Wandering, Sovereignty and Vulnerability

The biblical command Lech Lecha (לך לך) – go forth, depart, journey toward yourself – is among the most unsettling invitations ever addressed to a human being. God speaks to Abram and asks him to leave his land, his birthplace, and his father’s house. Yet the departure is not simply geographical. It concerns the possibility of becoming someone whose identity cannot be entirely defined by ancestry, territory, inherited customs, or the certainties of the past.

Eight years ago, reflecting on this weekly reading, I suggested that Abraham had reached what might be called his “self-conscienciousness point.” His calling demanded movement, separation, fidelity, and an extraordinary capacity to confront an unknown future.

Today, the question can be extended from the individual to the collective.

The question is particularly relevant to Medinat Yisrael-מדינת ישראל, the State of Israel – as it approaches another period of electoral decisions amid war, political disagreements, social fractures, and continuing uncertainty about the future of the region.

Israel exists. Its institutions function. Its citizens live, work, study, pray, quarrel, serve, and sometimes refuse to speak to one another. The country is defended, governed, contested, and constantly transformed. Yet the meaning of being Israel remains far from settled.

Abram’s journey begins in a world older and culturally broader than the later kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Ur Kasdim and Haran belong to the Mesopotamian horizon, where Sumerian, Akkadian, and subsequent Semitic civilizations contributed to the development of writing, law, religion, urban life, and human self-understanding.

In this historical and cultural sense, Israel is not only Hebrew. Its ancestral memory reaches into a Mesopotamian world shaped in part by Sumerian civilization. The biblical patriarch does not emerge from an isolated national territory. He belongs to a network of peoples, languages, families, and migrations.

He leaves, but he does not erase his origins. His descendants continue to seek marriages within the extended family. Eliezer is sent toward the ancestral region to find a wife for Isaac. Jacob returns to the family of Laban. Departure and connection remain inseparable.

Even the names change without abolishing the persons who bore them. Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, Jacob becomes Israel. These are not merely administrative modifications. They mark the unfolding of a vocation, the enlargement of responsibility, and the discovery of a future that the earlier name could not fully contain.

Modern Israel has experienced something comparable, although under radically different historical conditions.

The Jewish people returned in substantial numbers to the ancestral land after centuries of dispersion, persecution, religious continuity, cultural development, and successive migrations. The establishment of the State in 1948 was neither a simple restoration of an ancient political arrangement nor the invention of a people without a past.

It was a rebirth through grafting.

Israel is not yet eighty years old. Jordan, which became independent in 1946, and several neighboring countries belong to the same relatively recent political reconfiguration of the Middle East. Yet the establishment of the State of Israel was not merely another episode in the dissolution of empires and the formation of modern states. It involved the remarkable reconstitution of Jewish political sovereignty after nearly two millennia, through the gathering of communities that had lived across continents and developed distinct cultural traditions.

The grafting is so profound that it often passes unnoticed. What appears today to be ordinary national existence emerged from an extraordinary historical movement. No exact parallel readily presents itself to this collective return, sustained not only by the search for security or refuge but also by the memory of a Land of promises. The Drang, the compelling movement toward return, did not simply seek shelter. It sought the renewal of a common life, even when that life would be exposed to danger, disagreement, and uncertainty.

Abram and Sarai were hardly sheltered travelers. Abram, fearing for his life, presented Sarai as his sister before Pharaoh. The biblical account does not conceal his fear, his ambiguity, or the vulnerability of the woman who accompanied him. The divine promise did not provide a permanent refuge from human danger. Nor did the patriarch’s journey lead immediately to security or possession. The land was promised, but Sarah’s burial place still had to be purchased.

Present-day Israel cannot be identified directly with the biblical patriarchs, yet the parallel raises an unsettling question. What does it mean to return to a land without finding shelter from history? Sovereignty provides the institutions and means of collective defense that the patriarchs did not possess. It does not abolish vulnerability. The graft has taken root, but the tree remains exposed to the winds of the region, to its own internal divisions, and to the responsibilities that accompany its survival.

A graft joins living histories without making them identical. The new growth carries the inheritance of what preceded it, but develops under conditions that cannot be predicted entirely from the old roots.

The revival of Hebrew as a language of everyday national life is among the most striking expressions of this process. Ancient words entered hospitals, universities, military commands, scientific laboratories, markets, and domestic conversations.

Yet Israel is not exclusively Hebrew-speaking in its cultural reality. Arabic, Russian, Amharic, Yiddish, French, English, Armenian, and other languages continue to convey family histories and communal attachments.

Nor are all Israelis Jewish. Arab Muslims and Christians, Druze, Circassians, Armenians, and other communities participate in the country’s life, often with histories of belonging that cannot be described as immigration into a newly created national society.

The people of Israel, the land of Israel, and the modern State of Israel belong to different, though intersecting, historical, religious, and political categories. One can belong to the Jewish people without being an Israeli citizen. One can be an Israeli citizen without being Jewish. Attachment to the land does not automatically produce agreement about sovereignty, borders, legal status, or political responsibility.

The State nevertheless functions.

This deserves attention because political discourse often describes Israeli society almost exclusively through its conflicts. Governments change, elections are contested, judicial questions divide opinion, and religious and secular understandings of public life collide. The obligations of military service, the protection of minorities, the place of religion in legislation, and the responsibilities of citizenship remain subjects of serious disagreement.

Meanwhile, hospitals continue treating patients, municipalities provide services, teachers enter classrooms, emergency personnel respond to danger, and people travel between neighborhoods whose inhabitants may hold incompatible political convictions.

These ordinary activities do not eliminate discrimination, inequality, administrative failures, or profound disagreements. They demonstrate something else: a State is not sustained only by the ideological agreement of its population.

A functioning State is not necessarily a reconciled society.

Indeed, the capacity to maintain public institutions amid disagreement may be one of the most demanding forms of collective responsibility. It requires citizens to acknowledge that the State must serve people whose opinions, religious affiliations, languages, and historical memories are not their own.

Israelis are sometimes portrayed as stubborn, argumentative, or permanently divided. Such descriptions are insufficient. People establish friendships across communal boundaries, work together, exchange visits, and share professional responsibilities. They may suddenly stop speaking because of political events, family disputes, religious disagreements, or the pressures of war. Later, some reconnect.

A society is not a fixed collection of tribes permanently enclosed within inherited identities. Its relationships are constantly rearranged.

This movement is especially visible when the country must defend itself. The massacre of October 7, 2023, the suffering of hostages and their families, the subsequent wars, and the losses experienced by soldiers and civilians have affected different communities in different ways. Security is not an abstract concept for people who live with the possibility of sudden violence. Nor can the suffering of civilians elsewhere in the region be excluded from the moral questions raised by prolonged warfare.

The defense of the State is indispensable to its existence. Its territorial questions also remain complex. Borders have been established, challenged, negotiated, and altered through war and diplomacy. Historical memory, religious attachment, international law, military necessity, and political claims do not always produce identical maps.

The biblical narrative itself offers a striking distinction between promise and possession.

Abraham receives the promise of a land. Yet when Sarah dies, he negotiates with the sons of Heth and pays Ephron for the field and cave of Machpelah (Genesis 23). The man to whom a land has been promised must purchase a place in which to bury his wife.

This is no minor detail. Abraham’s relationship to the land is profound, but it does not relieve him of the responsibility to deal with other people already living there. Promise does not abolish negotiation, payment, or the recognition of another person’s presence.

The patriarch’s calling is particular, but its horizon is universal. God promises that through him all the families of the earth shall be blessed (Genesis 12:3).

The rabbinic tradition that Abraham observed the Torah before it was given at Sinai introduces another dimension. It suggests a fidelity that reaches beyond the immediate historical circumstances of the patriarch’s life. The past, present, and future are drawn together in a vocation that cannot be exhausted by any single generation.

Saint John of Damascus, defending the significance of matter in the mystery of the Incarnation, refused to separate the material world from its Creator. The earth is not an accidental stage upon which spiritual destinies unfold. It is the concrete place where human beings encounter one another and assume responsibility.

The Gospel according to John (chapter 17) speaks of people who remain in the world while being called to a unity that does not originate in worldly power.

No religious community possesses a monopoly on reconciliation.

As Israel approaches another electoral decision, political parties offer different understandings: the electoral process will translate competing positions into parliamentary representation, but it cannot settle every question of collective identity.

That is not necessarily a failure of democracy. Political institutions organize disagreement; they do not abolish the historical and cultural complexity of the society they represent.

The question of Abraham’s self-consciousness seems more relevant than ever. An individual may discover that reaching oneself requires leaving behind certain certainties. A nation may undergo a comparable experience.

Israel has recovered political sovereignty, but the meaning of being Israel remains an unfinished journey.

The State of Israel is not an ancient patriarch wandering without institutions. It is a modern political reality with laws, citizens, public services, borders, obligations, and the means to defend itself. Its existence cannot be reduced to a metaphor. The question is to act with consciousness and righteousness. Justice is at the core of present-day existence.

A nation does not become conscious of itself merely by declaring its unity. It may discover itself through the recognition of its fractures, the continuity of its institutions, and the willingness of different communities to share responsibilities even when agreement remains distant.

Lech Lecha remains a movement through history, toward a self that is neither entirely inherited nor finally completed.

The return was not the end of wandering, and sovereignty was not the end of vulnerability.