Above the Stars

The first words spoken to Avram are not a direction. They are a list of departures. Lech lecha me’artzecha umimoladetecha umibeit avicha. Go from your land, from your birthplace and from your father’s house. There is something strange about this order. Someone setting out on a journey leaves their father’s house first, then the town where they were born, and only last their country. The Torah counts in the opposite direction. First the widest circle, then a closer one, and last of all the innermost house. And Avram’s family has already set out once before. At the end of the previous chapter his father Terah takes his son, his grandson Lot and his daughter in law Sarai, and leaves Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they reach Haran, he settles there. The journey toward Canaan stops halfway. Lech lecha is spoken in the middle of an unfinished journey, inside a family that grew tired and stayed.

I read this order not as a map but as a measure of how deep a departure goes. Leaving a country, moving away from the culture you belong to, from the habits a language gives you, is hard but possible. Leaving your birthplace, your roots, the circle that first told you who you are, is harder. Your father’s house comes last. A person can travel the whole world and still go on living in their father’s house. The fears learned there, the place they were given there, the first sentences they heard there are carried at the bottom of the suitcase, never unpacked. First what society dresses us in, then what our lineage leaves us, and last what our family places inside us. This is my own reading. The Torah does not say why Terah stayed in Haran. But it records Terah’s death before Avram sets out, even though Terah lived another sixty years. Rashi explains that this was so people would not say Avram abandoned his elderly father. The Torah itself knows how heavy it is to leave a father’s house.

Reading these lines, I cannot help thinking of my own road. I lost my father when I was twenty two. I had just given birth to my son, and it was the time I needed my father most. After he died, I held on to my son. I held on so tightly that I would let no one else touch him. I loved him so much, and I still do. But looking back today, I can see that I had made him into an idol in my eyes. In time, my son walked on into his own life. Then I held on to my mother. I drew very close to her, and one day I lost her too. After that I held on to my son’s father, and in time our marriage came apart as well. After every loss, I held on to the next person.

The Midrash tells us that Terah made and sold idols. One day he leaves the shop to Avram, and Avram breaks the idols. My idols were not made of stone. They were the people I loved, or more precisely, the way I placed them at the very center of my heart. After losing my mother and my father, I made a decision. I would never again make anyone an idol in my heart. I would love every person as if I were loving Him, even when giving someone a glass of water, as if giving it to Him. Only much later did I understand that my lech lecha was not about leaving people. It was about leaving the habit of making them into idols.

Becoming deeply attached to someone is not the same as making them an idol. Today I see the difference this way. I was holding on to the people I loved out of fear of losing them. I saw them not as the owners of their own lives, but as what kept me standing. That is what I mean by an idol. Love sets a person free, while holding on out of fear binds them to you. Now when I love someone, I try to see them as something entrusted to me by Him. Giving someone a glass of water as if giving it to Him means knowing that the person I love belongs not to me but to Him. This is something I found on my own road, not a rule for everyone.

Then there is that small word. Lecha. To say go, lech would have been enough. Lecha means for yourself, toward yourself. Rashi explains it as for your own good, for your benefit. The Zohar goes deeper. Go from here for your own sake, it says, to repair your soul and rise in your level. Elsewhere it says, hold on to the root of your soul, so that by revealing it in this world you may become whole. So the true destination of this journey is not a piece of land. In a sense, the place Avram is going to is himself. What is strange is that to arrive at yourself, you first have to leave the things you thought you were.

For me, lecha came as leaving a city. I was living in a big city, and one day I realized that it had become too heavy for me. Its energy, its stress, its crowds. I made a decision and settled in the place where I live today. I let go of everything that was taking me away from myself and away from HaShem. Today I live with myself, my two dogs, my work, my writing, and the things that make me happy and bring me closer to HaShem.

But the Torah does not romanticize this departure. I will make you a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great. Rashi explains why these three promises come together. A journey diminishes three things in a person, he says. Their children, their wealth and their name. Anyone who has had to leave home knows this. In a new place no one knows your name, everything left behind has to be earned again, and the children grow up between two lands. The promise is set in the place of the loss, but it does not deny the loss. And then one more phrase. Veheyeh beracha. Be a blessing.

The end of the verse matters as much as its beginning. El ha’aretz asher ar’eka. To the land that I will show you. He sets out without knowing where he is going. Rashi says God did not reveal the destination at once, so that the land would become precious in his eyes and he would be rewarded for every step. Most of us want to see the whole map before we begin. Because we cannot bear uncertainty, we often never set out at all, or like Terah, we stay at the first comfortable stop. When the destination is unknown, each step begins to carry a meaning of its own.

Avram arrives in the new land, builds an altar, pitches his tent. Vayehi ra’av ba’aretz. There was a famine in the land. The promised land, at the first encounter, leaves him hungry. Avram goes down to Egypt. As they reach the border of Egypt, he turns to Sarai and tells her she is beautiful, and that when the Egyptians see her they will kill him and let her live. Say that you are my sister, he says, so that it may go well with me. Sarai is taken into Pharaoh’s palace.

Ramban reads this scene with more courage than most commentators. Know that our father Abraham unintentionally committed a great sin, he says. He placed his wife in danger, when he should have trusted that God would save both him and Sarai. Leaving the land because of the famine was also wrong. Ramban goes further still, and says that the exile in Egypt was decreed upon Avram’s children because of this deed. That is as far as Ramban goes. What follows is my own reflection. The man who left everything behind to follow a voice reaches, at the first hardship, for an old way of surviving. Fear does not disappear with the call. A person can take a great step, leave their country, their family, their habits, and still, on the first day they face hunger, return to their oldest defense. Lech lecha is spoken once, but inside a person it waits to be spoken again in every famine.

The Zohar reads the same scene differently. It follows Avram’s first steps in the new land as the stages of a soul. First he builds an altar at Shechem, then another between Bethel and Ai. And the verse says, Vayisa Avram halokh venasoa hanegba. Avram journeyed on, going steadily toward the south. According to the Zohar, on this walk Avram rises from one level of his soul to the next, from nefesh to ruach, and from there toward holding on to neshamah. And right after, in the same breath, Vayered Avram Mitzrayma. Avram went down to Egypt. The Zohar reads this descent not as a fall but as a test. Avram goes down there, is not drawn in by its lights, is refined, and returns to his place. Vaya’al Avram miMitzrayim. Avram went up from Egypt. Ramban sees a mistake in this descent, the Zohar sees a refining. Both can be true.

The Torah describes the road back with great care as well. Avram comes up out of Egypt and continues on his journeys, between Bethel and Ai, all the way to the place where his tent had first stood. El mekom hamizbe’ach asher asa sham barishona. To the place of the altar he had made there at the beginning. Rashi says that on the way back Avram stayed in the same lodgings where he had stayed on the way down. After a fall, a person does not run off to somewhere new. They return by the road they came, through the same stops. The same doors, the same rooms, but now someone different walks through them. And finally they reach the first altar, the place where they first heard the call. Vayikra sham Avram beshem HaShem. There Avram called once again on the name of HaShem.

But Avram cannot leave everything behind, and the Torah tells us so from the very start. Vayelech Avram ka’asher diber elav HaShem, vayelech ito Lot. Avram went as HaShem had told him, and Lot went with him. He has left his father’s house, but someone from that house is still walking beside him. No one ever sets out with completely empty hands. They come back from Egypt rich, and this time the problem is not famine but plenty. The land cannot carry the two of them together. A quarrel breaks out between Avram’s herdsmen and Lot’s. Avram says to Lot, If you go to the left, I will go to the right. Lot lifts his eyes and sees the whole plain of the Jordan, well watered like the garden of HaShem. He makes his choice with his eyes and pitches his tent toward Sodom.

When Lot is gone, God says to Avram, Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are. According to Rashi, as long as Lot was with him, the divine word had withdrawn from Avram. The same verb is used twice. When Lot lifted his eyes, he saw a fertile plain and went there. When Avram lifted his eyes, he saw an entire horizon and stayed where he was. One lifted his eyes to take what he saw. The other lifted his eyes to see what he was being shown.

And then the stars. Avram has grown old and still has no child. God promises him a son. Then He brings him outside. Look toward the heavens, He says, and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your offspring be. Rashi reads this bringing outside in two ways. In the first, God says to Avram, Leave your astrology. Avram had seen in the stars that he would not have a son. God tells him, Avram will not have a son, but Avraham will. Sarai will not give birth, but Sarah will. I will give you other names, and the star will change. In the second reading, God lifts Avram out of the space of the world and raises him above the stars. Habet na hashamayma. Look, He says, and according to Rashi this verb describes looking from above downward.

This is as much as Rashi says about the stars. In this scene I see the final layer of lech lecha. After country, birthplace and father’s house, there is one more place a person has to leave. The story written about them. From the moment a person is born, things are written over them. Which family they come from, which class they grew up in, which neighborhood they are a child of, with what eyes they were first looked at. Societies often assign people an ending before they have even set out. And a person takes these stories in so easily, and then repeats them in their own voice. Nothing will come of me. Things like that don’t happen in our family. I always end up alone. Avram, too, had read his own ending in the stars, and he had not read it wrong. But God does not tell him the stars are lying. He gives him a change of name. A new name, a new star. Avram’s star does not bind Avraham.

In the second reading, God does not do away with the stars. He raises Avram above them. The stars are still there, but now Avram looks at them not from below but from above. Perhaps this is how a person’s relationship with their own story changes. Instead of being crushed beneath them, a person can rise to a place from which they look down on them. Seen from there, those stars stop being a fate and become a promise too vast to count.

Then comes this sentence. Vehe’emin baHaShem vayachsheveha lo tzedakah. He believed in HaShem, and He counted it to him as righteousness. Without seeing any sign, he believes a word he heard beneath the stars. But a few verses later, when God tells him He will give him this land, Avram asks, Bameh eda. How will I know? Faith and the need to know live in the same person, on the same night, in two sentences one after the other. The Torah does not make him choose one over the other. He is given an answer, but not the kind he expected.

In answer to his question, Avram cuts the animals in two, lays the pieces facing each other and waits. As the sun is setting, a deep sleep falls upon him. And the verse says, Vehineh eimah chashecha gedolah nofelet alav. A great and dark dread fell upon him. Within this darkness he is told that his children will be strangers in a land not their own for four hundred years, that they will be enslaved, and that afterward they will come out with great wealth. The promise does not erase the darkness. It draws a path through it.

Toward the end of the portion God speaks to Avram once more, and this time the verb changes. Hithalech lefanai veheyeh tamim. Walk before Me and be whole. Lech meant go. Hithalech means keep yourself walking, go on walking. The portion begins with a command to go and ends with a way of walking. And right after, we are told where that walking leads. Tamim. Not flawless, but whole. Someone held together with all their parts, with the fear of the famine, the mistake in Egypt, the question of how will I know. And at exactly this point his name changes. A heh is added to Avram’s name, and he becomes Avraham. Sarai’s name becomes Sarah. Perhaps being whole is the addition of that small breath that was missing from a person’s name.

The words lech lecha appear in the Torah only once more. Years later, God calls to Avraham again with the same two words. Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and lech lecha, go to the land of Moriah. And offer him there on one of the mountains that I will tell you. The first time, to the land that I will show you. The second time, to one of the mountains that I will tell you. In both, the destination is not named. In both, Avraham walks without knowing. The first lech lecha asked him for his past. The second asks him for his future. Between the two, a whole life is lived. A country is left, a father’s house is left, there is fear in a famine, a mistake is made, the first altar is returned to, Lot is parted from, a night is waited through, a name changes, a child is born. Every new lech lecha asks where you arrived in the one before.

Sources

1. Genesis Rabbah 38:13, Terah’s idol shop and Avram breaking the idols. https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.38.13
2. Genesis 11:26 to 32, Terah settling in Haran. Rashi on Genesis 11:32, Terah’s death recorded first. https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Genesis.11.32
3. Genesis 12:1 to 5, lech lecha and the promises. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.12.1
4. Rashi on Genesis 12:1 and 12:2. https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Genesis.12.1
5. Zohar I, 77b to 78b (Lech Lecha), repairing the soul and holding on to its root. https://www.sefaria.org/Zohar%2C_Lech_Lecha
6. Genesis 12:10 to 20, the famine and Egypt. Ramban on Genesis 12:10. https://www.sefaria.org/Ramban_on_Genesis.12.10
7. Zohar, Lech Lecha, Sulam paragraphs 160 to 161, Avram’s altars and journey as nefesh, ruach and neshamah, his descent into Egypt, not being enticed, being purified and going up. https://www.zohar.com/zohar/Lech%20Lecha/chapters/18
8. Genesis 13:1 to 4 and Rashi on Genesis 13:3, returning through the same lodgings to the first altar. https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Genesis.13.3
9. Genesis 13:5 to 14 and Rashi on Genesis 13:14, the parting from Lot and “lift up your eyes”. https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Genesis.13.14
10. Genesis 15:5 and Rashi on Genesis 15:5, leaving astrology and being raised above the stars. https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Genesis.15.5
11. Genesis 15:6 to 14, faith, “how will I know”, the covenant between the pieces and the great dark dread. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.15.12
12. Genesis 17:1 to 15, “walk before Me and be whole” and the changing of the names. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.17.1
13. Genesis 22:2, the second lech lecha. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.2