This week’s parsha is “Lech Lecha”, which means, “Go forth”. It tells the story of the beginning of Abraham’s relationship with God and the covenant that God makes with Abraham and ultimately the entire Jewish people.
The story begins with the Lord saying to Abraham: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation…I will bless those who bless you and curse him that curses you…”
Abraham is 75 at the time, but he follows God’s command and leaves his father’s house in Haran and settles in Canaan. But as soon as he arrives the land is struck by famine; hence, he is forced to go down to Egypt for food. As soon as he arrives in Egypt, however, Pharaoh’s officials abduct his wife Sarah. God sends multiple plagues to Pharaoh’s house, and Pharaoh eventually sends Sarah and Abraham back out of Egypt.
Once Abraham returns to Canaan, his troubles still aren’t over. At one point the neighboring kings go to war, and his brother Lot gets kidnapped. Abraham is forced to go to war to rescue Lot. He’s an old man and he has no children. Sarah gives him her handmaiden Hagar so that they can have a child, but this eventually leads to familial strife. In the long run, Hagar is forced into exile with their son Ishmael and God calls upon Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the child that he does eventually have with Sarah.
In the story God establishes a covenant with Abraham. This covenant will be an “everlasting covenant throughout the ages” and cannot be broken. God tells Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars; however, he also warns him that his offspring “shall be strangers in a land not theirs”. In the long run though, he promises that He “will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end they shall go free with great wealth.”
This entire story can be seen as an allegory of the story of the Jewish people. All the elements are there: the theme of exile and return, even the precursor to the Exodus story in which God sends plagues down on Pharaoh and Pharaoh finally allows the Jews to leave Egypt.
When I read the story, several questions come to mind:
First, if God so loved Abraham, why did He inflict so much suffering on him? Why did He force Abraham to leave the country of his birth, and then no sooner had he arrived in the new land, why was he forced to move once again, this time to Egypt?
Second, if God so loves the Jewish people, why did he inflict so much suffering on them throughout the centuries? Why the repeated exiles from Egypt to Babylon to Spain to virtually every country in Europe, and so on?
Finally, why does God inflict suffering on anyone, Jewish or not?
Over the centuries many famous rabbis have attempted to answer these questions. One of the nice things about Judaism is that most Jews understand that there are always multiple answers to any question. There’s an old joke that for every two Jews, there are three opinions.
I don’t have time to go into all the rabbis’ explanations tonight—indeed, we’d be here all night–but I will tell you about one answer I like that was given by Rabbi Nachum of Chernobyl. Most of you have heard of Chernobyl because of the nuclear catastrophe that happened there. But what you might not have realized is that in the 18’Th Century Chernobyl was a major center of Jewish learning. Rabbi Nachum was a follower of the famous Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Chasidic movement.
Rabbi Nachum lived at a time when there was tremendous suffering and persecution for the Jews of Eastern Europe. Jews were frequently singled out for various punishments including imprisonment. Rabbi Nachum decided to devote his life to helping these prisoners. He would go from town to town trying to raise money in order to bribe the appropriate officials to obtain the prisoners’ release.
One day when he was in the town of Zhitomir, he got into some trouble with the local authorities. He ended up being thrown into prison himself. While he was in prison he tried to understand how God could have possibly allowed this to happen to him.
That night the answer came to him in a dream. The dream was about Abraham. Abraham is known for being a paragon of hospitality. In the dream God was telling Abraham that he was sending him into exile because only then would he be able to fully understand what it felt like to be a wanderer.
When Rabbi Nachum awoke he realized that, just as Abraham needed the experience of exile in order to fully perform the mitzvah of hospitality, if he, Rabbi Nachum, truly wanted to help prisoners, he had to first experience what it felt like to be a prisoner himself.
Suffering allows us to develop empathy and get in touch with our spirituality. It’s not by accident that the Chasidic movement, of which Rabbi Nachum was part, flourished at precisely a time when Jewish suffering in Eastern Europe had reached a peak. One has to wonder if Judaism would even be the great religion that it is today if Jews hadn’t first experienced so much suffering.
Abraham’s journey in which God commands him “Lech Lecha”—“Go forth”—can also be seen as a spiritual quest. God wants the Jews to be good people and to perform the mitzvah of tikkun olam—repairing the world. But in order to do this they must first develop empathy and an understanding of human suffering.
But one must also understand that even though God might sometimes allow the Jewish people to suffer, He will never forget them. The covenant He established with Abraham is an everlasting covenant.
I’ll conclude with an excerpt from the haftorah, the Book of Isaiah. This passage was written during yet another period of exile, the Babylonian exile, a time of great despair for the Jewish people:
“Why do you say, O Jacob,
Why declare, O Israel,
“My way is hid from the Lord,
My cause is ignored by my God”?
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
…you, Israel, My servant,
Jacob, whom I have chosen,
Seed of Abraham My friend—
You whom I drew from the ends of the earth
And called from its far corners,
To whom I said: You are My servant;
I chose you, I have not rejected you—
Fear not, for I am with you.
…Have no fear;
I will be your help.
Fear not, O worm Jacob,
O men of Israel:
I will help you.