Parsha Talk Lekh Lekha 5785 2024

Parsha Talk with Rabbis Eliot Malomet, Barry Chesler and Jeremy Kalmanofsky. D’var Torah by Rabbi Barry Chesler

My creative writing teacher at the University of Illinois had a theory about how why people in California were, shall we say, somewhat off the beaten path. He said that historically in this country, when people had problems that were too great to deal with, they would pick up and go west. If there problems were great enough they would eventually reach California. But once there, they could no longer go west, so they went crazy instead.

This kind of word play, using the word “going” in two different senses as if they meant the same in both, is what undergirds one of the great Hasidic teachings. The verse in question is the very first in the Torah reading for this Shabbat, already read yesterday in our minyanim:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהוָֹה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵֽאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ:

“The Lord said to Avram: Go, you, from your land, and from your birthplace, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

This has become the first Jewish memory, the act that summoned the Jewish people into existence, a thousand years before the word Jew became the preferred term to refer to the people of the Bible and their descendants.

Avram, who will be renamed Avraham, Abraham by the end of the parashah, is commanded to leave everything behind and go west, to a land not unlike California, with the sea its western border.

My teacher Rabbi Byron Sherwin z”l liked to say that there were 3 kinds of people who were literalists: little kids, schizophrenics, as the term was used then, back in the 80s, and ba’alai midrash, the masters of midrash, whose interpretive comments often pushed the envelope of not only linguistic sense but common sense as well.

In our verse, the command לך, “to go”, is followed by a pronominal form לך “to you”, which is chosen most likely for emphasis, you shall surely go, and for euphony, the repetition of sounds adding a literary, even a lyrical quality. So one might be tempted to read the command to Avram to be “go to yourself”, which hardly seems to be the plain meaning of the words themselves, nor the context.

And so, the comment:

לך לך … לך —לעצמיותך, אין האדם נדרש לעשות למעלה מכוחותיו

Go to yourself — to you, your essence: a person is not asked to do more than he is capable of doing

אבל נדרש הוא להשיג מה שבאשפרותו להשיג

But he is asked to reach for as much as is possible for him

אין דורשים מזושא להיות כהבעשט

We do not ask of Zusya to be like the Besht [regarded as the founder of the Hasidic movement]

אבל דורשים ממנו להיות זושא

But we do ask from him that he be Zusya, be himself as only he can be

The first part of the comment is good advice for teachers: we are not trying to create supermen and superwomen, rather we are tasked with helping each of our students discover who they really are, help them become more of the person only they can be.

The second part of the comment harkens back to a tale from the early years of the Hasidic movement. Zusya is on his deathbed and his students and disciples have gathered around him as he prepares to take leave of this world for the world of truth. His students find him in tears. Perhaps he is afraid of death, one ventures. No, he sighs, death comes to each of us. I am afraid of the entrance exam. When I appear before the heavenly court I am not afraid I will be asked why were you not more like Moshe Rabbenu, Moshe our Master, for I am poor Zusya and he is, was, Moshe Rabbenu, who can be compared to him? No, what I am afraid of is that I will be asked, why were you not more like Zusya, who only you could be. The story concludes with a line that does not appear in all versions: What troubles me, Zusya says, is that I have no good answer to that question.

To return to Avram for a moment and a conclusion. Imagine for a moment you are Avram and hear the divine call, go forth! Where do you go? Do you go into yourself, perhaps retreat from the world? Or, do you go forth into the world? There is a time for transcendence, reaching out beyond ourselves, and a time for immanence, embracing ourselves. In education, as in life, we need both. We need to go into ourselves, find, discover, the person only we can be; and we need to step forth into the world, to engage the world that in our religious tradition God not only created, but declared to be very good. For when each of us in turn is summoned to join Zusya, we want to be able to answer the question that troubled Zusya, but for ourselves. And along the way, we want to help our students find their own answers for themselves.