Parshat Lech-Lecha: We Must Make the Best of a Sometimes Dark World
After the Torah chapters that describe stages of early humanity, we come to Abraham (Avram) and the beginning of the monotheism we recognize. God tells Avram to leave Mesopotamia, his land and his birthplace to go somewhere where he will become a great nation and will be blessed. And through him, humanity will be blessed.
But no sooner does he arrive in the Land of Canaan, that things go wrong. The land he was told would be fertile is stricken with a famine. He has to leave and go down to Egypt together with his nephew, Lot. There his wife Sarai is taken into Pharaoh’s palace on the assumption that she is Avram’s sister, not his wife. Initially, this works to Avram’s advantage. But when he discovers the truth, Pharaoh is furious and they are driven out of Egypt. In one way, Avram benefits because under Pharaoh, he succeeds in amassing wealth, livestock, and slaves.
Avram arrives back in the land of Canaan. But tension between him and his nephew lead them to separate. Lot’s choice of the Jordan Valley gets him involved with the corrupt men of Sodom and Gomorrah. A war between rival kings drags Avram into it, to save his nephew. Then Avram faces a personal complication because Sarai, his wife, can’t conceive. She offers her maid servant Hagar as a surrogate but then there are tensions between them. God intervenes to reassure Avram that despite all his difficulties, he will succeed and overcome them.
Through all these difficulties, Avram remains strongly convinced that he’s being guided by a superior power in which he has enormous faith. But faith is something abstract and can be just a theological concept. It is how one lives that matters.
As it says this week, “He ‘believed’ in God, who valued his righteousness” (Bereishit Chapter 15 verse 6). The text is obscure. Normally translated as “He believed in God” — it can rather be understood to mean, “He trusted in God.” But then the text adds, “and God valued (or appreciated) it.” Because the word Tsedakah implied an ethical commitment to correct behavior.
The Torah is telling us that when things go wrong, the best way to cope is to think and act positively and hope for better things. This does not mean we should respond passively and wait — although sometimes we may have no option. Perhaps we may need to change something in ourselves or our decisions. Some people when faced with a challenge give up. Others persevere.
The Torah text keeps on stressing the failures of human relationship and the challenges of alien societies. It may sound as if God values suffering, and we should welcome pain, but this is not a traditional Jewish thought. It goes against our tradition. We are certainly not masochists. But the models the Bible gives us are of people triumphing over adversity.
The reality of life is that nothing is perfect, and we all have to go through difficult periods as well as good ones. Nowhere is this more obvious than the world in which we are in today. We assumed we were blessed, and God was on our side, and everything would go well and smoothly — only to discover that in terms of society, we find ourselves challenged and subjected to abuse. It is almost as if this is the nature of being Jewish, and something we have to embrace instead of trying to escape .
Life is not easy. Many years after the Torah was written, the schools of Hillel and Shammai debated whether it was better to be born or not. After years of arguing, they concluded democratically it would indeed have been better not to have been born, given that life is so tough. But they agreed that since we are here in this imperfect world, the best thing is to get on and make the best of it. That was the message then, and so it applies today. That’s what being Jewish means. It is sometimes painful, and yet think of the wonderful gifts it bestows.
The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.
The post Parshat Lech-Lecha: We Must Make the Best of a Sometimes Dark World first appeared on Algemeiner.com.