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One Person. People. (Lech Lecha)

One Person. People. (Lech Lecha)

Rabbi Menachem Creditor

Lech Lecha is the moment when humanity’s story becomes a summons addressed to one person.

Before Abram and Sarai, Genesis considers the human condition through creation, violence, flood, and dispersal. These stories contain encounters with God. With Lech Lecha, the Torah’s attention settles upon a family whose covenant will carry responsibility across generations.

Even a letter can mark that turning. Commenting on the final nun of "Charan," the place where Abram’s father Terach dies, Rashi describes an inverted letter and connects it with the divine anger preceding Abram, limited to the previous chapters by the implied visual bracket. (It is fascinating that we no longer have that tradition in the way scribes write Torahs today.) I hear in that remembered calligraphic nuance an invitation to imagine a world turning toward a new possibility.

The Torah marks a pivotal moment. God calls one person. A People’s journey begins.

What might it mean to mark our moment, hear that call ourselves, and see our individual decisions as impacting others?

Our collective future depends upon individual acts of responsibility. Before we ask what our People will become, each of us must choose how to live into our next moments.

May our decisions carry forward the life entrusted to us through Avram and Sarai.

Let it begin with me. Let it begin with you.

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A Faith Spacious Enough for Wonder (Lech Lecha)

A Faith Spacious Enough for Wonder (Lech Lecha)

Rabbi Menachem Creditor

Sometimes the Torah we remember contains stories the Torah never tells. We have heard them so often that they become inseparable from the text itself.

Consider Abram smashing his father’s idols. Terah leaves his son tending the shop. Abram shatters the statues, places the weapon in the largest idol’s hand, and tells his father that the gods fought among themselves. Terah protests: these objects cannot act! Abram’s response exposes the contradiction: Why, then, worship them?

It is a magnificent story. It is also not found in the biblical text. It is midrash, the magnificent imaginative project of the rabbis of old and of today.

Parashat Lech Lecha begins with God calling Abram to leave his homeland. The Torah offers no explanation for his selection. Our rabbis enter that silence with a story about someone willing to challenge inherited assumptions. Before Abram journeys, the midrash imagines him journeying beyond the boundaries of his father’s imagination.

But what happens when the descendants of an idol smasher turn his legacy into something immovable?

In "Open Closed Open," the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai z"l reminds us:

"We are all children of Abraham
But also the grandchildren of Terah, Abraham's father.
And maybe it's high time the grandchildren
Did unto their father as he did unto his,
When he shattered his idols and images, his religion, his faith.
That too would be the beginning of a new religion."

Amichai's poetic midrash is unsettling in all the right ways.

We can become so protective of our stories that we forget what they seek to express. We can mistake a clear formulation for God's Dream. We can hold an established understanding so tightly that there is no room left for wonder, growth, or another human being.

Idols need not be carved from stone. Certainty can become an idol.

We need not seek a new religion. This one, our precious Jewish tradition, its texts, its obligations, its stubborn insistence that life can become more holy, is a treasure beyond measure. This calls us to remain curious about what our ancestors handed down and courageous about what we must carry forward.

Our rabbis received Torah and responded imaginatively to its silences. Their fidelity included the willingness to create.

Lech Lecha demands the same: to recognize when familiar forms have narrowed our sense of what is possible, and to begin moving again.

We are descendants of Abram and Sarai. Our inheritance includes the courage to leave familiar ground.

May we teach and live a Torah spacious enough for that journey with the Divine.

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