A Faith Spacious Enough for Wonder (Lech Lecha)
Sometimes the Torah we remember contains stories the Torah never tells. We have heard them so often that they become inseparable from the text itself.
Consider Abram smashing his father’s idols. Terah leaves his son tending the shop. Abram shatters the statues, places the weapon in the largest idol’s hand, and tells his father that the gods fought among themselves. Terah protests: these objects cannot act! Abram’s response exposes the contradiction: Why, then, worship them?
It is a magnificent story. It is also not found in the biblical text. It is midrash, the magnificent imaginative project of the rabbis of old and of today.
Parashat Lech Lecha begins with God calling Abram to leave his homeland. The Torah offers no explanation for his selection. Our rabbis enter that silence with a story about someone willing to challenge inherited assumptions. Before Abram journeys, the midrash imagines him journeying beyond the boundaries of his father’s imagination.
But what happens when the descendants of an idol smasher turn his legacy into something immovable?
In “Open Closed Open,” the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai z”l reminds us:
We are all children of Abraham
But also the grandchildren of Terah, Abraham’s father.
And maybe it’s high time the grandchildren
Did unto their father as he did unto his,
When he shattered his idols and images, his religion, his faith.
That too would be the beginning of a new religion.
Amichai’s poetic midrash is unsettling in all the right ways.
We can become so protective of our stories that we forget what they seek to express. We can mistake a clear formulation for God’s Dream. We can hold an established understanding so tightly that there is no room left for wonder, growth, or another human being.
Idols need not be carved from stone. Certainty can become an idol.
We need not seek a new religion. This one, our precious Jewish tradition, its texts, its obligations, its stubborn insistence that life can become more holy, is a treasure beyond measure. This calls us to remain curious about what our ancestors handed down and courageous about what we must carry forward.
Our rabbis received Torah and responded imaginatively to its silences. Their fidelity included the willingness to create.
Lech Lecha demands the same: to recognize when familiar forms have narrowed our sense of what is possible, and to begin moving again.
We are descendants of Abram and Sarai. Our inheritance includes the courage to leave familiar ground.
May we teach and live a Torah spacious enough for that journey with the Divine.
