Scrollers Preview Parashat Lech L’cha 2015

I didn’t plan it this way, but it just worked out that this week, the week of Parashat Lech L’cha, I saw the movie, “The Walk,” about Phillippe Petit and his high-wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The film was breathtaking, in its beauty, and in its terror. It was hard to watch, and at the same time, impossible to look away, as Phillippe crossed what he calls, “the void,” between the two towers, hundreds of feet in the air.

This week, God calls to Avram from out of the void, and asks him to step into it. “Lech L’cha,” “Go forth, from your country, from your birthplace, from your father’s house – to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.”

Hannah Senesh writes, in a poem printed in the Women’s Torah commentary:

A voice called. I went.

I went, for it called.

I went, lest I fall.

At the crossroads

I blocked both ears with white frost

And cried

For what I had lost.

This week, Avram is called to depart from all he has ever known, to forgo his past, and to head into the void. He is called to do this by a voice that is greater than himself. And this voice promises blessing. Next week, that same voice will use a similar pattern, calling on Avram to forgo his future – to take his son, his only son, his precious one, Isaac – to the land of Moriah, and to offer him up as a burnt offering.

What does it mean to live on a high wire? What does it mean to be called to step into the void? What do we lose? What must we sacrifice? How are we blessed? Why do we go?

Scrollers Preview - Noach 2015

Parashat Noach encompasses the flood story, the Tower of Babel, and the genealogies that set up God’s calling Abram to set out for the land of Canaan.

The story of Noah has clear parallels with the story of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The differences, however, are differences that make the story very clearly ours. For example, while Enlil wants to flood the world to wipe out humanity’s constant noise, God wipes out the world because God sees “how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth.” The idea that God is horrified by category violation and lawlessness is quite clearly derived from Torah categories. The specifics of the Noah story both reach back to creation and forward to Abraham, the Mishkan, and into the prophets (where the Noah story serves as a useful metaphor for later exiles and redemptions).

The question then becomes not how or whether we borrowed the story, but why is this story placed here? How is it a useful hinge to get us from creation to Abram? What does Noah provide us that B’reishit didn’t? Additionally, how does the parasha shed light on later stories of sin, exile, redemption, and law-giving?