You Are A Sign For Your Descendants 

God’s command to Avram to journey to the land of Canaan came with great promises: he would inherit the land and become the father of a great people. These promises, however, did not readily come to fruition. His sojourn in the land was fraught with challenges. When a severe famine struck, Avram and Sarai descended to Egypt to escape its effects. There, fearing that he would be killed because of Sarai’s beauty, Avram passed her off as his sister. In doing so, he left her vulnerable to being taken into Pharaoh’s household. Although the story had a “happy ending,” for obvious reasons, it has never sat well with readers:

“There was a famine in the land, and Avram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.… Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you…” (Genesis 12:10–13)

From the earliest times, apologists and interpreters have sought to smooth over the story’s rough edges, offering explanations that make Avram’s behavior more palatable. Yet, given the story’s laconic nature and our inability to recover fully the circumstances in which it was told, we may never completely understand the quandary that confronted Avram and Sarai.

Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, thirteenth-century Spain), however, did not mince words in his criticism of Avram:

“Know that Avraham our father unintentionally committed a great sin by bringing his righteous wife to a stumbling-block of sin on account of his fear for his life. He should have trusted that God would save him and his wife and all his belongings, for God surely has the power to help and to save. His leaving the Land, concerning which he had been commanded from the beginning, on account of the famine, was also a sin he committed, for in famine God would redeem him from death. It was because of this deed that the exile in the land of Egypt at the hand of Pharaoh was decreed for his children. In the place of justice, there is wickedness and sin.”

Ramban argues forcefully that Avram sinned by leaving the land, demonstrating a lack of faith in God’s providence. According to Ramban, Avram was obligated to remain in the land God had promised him, trusting that God would provide for him even in the face of famine. As Jon Levenson points out, this position represents one side of a larger religious debate over whether faith requires quietude or activism (Inheriting Abraham, pp. 36–38). Must faith in God lead us to wait patiently for God’s providential hand to act on our behalf, or does faith permit or even require us to take action ourselves? This remains a question of considerable religious significance.

I would, however, like to focus on a midrash that Ramban cites in his introduction to the above passage:

Rabbi Pinḥas said in the name of Rabbi Hoshaya the Great: The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Abraham our forefather: ‘Go and pave the way before your descendants.’ You find that everything that is written concerning Abraham is also written concerning his descendants… (Bereishit Rabbah 40:6; Theodor-Albeck edition, pp. 385–386)

The midrash continues with a lengthy list of events in Abraham’s life that parallel events in the lives of his descendants. Ramban invokes this phenomenon through the well-known principle “ma’aseh avot siman labanim – the deeds of the ancestors are a sign for their descendants.” I would like to take this idea in a somewhat different direction from Ramban’s.

I would suggest that we understand this principle as a lesson about the transmission of values and behavior: the deeds of the ancestors are a model for their descendants. What parents do, for good or ill, becomes a model for their children. Our actions, our priorities, and the things we consider important all leave their mark on the next generation. In this sense, our behavior helps pave the way for those who follow us.

This perspective helps explain Ramban’s dissatisfaction with Avram’s descent to Egypt. He saw Avram’s departure from the land as the precursor to, and perhaps even the cause of, Israel’s eventual descent into Egypt. I am not sure that I would go so far as to make that causal connection. But I would argue that the principle underlying Ramban’s interpretation carries an important lesson for us: our own Jewish commitment, enthusiasm, and love of Jewish life will help determine whether our children choose to follow in our path. The values we embody are often more influential than the values we merely profess.

And, of course, this lesson extends beyond Jewish life. Whatever we cherish – our religious commitments, our moral principles, our sense of responsibility, or our concern for others – we pass on not only through what we teach but, more importantly, through how we live. Like Abraham, each of us helps pave the way for those who come after us.