Lekh l’kha. If there are two Hebrew words that every reader of the Bible should know, they are these: Lekh l’kha, “Go forth.” The opening of this week's Torah reading, and the name given to the portion itself. “Lekh l’kha, go forth from your land, your birthplace, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” a call from God to Abraham, that changed the course of his life, the course of biblical history, and arguably, our understanding of what it means to be human.
The plain meaning of the text is simple and straightforward. Plucked from obscurity in the backwaters of Mesopotamia, Avram, whose name will soon enough be changed to Avraham, a point to which we will return, is called to journey to Canaan, where he will become a great nation, as numerous as the stars in the sky, and a blessing. Peoplehood, blessing, and yes, land: the three constitutive elements of Jewish identity from the very beginning, whatever some today would have us believe.
But the rabbis, being rabbis, were never satisfied with the simple and straightforward. Ever probing, ever searching for deeper meaning, they understood that God's call to Abraham was more than a biblical precedent for Waze, directions on getting from point A to point B. After all, as readers of last week’s Torah portion know, Abraham was already on his way to Canaan with his father Terach. Lekh l’kha, the rabbis intuited, must mean something more than geography, more than a mere physical trek.
The most famous interpretation, the one many of us first learned in Hebrew school, is that God’s call to Abraham signals a break with the idolatry of his father and the world in which he was raised. Go forth. Leave the false gods of your ancestors. Smash the idols, reject the beliefs of your surroundings, and embrace the revolutionary idea of one God, Creator of heaven and earth. Abraham was the first Hebrew, ivri, from the word ever, meaning “other.” The whole world standing on one side and he alone on the other. Lekh l’kha was not merely a summons to a new land, but a call to a new monotheistic faith, a radical departure from the religious assumptions of Abraham’s time.
Rashi, the eleventh-century commentator, reads the command somewhat differently. He sees Lekh l’kha as a call for Abraham's character and reputation to become known throughout the world. “Go forth.” Like a flask of fragrant perfume whose scent is released only when it is moved, Abraham must leave the confines of his birthplace so that the message of his goodness and blessing could spread far and wide.
Alternatively, the Hasidic masters read the grammar of Lekh l’kha not simply as “Go forth,” but as “Go toward yourself.” In their view, Abraham’s true destination is not a place on a map, but the deepest reaches of his own soul; he is to take a journey of self-discovery, of becoming his best self, the person he was meant to be.
Lekh l’kha. Go forth. Two simple words that have given rise to an industry of interpretation, with readings as numerous as the stars of the sky, as the generations of Jews who have pondered them. Today, I want to focus on one particular interpretation, an interpretation that sheds light not only on these two words, or on Abraham, or on the arc and art of biblical narrative, but on something far more fundamental: what it means, or what it might mean, to be human.
In his commentary on Lekh l’kha, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, the great Hasidic master of Ger, Poland, known as the Sefat Emet, writes: “This is the meaning of Lekh l’kha: A person must always be a mehalekh, moving forward, toward ‘that which I will show you,’ continually attaining new understanding and new perspectives. This is why a human being is called a mehalekh, literally, one who is always on the move. For whoever stands still, whoever ceases to grow and renew themselves, becomes captive to habit and nature.”
It is a beautiful teaching, an insight as original as it is sublime. God’s call of Lekh l’kha was undoubtedly a summons to a new land, a break with the beliefs and ways of Abraham’s father and homeland, and an inward journey of self-discovery. It was all these things. But at its core, the Sefat Emet teaches, Lekh l’kha was a call to see the world anew. Or, more precisely, a charge to go through life never ceasing to see oneself and the world anew. To never stop learning and growing. Never stop becoming. Never stop never stopping. Never mistake who we are for all that we might yet be. Never allow the experiences of yesterday to foreclose the possibilities of tomorrow. Lekh l’kha: not a one-time command to Abraham, but a lifelong calling for how to walk this earth.
It is a teaching illuminating a moment that is not only an inflection point in Abraham’s life, but a pivot in the biblical narrative itself. The stories preceding Abraham, Genesis chapters 1 through 11, are among the most vivid and memorable in all of Scripture: the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and more. But for all their drama, the protagonists of these stories are, in a sense, static figures. They act, they err, they suffer the consequences, but we never witness them growing in wisdom or becoming different from who they were. Adam and Eve, having eaten the forbidden fruit, are expelled from Eden. Their circumstances change, but the text offers little indication that their characters do. So too, Cain. Warned by God that he has the power to master his impulses, Cain nevertheless murders his brother. Cain is condemned to wander the earth, but we never see him become a new person. Even Noah, righteous and blameless, survives the Flood to emerge from the ark into a world made new, and yet Noah himself appears the same. The last time we see him, he is drunk and exposed in his tent. The circumstances of these early biblical figures may change, but their characters remain largely unchanged. They may travel, but they do not grow.
And then, with Lekh l’kha, with Abraham, the Bible introduces a new possibility: that the greatest journey of all is not from one place to another, but from who we are to who we might yet become. The point is not that Abraham's character develops in a straight line, or even that he becomes more virtuous with each passing chapter. Far from it. The same Abraham who bravely risks his life to rescue his nephew Lot twice puts his wife Sarah at risk out of fear for his own. The same Abraham who opens his tent in magnanimous hospitality to strangers, also sends his handmaiden Hagar and his own son Ishmael into the wilderness. The same Abraham who challenges God to spare the innocents of Sodom and Gomorrah remains inexplicably silent when commanded to sacrifice his own son Isaac. There are steps forward and steps back. Abraham's development is anything but linear. And that is precisely the point. His character is not fixed, his story not static, his identity not set in stone. With each encounter, each choice, each triumph and failure, he becomes someone he was not before. In the language of the Sefat Emet, Abraham is a mehalekh, a person whose life is not merely a journey through the world, but a continual journey of becoming.
The great literary critic Erich Auerbach, in his celebrated comparison of Homer and the Hebrew Bible, cast a spotlight on the fundamental distinction between Greek and biblical storytelling. Agamemnon and Achilles, for all their travels, triumphs and tragedies, remain essentially the people they always were. Even Odysseus, returning home to Ithaca after twenty years of wandering, is arguably the same man who set out two decades earlier. Not so Abraham. Not so Jacob, who wrestles with angels, with his past, and with himself, emerging with a new name and a new identity. Not so Joseph, who begins life as a self-absorbed braggart and emerges a man of empathy, wisdom, and forgiveness. Not so Esther, introduced as a beauty pageant contestant and emerging as a courageous queen. Not so Ruth, who begins as a bereaved widow and becomes the courageous matriarch of Israel’s royal dynasty. Not so Judah, Jonah, David – the list goes on. Show me a heroic biblical character, and I will show you someone with character development, whose tomorrow is different than their yesterday.
To have what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” to reject the notion that our character is fixed, our identities set in stone – this, I believe, is among the defining features of what it means to exist in covenant with God and to be a descendant of Abraham. It helps explain the enigmatic scene at the beginning of the Bible’s second book, Exodus, when Moses, standing before the burning bush, asks for God’s name. “Ehyeh asher ehyeh, I will be what I will be,” God replies. In other words, God tells Moses that while it may be understandable for him to want a name to hold onto, the mark of divinity is just the opposite, not who one is, but who one is becoming. It also explains why God changes the names of Avram and Sarai. Avram becomes Avraham. Sarai becomes Sarah. Into each name enters the Hebrew letter hey, a letter of God's own name, a mark of the divine. It is more than a change of name. It is a declaration of possibility. Who Avram has been is not all that Avraham will become. Who Sarai has been is not all that Sarah will become. Like the God in whose image they are created, they are not defined solely by what has been but are called toward what they might yet be. This is the real idol that Abraham smashes. Our hearts must not, as Pharaoh’s later was, be turned to stone. Our past need not dictate our future. Becoming is not a chapter of life, but the work of a lifetime.
As your rabbi, I am made privy to countless stories of your lives. The conversations in my office, the pastoral work of walking alongside you through life's joys and sorrows – it is the most sacred dimension of my rabbinate. Every one of us an amalgamation of our experiences, the accumulated imprint of all we have lived through – the good, the bad, and sometimes, really bad. We are shaped by those experiences, the ramifications of them, and our reactions to them. And one thing I know for certain: None of us can turn back the clock. We cannot undo what has happened to us. Which leaves us with a fundamental question. Do we, in the language of the Sefat Emet, see ourselves as mehalkhim, always growing, learning, evolving, becoming? Or do we remain captive to experiences that, despite being firmly in our rearview mirror, continue to dominate the road ahead? I think of a young couple with whom I spoke this week, the man carrying painful memories of Jewish teachers from his childhood. Would those early experiences forever define his relationship with Judaism, or could he find a way to lay claim to his tradition as an adult? I think of a young woman who suffered a hurt no person should ever have to endure, now struggling to enter new relationships without the weight of that traumatic experience bearing down on her. Or a divorced congregant, wounded by the failure of a marriage, carrying anger, cynicism, insecurity, and suspicion into the possibility of loving again. Three conversations in my office. And that was just this week. Their experiences are neither identical nor equivalent, nor are the burdens they carry. But each, in their own way, faces a question that confronts us all: Will what happened yesterday determine who we are tomorrow? Will we allow our past to define us, or will we find within ourselves the courage to become something different?
There are no easy answers, no quick fixes, no one-size-fits-all solutions. Each of us carries experiences whose details and depths are fully known only to ourselves. Sharing them with a therapist, a friend, or a rabbi may help, but it cannot undo what has happened. Healing takes time, sometimes a lifetime. But what this rabbi can teach, what this parashah teaches, is that each of us, created in God’s image, possesses the capacity for renewal. As we say in our morning prayers, m’hadesh b’tuvo b’khol yom tamid ma’aseh b’reishit, God renews the goodness of the work of creation each day. And so, too, we must believe in the possibility of our own renewal. Abraham was seventy-five when God called him to begin his journey. Sarah was sixty-five. Rabbi Akiva was forty when he first began to study Torah. Moses was eighty when he stood before the burning bush. At every age, at every stage, the possibility of becoming remains ours.
The heroic stories of our people, in biblical times and our own, are not measured by riches amassed, battles won, or dragons slain. They are found in the quieter, sometimes harder work of transformation. The courage to begin again. To change course. To break a habit, admit a mistake, seek forgiveness, open one's heart, learn something new. To invent, reinvent, and then reinvent ourselves yet again. None of us is a blank slate. We carry our past with us – our childhoods, our disappointments, our losses, our regrets, the wounds inflicted upon us and the wounds we have inflicted upon others. Those experiences are real. They have shaped us, and we cannot simply wish them away. But neither are we condemned to remain the people those experiences made us. Life is just too darn short to have it otherwise. “To live,” wrote the theologian John Henry Newman, “is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” We can learn anew. Love anew. Trust anew. We can grow in wisdom, generosity, patience, and courage. Not because yesterday can be undone, but because tomorrow has yet to be written.
This is the promise of Lekh l’kha. It is the promise of what it means to be human. It is the mark of the divine. No matter how long we have lived, no matter how far we have traveled, the most important part of our becoming still lies ahead.
Lekh l’kha. Go forth. The journey is not over. And neither are we.