Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

“There are two kinds of people’ she once decreed to me emphatically. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point that congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing…they are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard, Justin, against congealing.” Gail Godwin, The Finishing School

In Godwin’s novel The Finishing School, Justin Stokes’ teacher and mentor Ursula taught her invaluable lessons about how to remain ‘fluid’ and not become overly rigid and stuck in life.

Two lessons about how to do this are found in this week’s parsha, Lech L’cha:

In Bereshit Chapter 12, God challenges Avraham to leave everything he has known behind and step into the unknown: ‘Lech l’cha me’artzecha u’mi’moladetecha, u’mi’beit avicha, el ha’aretz asher arekha’ ‘Go for yourself from your land, from your birthplace and from the house of your father to a land that I shall show you.’

Avraham is told by God to leave everything familiar behind and simply, to leave. The Midrash Tanchuma tells us that Avraham was living among idol worshippers and God felt his growth was limited there. What’s more, God also felt Avraham needed to spread his good works abroad. In other words, Avraham was encouraged to go global and spread the light and his teaching about ethics and Monotheism. Before we think of this as glitz and glamour, our rabbinic tradition expresses compassion for Avraham exclaiming that traveling around the world and spreading ethics and ideas about God was difficult and, in some ways, degrading. The Midrash writes, ‘Look at this old man, traveling through the country, looking like a madman.’ Leaving one’s familiar surrounds is difficult, perhaps even involving a loss of a known self. The very act of leaving somewhere, unleashes a spiral of struggle and yet we know that struggle always has the potential to lead to growth and development. The Rabbi’s point to Avraham’s own enlargement as a human by saying that in his local town, Avram was Av-Aram, the Father of Aram, his local village. When he left, he soon becomes Avraham (with the additional letter ‘hey’ or ‘h’ inserted in his name) to signify that he was now ‘Av hamon goyim’, the ‘father of many nations.’  Avraham’s leaving his familiar life and familiars must have been excruciating but it ultimately helped to grow him and expand him to make a larger contribution to the world.

It is fascinating that the overarching theme of the Parsha is about ‘leching’, meaning ‘going’, ‘leaving’ and spreading your wings in order to stretch. Yet, nestled within the portion, is an invitation to do the very opposite of ‘leave’. Towards the end of this portion, Sarai and Avram have still not succeeded to conceive and have a child and so Sarai invites her husband to marry her maidservant Hagar and have a child with her. As soon as Hagar falls pregnant, the relationship between Hagar and Sarai sours. Hagar develops attitude towards Sarai, assuming she must be a better person than her as she is about to bear Avraham’s child. In response, Sarai becomes a cruel mistress to Hagar, so much so that Hagar flees to the desert. In the desert, an angel approaches Hagar and says to her, ‘Where have you come from and where are you going?’ Hagar responds, ‘from my mistress Sarai I am fleeing.’ Immediately, the angel says to Hagar, ‘return to your mistress.’ The Hebrew word for ‘return’ is ‘shuvi’. At first it may seem disturbing to think that God’s angel is sending Hagar back into a conflict situation where the power dynamic is not equal. Why must Hagar be forced to return? However, I was once teaching this portion to a Batmitzvah student and we looked at how Hagar was running towards Shur, a place in Egypt. According to the Midrash Hagar had originally come from Egypt. My Batmitzvah student exclaimed, ‘Hagar is finding it hard with Sarai and she wants to go back to mummy and daddy, but this is her Batmitzvah moment, she can’t run away, she needs to GO BACK to Sarai and face her problems.’ My student’s fresh response opened the story for me.  According to her the invitation from the angel to Hagar to ‘shuvi’ was tough but not cruel! The angel was interested in the growth and development of Hagar’s character- and the enlargement of her story. The angel understood that Hagar and her son had a large destiny and it needed to be fulfilled. This is perhaps why at the end of the dialogue with the angel Hagar says that she feels seen by the angel and she can summons the strength to return to Sarai and ultimately, to grow.

Sometimes when we leave somewhere it can be about expanding, and sometimes, it can be about running away. Sometimes returning to a place that is familiar is about playing it safe and remaining stuck in a comfort zone, and sometimes it is about ‘leaning in’ to a difficult situation and confronting the harder stuff. These stories suggest that to grow as a human being we are not encouraged to take the easier paths, we are invited to travel or to return in order to grow, stretch and ultimately be of service.

When things get difficult, it might be worth asking, is this a ‘lech’ moment? Is it time to leave? Or is this a ‘shuvi moment’, time to stay, lean in and face the current challenges?

Each situation in our lives will require different answers, but we can take strength and courage from both Avram and Hagar, who both must have faced enormous fear and angst in leaving or returning and who both ultimately became founders of great nations and lived their full destinies.

Shabbat Shalom