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Lech-L'cha: "Where are You from?"

10/23/2015

 
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This is the sermon I gave tonight at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island, for Parashat Lech-L'cha.

I have to admit that there is one common question that people use to start a conversation that always troubles me. It’s a simple question that most people seem to answer with ease, but it has always been difficult for me.

"Where are you from?"

Where am I from? Well, I was born in Norfolk, Virginia, while my father was serving in the U.S. Navy and was stationed there. I could say that I’m from Virginia, but I actually only lived there for a few months while I was an infant. I have no memory of living in Virginia during that first year of my life. I’m not really from Virginia.

I spent the next part of my life living on the East Side of Manhattan. Those were some very important years for me and I have many memories of growing up in New York City, traveling uptown and downtown on city busses, visiting my grandparents' apartment south of Central Park, going to museums and doing the things that city kids do. However, I left Manhattan when I was ten years old, so I didn’t go to high school there. I didn’t learn to drive there. I didn’t make many lifelong friends there. I did not do a lot of things that people associate with “the place where I grew up.” I’m not really from Manhattan.

Most of those teenage, identity-building experiences for me were in the suburbs. My family moved to Westchester County when I was ten and I eventually graduated from Scarsdale High School. It never really felt like home to me, though. The culture of the suburbs turned me off when I was a kid. I didn’t like the cliques and the country clubs. I was turned off by the 1970s version of preppy materialism. Even though most of my oldest friends are people I met and went to school with in the suburbs, I never really felt like I was from there.

So, where do I really feel like I am from? For most of my adult life, I have felt comfortable answering that question by saying: Here. I’m from where I am right now. I moved to Boston a year after I graduated from college and I felt right at home there in a way that I never felt about New York City. After rabbinic school, I lived for a decade in Western Massachusetts and I took to it very quickly. The town where I lived seemed like my hometown in no time. 

I’ve only been in Rhode Island for just over a year now, and it, too, seems to fit me like a glove. When people ask me where I’m from, I say with hardly any hesitation, “I’m from Rhode Island.” 

That’s nice. I think it is a good and comfortable thing to feel at home in the place where you live. My wife and I often say to each other, “You are my home,” and that is our deep, truest truth. "Home," as they say, "is where the heart is."  That saying, to me, does not mean that you can only find your heart by going home. To me, it means that when you find your heart, you find your home.

I think it is better to be at home where you are than to always be thinking about some other place as being your "real" home, as if we always carry the shadow of our former homes around with us and long to return to them. I’ve never felt that way in life and I’m glad for it.

However, that does not eliminate the discomfort that comes when someone pushes me on the question of my place of origin and says, “No. Where are your really from? Where do you come from?”

I don’t really have a place on a map that is an answer to that question. It is not Virginia. It is not New York City. It is not Scarsdale. It certainly is not Florida, the place that I left to come to Rhode Island. (Actually, it can be hard to find anyone who is really from Florida, even in Florida.) The only answer that really makes sense inside my own head to the question, “Where are you really from?” is right here – with my family, the people I love, and the things that I care about. That is my home.

So, it is odd when I consider that this befuddlement with the question, “Where are you from?” is also a befuddlement that has followed  the Jewish people from our very beginning. In this week’s Torah portion, God tells Abram (who will later be renamed “Abraham”) to leave his land, to leave his birthplace, to leave the house of his fathers and to find a new home in “a land that I will show you.”

Abram is told that the physical location from which he comes does not define him and will not define his future. He will, for the rest of his life, have to find an answer to the question, “Where are you from?” with a different place and with a different kind of answer. It is almost as if God is telling Abram, “From now on, your home is with Me. It is wherever you and I are together.” That is, in a way, a lovely way to think about home and a lovely way to think about God. But it can be a bit uncomfortable. It's a bit like not really having a place from which to be from.

This, indeed, was the predicament of the Jewish people for most of our history. We began to grow used to the idea of not having a home when we were exiles in Babylon during the 6th century B.C.E. The ancient Israelites returned to their land after the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, but the memory of being homeless stuck with us for a long time.

After the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E., some six hundred years later, we were exiles again. The memory of the first exile helped us make sense of our landless existence for the next two millennia. For the many centuries in which the vast majority of the Jewish people lived outside of the land of Israel, we got used to thinking of our homeland as a faraway memory – more of a idealistic dream than a real place. We grew inured to the idea that we were a homeless people and that our homeland was something that existed in our sacred books more than it existed in on the earth.

That, of course, changed in the nineteenth century with the birth of the modern Zionist movement. Jews had always had some presence in the land of Israel, but starting in the 1880s and 1890s, large numbers of Jews started moving to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, and making it their home. They tilled the soil, drained the swamps and discovered a depth of dirt-under-the-fingernails connection with the land unknown since ancient times. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Modern Zionism, taught us that our dreams of a homeland did not have to reside only in books. “If you will it into reality,” he said, “it need not be just a dream.”

So, here we are now, sixty-seven years after the founding of the State of Israel. We can longer say, as a people, that we do not have a national hometown. Israel is that hometown, even for those of us who have never been there. When the nations of the world say to us now, “Where are you from?” the Jewish people answer proudly, we are from the land of our ancestors, the land of Israel. It is our home. It is where we are from.

But that answer sounds and feels differently coming from Jews than it would sound or feel from just about any other people. There isn't the same catch in the throat from a Frenchman who says, “I am from France,” and there is no moment of hesitation from a Bolivian who says, “I am from Bolivia.” For Jews, it is different. There is so much history, so many tears, and so many intervening centuries of separation that make us shiver a bit – even for the nativeborn Sabra – when we say, “I am from Israel.” It means something more complex and bittersweet for us, I think, than for most people.

Over the last few weeks, we have seen some desperate challenges to our claim to our own homeland. A United Nations cultural agency took up a resolution this week that claimed, essentially, that the Jewish people have no historical claim to the land of Judea ("Jew-dea"!), the land that bears our name. In the streets of Jerusalem and throughout Israel, a small number of Palestinian Arabs have picked up knives and swung them in our faces to declare that we are not really from the land that they claim. Some have killed and some of us have been killed for the audacity of living in our own home. It has been a painful few weeks to be a Jew and to affirm our home in the land of Israel – even more so than usual. 

But it has never really been easy for us. Abram had to learn to be not from the place where his mother give birth to him and the place where his father taught him to shepherd sheep. It became his place because it was the place where he fell in love with God and the place where he made and loved his family with God.

We, too, diasporan Jews, have had to deal with the strange notion that our home – our real home – is someplace else. The place where our heart knows its deepest truth and where we are really from, is the land that we built, the land that we are still building, and the land that we will forever build in the land of Israel.

​Shabbat shalom.

Lech Lecha: "Get Yourself Going"

10/9/2013

 
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The title of this week's Torah portion, Lech Lecha, comes from God's two-word command to Abram. "Lech lecha" is variously translated as "Get thee out," "You shall surely go," or "Go forth." The opening verse of the portion is God's command to Abram, "Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1, JPS translation).

The uncertainty of translating the expression, Lech lecha, comes from the odd syntax in the Hebrew. Lech is simply the imperative form (masculine singular, if you're keeping score) of the verb that means "to go."  Lech means "Go!"

The second word, lecha, is a bit more tricky. It appears to be a form of the preposition that means "to," "toward," "for," or "belongs to." The preposition has a suffix that makes it masculine, second person singular. 

If you want to skip the grammar lesson, let's say that lecha means something like "to you" or "for you." But that is just the beginning of understanding the phrase.

Most biblical scholars say that adding lecha to lech serves to make the verb more intense. Think of it as God saying, "Get going, Abram! I'm talking to you!" We have an idiom that is something like this in English when a person says, "Get yourself going."

We also notice, though, that lecha sounds a lot like lech. In fact, in Hebrew without the vowel symbols, the two words are spelled identically — "לך לך" — even though they are pronounced differently and are grammatically unrelated. The phrase, lech lecha, has more than a little poetry to it. It begs to be interpreted and to be a source of hidden meanings.

The great medieval commentator Rashi understood lech lechah in absolutely literal terms. He read it as, "Go for you." Rashi wrote that the command means, "Go for your own enjoyment and for your own good." God is telling Abram that this is not just a command to leave home, it is an invitation to adventure, wonder and self-discovery.

Lech lecha is the command that stands at the beginning of Jewish identity. It is the two-word phrase that God uses to set Abram onto the journey toward becoming Abraham and the foundation of God's covenant with the Jewish people. If Rashi is right, it is a journey that does not serve God's purposes alone. It is a journey that serves Abram's own interests, his own enjoyment, and his own good. 

We might recommend lech lecha as the most basic command of Torah, superior even to "You shall love Adonai your God," and, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Lech lecha is the command not to get stuck in life, to move forward, to try new things, to be a better person than you thought you could be — and to do it knowing that it is for your own benefit and enjoyment. 

Abram became a Jew in the moment when he obeyed the command to leave behind the pain of the past, to break away from the familiar, and to embrace an unknown future with an unknown destination. That is the secret of life. None of us knows where life is taking us. Life is richer, more meaningful and more fulfilling when we embrace the unknown and resist the tendency to play it safe, to lay low, or to settle. The journey is what matters. Enjoy it.

Don't wait for life. Don't miss out on the pleasure of reaching higher. Keep alive with adventure, even when life knocks you around. Pick yourself up. Get yourself going.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Lech Lecha: Facing our Fears, Being Ourselves
Lech Lecha: Be Perfect!

Lech Lecha: Facing our Fears, Being Ourselves

10/24/2012

 
To what extremes will people go when they fear the loss of material security? Will they  turn against others to avoid those fears? How can we know when our own fears begin to control us and cause us to lose the people we care about? When do our fears cause us to lose ourselves?

This week's Torah portion, Lech Lecha, tells a story about Abraham before he became Abraham. It is the story about a time when his fear caused him to turn his back on the person dearest to him, and it is about how we can avoid doing the same.
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Avram (who soon will be renamed Abraham) went with his wife, Sarai (Sarah), into Egypt to escape a famine (Genesis 12:10-20). It is impossible for us to read the word "Egypt" in the Torah without thinking of it as the symbol of slavery, confinement and constriction. To enter Egypt willingly in the Bible is an act of self-enslavement. The prospect of deprivation—the hunger of the famine—frightened Avram into giving up some measure of his freedom in exchange for security.

The text tells us, "It was when … caused him to come close to enter Egypt, [Avram] said to Sarai his wife, 'Behold, now I know that you are a beautiful woman'" (Genesis 12:11). The verse is difficult to understand on a few critical points. 

First, it is unclear what the subject of the verb "caused to come close" might be. Was it Egypt that enticed Avram into approaching its borders, or was it Avram himself who was the cause? Perhaps it was both. Avram's fear of deprivation may have caused him to feel the attraction of Egypt, which lured him into giving up his freedom for false security. 

Second, Avram speaks as though he did not know before that Sarai was beautiful. He said, "Behold, now I know that you are a beautiful woman." How could that be? Had he never looked at her before? Obviously not. Rather, this was the first time that Avram had ever seen Sarai's beauty as a threat. He sees her beauty and responds, again, with fear. He tells her, "When the Egyptians see you and say, 'this is his wife,' they will kill me and keep you alive. Please say that you are my sister so that it will go well for me, so that my life will be spared because of you" (Genesis 12:12-13)

In this story, Avram is afraid of everything. He feared the famine, and that led him to enter the land of confinement. As soon as he began to feel the pinch of Egypt's grip on him, he began to fear that others would desire Sarai. It was at that point that he failed to see her as a full person. He began, for the first time, to see her instead as an object—a y'fat mareh--a thing that has a lovely appearance that others would want to take from him. He is so afraid that he disavows his wife and allows other men to take her.

The hidden lesson in this story is about what happens to us when we begin to give in to our fears. We give up little pieces of ourselves to buy some safety or security, but we do not realize how much we are giving up. We do not realize that one devil's bargain inevitably leads to others. Avram entered Egypt rather than face hardship in the land that God promised to him. Once out of his element, he began to see himself as vulnerable in more ways and his fear overwhelmed him. He betrayed his loyalty to his wife and he lost sight of the mission that God had set for him. 

It happens to us, too, and it can start early. Perhaps you know someone who has turned away from his or her interests and passions in order to play it safe in life. Perhaps you yourself have sometimes taken a comfortable path at the expense of following your dreams. What happens next? People can become trapped by the choices they make, leading to worse choices. In time, people can discover that they don't even know themselves anymore. They feel as if they are living somebody else's life, all because of choices made in fear.

At the beginning of this week's Torah portion, God told Avram, Lech l'cha, "Go to yourself." God wants us to be our most authentic self, to discover the identity that is formed by our hopes and aspirations, not the path we are scared into following. Early in the story, Avram gets derailed. He drifts away from the promise of the Land of Israel and goes down into Egypt. He gets trapped by material comforts of Egypt. The Torah even tells us that Avram "acquired sheep, oxen, asses, male and female slaves, she-asses, and camels" (Genesis 12:16) in Egypt. But he was not being true to himself. He had to leave.

The lesson of this week's Torah portion is that in order to be our most authentic selves, we must face up to our fears, not avoid them. In order to heed the call of Lech l'cha, "go to yourself," you must be willing to take the difficult road and stay true to the people who are close to you and to your own passions. That is the path of true reward and true happiness.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Devarim: Bringing Your Questions to God
Fearing God

Lech L'cha: Be Perfect!

10/31/2011

 
In this week's Torah portion (Lech L'cha), God asks Abraham to enter into a covenant. God says, "Walk before me and be perfect (תמים)" (Genesis 17:1). Perfect? Really? How can God ask that of Abraham? How can Abraham possibly live up to that command?

There is a discussion about this passage in the Babylonian Talmud (B. Nedarim 32a), in which the rabbis say that Abraham "was seized with trembling" when he heard this command. Abraham's heart sank with guilt as he imagined that he must carry some terrible sin and stain within him that caused God to demand that he become pure. However, when Abraham then heard God say, "And I will make my covenant with you," his heart was filled with joy in the realization that perfection was, somehow, within his reach.

Perfection, you see, does not mean being without flaws, as Abraham first imagined. Rather, it means that we are willing to admit our flaws and to allow God to perfect them.

This is how the rabbis understand the ritual of circumcision. How, you might ask, is a man made better by permanently marking his flesh? Wouldn't the cutting of circumcision make him less perfect, less in the form that God intended for him? The rabbis answer this by saying that circumcision helps bring a man closer to perfection specifically because it points out flaws and acknowledges imperfection. If we were to depend only on our flawed selves to repair ourselves, we would be hopelessly and endlessly disappointed. It is only when we recognize that there is something beyond ourselves to which we owe reverence and hope for healing that we can find our highest selves. We can, by submitting ourselves to God, find a different kind of perfection.

In the same section of the Talmud, Rabbi Yitzchak says, “When you seek to conduct yourself perfectly, the Holy Blessed One deals perfectly with you." We human beings do not reach perfection, but we can do something even better: we can strive for perfection. The fact that we fail—again and again—does not diminish the merit we earn in trying. God sees our striving and treats us as if we were perfect. God perfects us, and this is why Abraham rejoiced. 

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