Lech Lecha: The Patterns We Leave, The Patterns We Carry

“What do you want to eat for dinner?” The question is simple enough, and only requires minimal introspection.

And yet my daughter shrugs and says, “I don’t know.” Sometimes, when the answer requires a definitive yes or no, she will stare blankly and say, “sure.” Her words are noncommittal, egalitarian, easygoing. Her face tells a different story, but so subtly that if you wanted to ignore it, you could. A quick twitching downwards of her lips, a slight elevation of her eyebrows, a crinkling of her nose. She clearly does know, and does have an opinion, but she chooses to hide it, sometimes to make the moment pass more smoothly. She doesn’t want to cause any trouble, or take up too much space.

This particular morning, her answer of “I don’t know” pushed a button for me. I locked eyes with her in the rearview mirror and said very plainly, “Yes, you do know. You have wants and desires and dislikes, and I want to hear them.” I took a breath to steady the rising tide of emotions and added,

“If you learn one thing from me in your whole entire life, let it be this: your voice matters. You need to have an opinion. It doesn’t matter if it’s the unpopular one, people need to know that you care about things, because you do, and it matters.”

She stared back at me, our eyes meeting in the mirror. I looked at her and saw the girl I once was. The girl who swallowed her emotions and needs, to keep the calm, to make sure no one had to struggle too much.

In this week’s Torah portion, Avram leaves his father’s house by smashing his way out of it.

The midrash tells us that even before he heard God’s voice, a young Avram sat in the shop where his father Terach sold idols. One day, he picked up a stick and smashed every idol except the largest, and when questioned said that the largest of them had smashed the others. When his father shouted at him that idols cannot move, Avram responded, then why do you worship them? (Bereshit Rabbah 38:13).

The break from inherited patterns and beliefs begins inside Avram. He sees what his father worships and refuses to bow down to it. When God says to him, lech lecha, go forth from your land, your birthplace, and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you (Bereshit 12:1), Avram has already heard the call from an internal source. God is meeting him mid-journey, and encouraging him to find his way.

Lech lecha literally translates to go to yourself. Rashi reads it as go for your benefit, for your good. The Zohar reads it as go to yourself, to know yourself and repair who you are. For Avram, following God and becoming himself turn out to be one road.

If we look again at the order of the verse, something jumps out. When someone sets out on a physical journey, they tend to leave the house first and the country last. The Torah, however, lists them in reverse. He leaves the land first and his father’s house last. Ramban reads this order as a climb in difficulty. When someone sets out on an emotional journey, on a path to self-discovery or definition, leaving the country is the easiest part, but leaving the house of origin is by far the hardest.

In the becoming of parenthood, we start to realize this as our children grow through phases where we struggled as children. Their struggles bring us right back to our own homes of origin. A child says “I don’t know” in the rearview mirror, and we are 11 years old again, swallowing our own needs for the sake of calm. A teenager tells us they hate us, and we are right back in our childhood living room, hollering I hate you! through torrents of tears.

Each of us carries a proverbial father’s house. For Avram, it was a way of worship and belief. For us, it can be the way our family handled anger, whether difficult subjects were talked about, or whether love was given freely or as a reward for performance. Some of us might have grown into the fixer, rushing in so our children never feel any discomfort, because nobody ever sat with us in ours and told us it was okay to feel that way. Some of us grew into the performer, still measuring our worth by how well we do, and how much people like us — or “like” us.

We might have made a vow along the way: I will never yell like my mother. I will never make my children earn my love. I will never use the counting down method.

One day we look up and realize that we have swung so far in the opposite direction of how our parents parented us that their house is somehow still setting the direction. Instead of screaming, we have forbidden all raised voices, even in excitement. We were so counted on to be reliable and obedient that we can’t bring ourselves to set a single limit. We left their house, but we still let it draw our map of parenting.

If running in the opposite direction keeps us tied to the patterns of the old house, what does leaving actually look like?

The Torah nestles an answer into a detail that is easy to miss on a quick read. At the end of last week’s parsha, Terach takes his family and sets out for the land of Canaan. He gets as far as Haran, and he settles there (Bereshit 11:31).

He travels towards the very land that God will soon send Avram to. Long before God’s call, the journey was already started by his father. When Avram finally walks into Canaan, he leaves his father’s idols behind, and finishes a journey that his father could not complete.

Our inherited patterns work this way too. We are meant to smash some of what our parents handed us. Some of it holds a journey they started and never quite finished. We are meant to carry it further than they could.

I was a peacemaker, and thirty years later, I see the same patterns in my own daughter. There are gifts in some part of that inheritance: I learned to notice what other people feel and to hold a room with empathy. That attunement is what grounds the work that I do today. The silencing of my own voice…that’s the part that I’m smashing, and loudly naming it for my own child.

God’s first words to the first patriarch send him on a journey towards himself, and the very next words carry a blessing: I will bless you, and you will be a blessing (Bereshit 12:2). The blessing comes with the command: God asks Avram to do the hardest work a person can do, to sift through everything his father has handed to him, and God promises to walk beside him when he does it.

Parenthood is a sacred journey of becoming. Every time we venture to question an old pattern rising within us, and choose a different way, we answer the call that Avram heard: leave the familiar and step into who you are becoming. Just as God walked beside Avram, God walks beside us.

Which pattern from your house of origin still travels with you? Name one piece you are ready to set down, and one piece you hope to carry further than the people who raised you could. Say them both out loud. Let God hear you on your journey too.