Genesis 12:1-17:27

 

Departure to Places Unknown

 

This week’s Torah reading records the moment when the Holy One commanded Abraham to “set out from your homeland, your relatives, and your immediate family and go on to the land that I will show you.” (Gen 12:1). Thus began the great spiritual migration of Judaism’s first founder. But, come to think of it, why the secrecy? Couldn’t Abraham have been told exactly where he was to go? Or was this, as our Rabbis sought to argue, merely one in a great series of divinely imposed tests of Abraham’s faith?

Even if that was its purpose, what was gained by this deliberate silence, especially when, in an identical phrase used some ten chapters later, Abraham is once again commanded to take a chance on incomplete information, this time having been told to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac in a place “that I will show you” (Gen 22:2). One could easily get the impression that this was a formulaic, even ritual phrase, as if not revealing where Abraham was headed was in both cases a crucial part of the whole exercise. Indeed, people sometimes like to refer to Abraham’s departure from his homeland as a demonstration that the true servant of God is someone who can face the vicissitudes of life unflinchingly and without question. If that was the point, then departing with incomplete information would seem to be an important element in the overall story.

It is noteworthy, however, that our ancient Rabbis sometimes presented the specific reason for Abraham’s departure in Genesis 12: he was commanded to leave his homeland only after having tried, and failed, to reform the idol-worshipers of his day. Indeed, his mission is sometimes associated with the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, interpreted as “fixing the world.” Nice sentiment, but the wrong connotation. The book of Ecclesiastes says quite the opposite, “That which is crooked cannot be (or “be made”) straight” (Eccles 1:15, 7:13). Tikkun—a relatively rare word in the Bible—means something like “establish” in this phrase, but not necessarily fixing or repairing anything. (This is not a call to inaction, but simply a recognition of humanity’s limitations. Tough news for salvation’s do-it-yourselfers.)

Just now, for many people, the world seems to be going the wrong way, spectacularly. Russia and Ukraine, whole countries in Europe and America (North and South), plus individual strongmen and ordinary grifters now in office—all these are happening at once, until the things that people had always taken for granted suddenly are not. How did this come about? Perhaps the answer is lurking “in a place that I will show you.”

The Romans had a goddess called “Fortuna,” and true to her name, she helped make things turn out one way or another, for good or ill. It was like the toss of a coin. None of this quite fits with Judaism, however. Rather, we are the religion of the little man in God’s great world, Klein and not Gross, who nevertheless tries to find a place inside to fit within. So sometimes indeed, we might do better to choose a different title for Abraham’s journey, not “The Great Man of Faith” but something like “Departure to Places Unknown.”

Shabbat shalom!