This preview is late today. I suppose the reason is that I’m
having a very hard time focusing on tomorrow, knowing that I leave for our
congregational Israel trip on Tuesday evening, and there are so many loose ends
to tie up!! But as I finally got myself to sit down and write this, I realized
that perhaps I’m feeling the way Avram felt at the beginning of our parasha.
Out of nowhere, it seems, God calls to him to get up and
leave his native land, his birthplace, and his father’s house, to go to the
land that God will show him. God promises that Avram will be a great nation,
and that he will be a blessing. What loose ends must he have left hanging? Was
this an abrupt break with his past, as so many commentators declare? Or is it a
continuity of his father Terach’s journey, from a generation before?
These days, people get up and move pretty regularly. It is
rare in my generation to find peers who have lived anywhere for more than 4 or
5 years at a time. When I tell people that my father served as a rabbi for the
same congregation for 35 years, their jaws drop. But no matter how often some
of us do it, getting up and leaving takes enormous effort and brings many
risks.
Avram doesn’t even get to spend much time in Canaan at
first. A famine strikes, and he immediately has to leave for Egypt. And then he
eventually returns to the land. But even in the land, he moves around. What
stays continuous is the relationship with God. God calls to him every few years
and adds another layer to the covenantal promise with which their relationship
began. Over the years, Avram is promised land, and then a child through Sarai,
and then his and Sarai’s names are changed, and then he is given the mitzvah of
circumcision as a sign of the covenant.
It seems that Avram’s trust needs to be, not in the
stability of the actual place he is dwelling, but in something beyond that – in
a God whom he can not see but who promises him blessing.
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