Lech Lecha - Jonathan Wittenberg

The Journey

Jonathan Wittenberg is rabbi of the New North London Masorti Synagogue

And the Lord had said to Abram, Get you gone from your country, and from your family, and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you
Bereshit 12:1

Sometimes I think it isn't God who says to Abraham, 'Go forth!' but simply life. For life is ruthless to us all, harrying us from the moment of conception till the breath departs at death. We are all subject to the radical equality of time, which commands every one of us 'Get thee gone!'.

Therefore it must be how we hear the words which determines whether or not they come from God. This was the view of Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh Lev of Ger, who taught that what was special about Abraham was not that God spoke to him. God speaks to everyone. It was that Abraham heard. He understood that God was there in that demand to go forth. God is a presence which transforms the nature of the journey. It is no longer merely a wandering, a path half plotted and half stumbled upon amidst the exigencies of time. It is the quest between the human and the other, between the transient and the transcendent. It is the talking and the listening between them, the arguments, the long silences, and the singing on the way.

Thus the imperative 'Go!' doesn't stand alone. Attached to it is 'lecha - to you', yielding the familiar 'lech lecha, go to yourself'. These two words are composed of the same consonants, a fact emphasised in the unvocalised, vowel-free text of the Torah, so that although they are read as lech lecha, the going and the self that we become may also be pronounced as the same. Hence what we are is our life's journey and to become ourselves we have to go. Maybe that is why, according to one interpretation, the country to which God promises to lead Abraham is not 'the land which I will show you' but 'the land where I will show you you'.

As you set out for Ithaka
Hope that your road is a long one,

wrote C. P. Cavafy, reflecting on the other great foundation journey of western literature, the Odyssey. But the archetypal Jewish journey is not a treasury of islands and sirens; it is the discovery of that 'you', 'you' the inner self, 'you' the other, 'You' God, towards whom all life travels. It is a ceaseless process; there is no homecoming - only another setting out. For as the 'you' that I discern changes the person I become, so the 'I' who sets out is no longer the same traveller going forth. I am constantly in my journey, my new departure, lech lecha till the end. Thus there is no final answer to the question 'Who am I?', only the process of discovery, the constant becoming, until death.

Even the Torah ends en route, not with an arrival but with an unfinished journey. Go up the mountain, says God to Moses, and look at the land I promised you; see it from afar and resign yourself to the fact that you're never going to get there. According to the mediaeval commentator Rashi, God orders Moses to go as soon as he has died to the burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the cave of Machpelah and tell them that the divine promise has been fulfilled; God has brought their children's children to the promised land. But it isn't true. The people have not yet entered the land. But what God has given, and what God always gives, is 'the land where I will show you you'.