Parashat Lej Leja

Rabbi Gustavo Kraselnik
Kol Shearith Israel Congregation
Panama City, Panama

The story of the Jewish people starts with Lekh Lekha; a call and a promise:

The Lord said to Avram, "Go from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father's house, [and go] to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you and make your name great; and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and he who curses you, I will curse; and through you, will be blessed all the families of the earth." (Gen. 12:1-3)

 

The call, Lekh Lekha –usually translated as “Go”, but which literally means “Go for yourself”– is an invitation to Abraham (who was originally called Avram) to abandon his house, his society, his world, and go to a place specified by God. The promise, if Avram answers the call, is the blessing. In order to make clear the divine intention, five words with the same root as Brachah, “blessing”, appear in this short passage. And the blessing refers here to the multiplication of his descendants (which, along with the delivery of the land of Canaan, constitute the two conditions of God’s promise to the patriarch).

Reiterating the promise of the blessing, God uses two metaphors in the same parashah that will be repeated throughout the entire biblical text: “I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth” (13:16) (also used in other verses, the sand of the sea) and "Look towards the heavens and count the stars if you are able to count them.” And next He added: "So [numerous] will your descendants be” (15:5).

Although the common denominator of both images –the dust of the earth and the stars of the heavens– give the sense of infinity, they are essentially different: the stars shine in the sky, hard by heaven, while the dust of the earth may be stepped on and trampled on by anyone.

Rashi, the outstanding exegete, refers exactly to this disparity in his commentary regarding one verse in the book of Esther (6:13): “This nation has been compared to the stars and to the dust. When they descend, they descend to the dust, and when they ascend, they ascend to the sky and the stars.” To Rashi, metaphors not only refer to the number of descendants but also to their quality potential: ascension or descent. God “guarantees” the multitude; our ascension is up to us.

And this takes us back to the initial call, to Lekh Lekha. In a Talmudic passage (Bava Metzia 163a) that discusses the space that should be left between the lines in a document, the reference is to write the expression Lekh Lekha one on top of the other, since the LAMED is the highest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the CHAF SOFIT (final) is the letter that reaches lowest.

Thus, we see how Lekh Lekha also contains both extremes: the upper and the lower. We may ascend to the top of the LAMED or descend to the depths of the CHAF SOFIT. Just like Abraham, God calls unto us, invites us: how we answer is up to us.

And in this sense, a Hasidic tale (Iturei Torah, Vol.1 page 83) teaches us that we must understand the Lekh Lekha call as “Go for yourself”, that is, “Go to your roots, Go to find your potential”. And the lovers of Gematria (the art of assigning numerical values to letters, hence obtaining new interpretations) add that Lekh Lekha is equivalent to 100 (LAMED = 30 and CHAF = 20). It would seem that Lekh Lekha is also a call to give the full hundred per cent.

The history of the Jewish people starts with Lekh Lekha; from then on, the call echoes in each one in the community. Facing us, the shining stars in the sky and the dust of the earth. The invitation is still there, to make real the divine promise to Abraham: to reach our peak, to ascend in our human experience and be, ourselves, also a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom,
Gustavo