This week’s Torah portion, Lech L’cha, is full of incredible promises. God comes to Abram and Sarai, and invites them to leave their home for “a land that I will show you,” where they will “be a blessing.” It’s the beginning of the covenant, and the Jewish people (not yet by that name). So, they go. They become Abraham and Sarah – new names for this new chapter of their lives. They start a journey that generation after generation has found highly evocative, perhaps in part because, in the words of Debbie Friedman, “each and every one of us … at some point or another has to go forth, like Abraham, and like Sarah, on [a] journey, … and become all that we can be.”
If I am being honest, there are years when this story really speaks to me, and years when it feels further away. This year, it feels a little bit further away. When they left on their journey, Abram and Sarai had something pretty remarkable: assurances about their future, and even about the ways that their lives and those of their descendants could positively impact future generations. In the words of the sociologist Carol Weiss, they had a “theory of change,” and boy, did they act on it.
For many of us, over the last many years, a lot of our previous assumptions about how the world works, and how we can be part of efforts that lead towards positive change in the world, have been severely challenged. We are in many ways in a time period of uncertainty and becoming. Many of us lack assurances that we wish that we had.
Assurances like: you and the generations that come after you will have what you need. Assurances like: all the families of the earth will be blessed by your deeds.
It can be easy to feel jealous of Abram and Sarai. Even if you read ahead, and know what’s next for them – years of tumult and struggle – it can be easy to envy that moment they had, when they were told: this path you are on is going to work out, one day. You just need to take the first steps.
And yet … we have something important, too. In the absence of promises as grand as these, (at least from on high,) what we have instead is the wisdom of so many people who have navigated uncertainty and challenge before us. And, crucially, we have each other. We have the ability – and the obligation – to say: let’s work together so that we and the generations after us will have what we, and they, need. Let’s work together so that our deeds ripple out like blessings, touching all of the families of the earth.
As Rabbi Schwartzman reminded us on Yom Kippur, there is great power to envisioning, and then living into, the future you hope to see. In large and small ways, many of us can trace important aspects of our present to the bold imaginations of people in the past. This year, Parshat Lech L’cha reminds us that now, it’s our turn. Whatever blessings we most dream of and want to help make real in the world – it is never too late to take the first step.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alexandra Stein
___________________________________
1 Genesis 12:2 (partially, as interpreted by the medieval commentator Rashi, who saw God’s promise to Abram as having multiple implications, including economic implications).
2 Genesis 12:3.
