to the individual sitting next to us.

It was the created world’s great diversity and not its sameness that first led Avraham to the idea of the one God. According to the Rambam, in the Mishneh Torah, Avraham’s journey began with a wandering, a roaming, in his mind that led him to explore the natural phenomenon around him: the movement of the planets and stars, the rain and the sun. In my reading of the texts, Avraham’s greatness was that he never lost this ability to notice individuality in the world around him.  At the start of the next parsha, Va’ yera, God commands Avraham to sacrifice “your son, your only son, Isaac…” (22:1) Why does God say your only son when Avraham also had Ishmael?  Perhaps God knew that
Avraham understood every son is an only son, every sister an only sister, every friend an only friend. When confronted with tragedy there is an impulse to try to escape individuality.  We call recent events an attack on the whole civilized world, but how much greater is the tragedy if instead we see it as the destruction of over 6,000 individual worlds? 

Avraham never lost sight of individuality, but he also never lost sight of collectivity. The parsha ends with Avraham and Ishamel’s circumcision – a tangible commitment to peoplehood through a brit , an eternally binding covenant between God and each of the
diverse children of  Israel.  In the midrash, Abraham is compared to perfume. What makes a perfume, like any art form, great, is its ability to harmonize and find the pattern within complex elements without blurring their distinctiveness. However, fragrance manufacturers warn us that no perfume, no matter how fine it is, will smell the same on every person.  The fragrance interacts with the body chemistry of its wearer and releases a unique scent for each individual.  Not only is Avraham’s vision of one God infinitely diverse, each Jew “wears” Avraham’s vision of monotheism in a unique way. We find in Tractate Sanhedrin the claim that “the day when truth can be repeated without concealing the name of the person who first stated it, is the day when the Messiah will come.”  In other words, the heralding of a perfect world is when everyone can perceive that truth, no
matter how eternal, still carries the individual fragrance of the one who releases it into the world. 

My blessing for us, who like Avraham Avinu in Lech Lecha have already taken the crucial first step of leaving our ‘father’s house’, is that we continue to follow in Avraham’s footsteps.  May we wear the scent of Judaism in a way that allows our individuality to interact with its complex essence and releases a unique fragrance into the world around us.