Scrollers Preview - Parashat Lech L'cha

The Etz Hayyim commentary distinguishes between God’s first two attempts, through Adam/Eve and then Noah and his family, to create humankind so that they will choose to do good, and this new attempt, through Abram and Sarai (later known as Abraham and Sarah.) According to the commentary, in this Parasha, God “now changes the approach. Instead of asking one individual or one family to be good in isolation, God seeks to create a community, a people, descendants of a God-fearing couple, in the hope that the members of that community would sustain and reinforce each other. In that way, ordinary people would be capable of displaying extraordinary behavior.”

This is a powerful assertion, that a community is what is needed for good values to endure in the world. As we study together, I want us to ask ourselves if this communal aspect is what distinguishes the covenant with Abraham from God’s relationships with Adam and Noah and the other false starts in the beginning of the Torah. How is asking Abram to “go forth” from his native land and his father’s house to the land that God will show him qualitatively different from God’s choosing of Noah or God’s creation of Adam?

We are presented with a series of covenantal moments in this parasha –from the creepy scene of the covenant between the pieces to the name changes of Abram to Abraham and Sarai to Sarah, to the commandment to circumcise all males. How do these encounters between God and humans lay the groundwork for a community that will, as the commentary says, “sustain and reinforce each other” that “ordinary people would be capable of displaying extraordinary behavior”?

We will also read about Sarah giving her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham to have a child through her, and about Hagar’s subsequent banishment. As well, we will read about Abraham’s passing Sarah off as his sister in Egypt, and about Abraham’s participation in a war between two groups of kings. If this parasha is about a particular covenantal community, what is the text saying about other communities with whom we interact?