Beth Shalom
Oceanside Jewish Center

A Journey:
Rediscovering the Biblical Abraham

Parshat Lech Lecha
October 19, 2002   -   13 Cheshvan, 5763
by Rabbi Mark B. Greenspan

One of the strangest aspects of the story of Abraham in Parshat Lech Lecha is the abruptness with which it begins. With little warning and no explanation, we see Abraham leaving on a journey which takes him far from his ancestral home and his family. Even stranger, our forefather finds himself on his way to an unknown destination.

Most of us today would say that what Abraham does is not faith; it's just plain crazy. Imagine, one day you hear a voice, "Leave your home and everything you know!" "Where are you sending me?" you ask. The voice answers, "Don't worry - I'll tell you when you get there!" I can't imagine most of us following such a call. The only place we would go if we heard such a voice these days would be to see our local psychiatrist.

Nothing in the Torah prepares us for God's call to Abraham: "Lech lecha may-artzecha, mi-moladiticha, u-mi-bait avekhah," "Go forth from your country, your birth place and your father's house to the land that I will show you!" Abraham leaves home not knowing where he's going or what he will face.

Worst of all, what follows in the coming chapters is not a happy story. Abraham copes with hostile neighbors and family conflict. He deals with famine and infertility. He sees his beloved nephew, Lot, kidnapped, nearly looses his wife to a lusty king, and when he's finally blessed with children, he nearly kills both of them. Through it all Abraham limps along doing the best he can. What's amazing about Abraham is that he's so ordinary. The sages tell us that our forefather was subjected to ten tests. Reading these chapters I can't help but feel that sometimes he was able to rise to these tests while other times his actions were clumsy and inexplicable, just as ours might be. Despite everything, however, Lech Lecha is a story of faith.

And it all begins with two simple words: Lech Lecha - Go forth, or literally, "Go to your self." We're not told whether Abraham had a previous relationship with God, or why he was willing to put so much trust in this mysterious being who orders him to leave home. The sages were also troubled by the Torah's silence concerning the early years of Abraham's life. So how did our forefather come to believe in God? The sages allowed their imagination to fill in the glaring gaps in the text of the Torah.

No doubt some of you are familiar with the delightful story that we learned in Sunday school of how young and impetuous Abram smashed the idols in his father's boutique. He was certainly not the first nor the last child to rebel against his parents' beliefs. When his shocked father returned home and found his shop in disarray, he asked young Abram what had happened. Abram answered, "The idols began to fight with one another and the large one destroyed all the smaller ones." Incredulous, Terach told his son that this was impossible since the idols can't fight since they are made of wood and stone. "If that's so," said young Abram, "then why do you bother bowing down and worshipping them?"

Out of the mouth of babes, comes the truth. In this Midrash, the sages imagined Abraham believing in God even before he was called to God's service. Only the Torah never tells us this in so many words.

Moses Maimonides, basing himself on other Rabbinic Midrashim, recasts Abraham in his own image. He imagines young Abraham growing up in a pagan world. A budding philosopher, he suggests that our forefather went through a solitary intellectual process (much as Buddha and Mohammed did) in which he rediscovered the earlier human belief that there is only one God. "How can there be such order and harmony in the universe," reasoned Abraham, "if there isn't a creator - a power that causes the universe to be?"

Only Abraham never says this either, at least in so many words. I suspect that Maimonides, ever the philosopher, felt the need to recast our forefather as a man of intellect and reason. Interestingly Abraham says very little in the book of Genesis. He epitomizes the rabbinic dictum, "Say little and do much." He talks to God but he never talks about God.

So the story of Abraham leaves us with more questions than answers. For the Abraham of the Bible, faith begins as a journey and not as an intellectual supposition or a series of ideas. And it's not what Abraham says that makes him a man of faith but what he does. What's more, the Torah suggests that the journey toward faith is not limited by age or circumstances - one can never be too young or too old to encounter the presence of God in the world.

If we take the Bible at its own word, then faith is really life. Abraham may have believed in one God before he was seventy five, but his faith only became relevant and meaningful when he answered the call and 'went forth." Faith is a journey we undertake and a goal toward which we are constantly moving. It's not how we feel but what we do. We like to think that if we had faith, things would be better or different, or we would be rewarded with blessing or at least peace of mind. Yet what we see in Parshat Lech Lecha is that faith is all about struggle, dealing with the "nitty gritty" of daily life. It's about taking action.

The Abraham we encounter in the Bible is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, nor even a holy man. He's a husband, an uncle, and a father. He's a tribal leader and a business man, a community activist and an immigrant. He's an outsider and a man who just wants to get by in life. But he is also a person who turns to God and has a vision for the future; a human being with a deep sense of justice, an individual with a strong sense of compassion, who, like all of us, sometimes stumbles and can be callous and cruel. Despite it all, Abraham never looses site of his journey. He acts.

I like Abraham, unadorned and just as he is in the Bible, without all of the Rabbinic and Medieval embellishments of his personality. In the end Abraham is you and me - just a regular guy trying to get by and make it in the world. There's something comforting about this. There's something encouraging about recognizing that you don't have to be a 'Rabbi' or a 'theologian' to struggle with you faith. You just have to be willing to answer the call and "Go forth." Faith is lived in the struggles and tests in our daily lives. It can be found in the good and the bad.

So you may not hear a voice, but there's one calling you right now and challenging you to look more deeply at what your life means. I suspect that many of us here would say that we believe in God, or at least in some type of higher power, how ever you choose to define it. Faith, however, is not what you think or feel - it's defined by what you do and where you choose to go.

Faith doesn't really begin until we answer the call - Lech lecha. So I wonder -- where are you going, tomorrow?

Shabbat Shalom