Originally published in Octoboer 2020
Who are you? How do you identify yourself to other people? You might say something like — I am a doctor and I grew up in Chicago; my parents were immigrants from Cuba and I now live in Atlanta with my husband and two children. This is the kind of answer most people are looking for, and also the kind we are used to filling out on forms.
But who are you really? What is your essence, your true nature?
Avram’s first command, lekh lekha, is famously interpreted by Hasidic commentaries as “go to yourself” — go on a journey toward your deepest self. According to tradition, Avram had been engaged in a great search for the creator of the world; he had looked high and low and considered all external options, the sun, the moon, the idols around him. Now God calls to him and says — don’t look outside; look inside. If you look deep enough inside, you’ll find your own Source, you’ll find the path to Me.
But in order to find that truth, you are going to have to learn to let go of — or at least to not hold on so tightly to — certain aspects of “yourself,” all the outer trappings that you think define you, where you came from, who your parents were, how you were raised, the whole situatedness of your life, the stuff that makes you feel “grounded” — artzhekha, moladetekha, bet avikha. Your land, your birth place and your parent’s house. All of those are true and helpful to some extent — you can’t live in the world without them — but now, in order to move forward, to really know your own truth, which is the truth of your connection to the Source –now, you need to loosen your grip on all this ground, all the stuff that makes you feel situated and know who and what you are in the world.
Because all these trappings, they do ground you; they keep you firmly on the ground, static and moored and not free to move and fly and see the largeness of your self and the world around you. All that ground is also baggage that weighs you down — the legacy burdens we carry and the heaviness of our childhood wounds and all of the accumulated weight of our personal and communal history. We are imprisoned by all of it, by the expectations of our parents and culture and by the habits we developed to protect us from our insecurities and vulnerabilities. Strangely, one cannot journey lekha — toward the true self — while still holding on too tightly to our past, to artzekha, moladetekha and bet avikha.
At the same time, we do not make the journey out of nowhere. It is essential to begin here. The Torah does not merely say lekh lekha and proceed. It tells us where to start from; this ground, these trappings, these bags — these are the starting point. We begin here. They are the gateway toward something larger.
If they are the starting point, what is the destination point in this journey toward the true self? God tells Avram to go from these places, from this situatedness, el ha’aretz asher areka, to the land that I will show you. The journey lekha, toward the self, does not have a clear destination point. We are giving up a sense of groundedness for a journey toward the unknown, a place that God will — continually — show us, a place that is ever unfolding as we journey. We can’t see this place to start with. It requires great trust, a leap of faith, to move from the comfortable known environs of our external trappings toward a self that is as yet blurry and unstable, that will only reveal itself, slowly, in stages, like layers of an onion, as we make each step.
This is an awesome, scary process. We move from firm ground to something “we will be shown.” But, God tells Avram and us, the rewards are enormous. This new land, this new capacity of ours to see — to be shown (in Hebrew, the same root) — will reveal to us unimaginable greatness and blessedness. The words brachah, blessing, and gedulah, greatness, are repeated numerous times in the verses that follow, as if to create a sense of the incomprehensible vastness that we stand on the cusp of in taking such a journey.
What we are being asked to do is to move from the starting place of our small, situated human selves toward a self that is a part of the vast groundless blessedness of the divine, to move from small self to large self.
The large self is given privy to seeing and being shown vastness in all realms, to become a visionary of sorts. This is Avram’s journey. God asks him to look out on the land — like Moshe, the ultimate visionary, who stands on a mountaintop at the end of his life and sees the entirety of Israel — God asks Avram to look out east and west and north and south — to take in the entirely of the land, the entirety of space, the sheer vastness of it.
Space is but one aspect of this new vision. In respect to time, too, God offers Avram the capacity to see beyond normal human boundaries, to see into the far future — 400 years, the coming slavery and the redemption — and even speaks to him of le’olam, “eternity,” And in respect to people, too, there is a vision of vastness, the vastness of the stars and the sand, and the vastness of God’s promise that Avram would become a blessing for “all the families of the earth.”
Note that these three aspects, space, time and people, are considered by Hasidic thought to be the three categories that encompass everything, and the categories also correlate well with artzekhai, your land (space), moladetekha, your birth place (time) and bet avikha, the house of your father (people). God was showing Avram the vastness of everything that is, in all categories of existence. He was taking him beyond the narrow confines of a situated human existence to the grandness of the divine plane.
But do we even want such grandness? When we begin to imagine such visions of eternity and endlessness, we feel the urge to step back; we are frightened and overwhelmed; we feel unmoored, like we have lost the ground under us; we have a sense of vertigo at the enormity of it all.
There is something inside us, though, that is connected to all that vastness. Haye olam nata betokheinu. “God implanted in us eternal life”. The journey is lekha, toward yourself, not the usual self that we normally inhabit — the one that has ego needs and wounds, the one that bears the weight of all that baggage and carries an identity tied to a particular place and profession and role; that self is also precious and we don’t throw it away, but begin there — that’s not the self we are journeying towards in lekh lekha, but another self, a self that is made of eternity, that is already a piece of the vastness, already and always tied to the Source of all.
Taking the journey from the place of “your land” to the place of “the land that I will show you” does not mean giving up a sense of groundedness, but on the contrary, means replacing a false sense of groundedness — tied to a particular place and situation, which we know to be ultimately transient and uncertain — with a more secure feeling of eternal connection to all that exists. We may come from a certain place, but we belong everywhere. We may live for a certain time, but we are tied up in the bonds of eternal life. We may feel like a particular person with a distinct identity, but we are linked to all of humanity. We are a drop of water in an ocean. We are already a part of the vastness. Lekh lekha is the journey of remembering, being shown, again and again — while at the very same moment living in and coming from this world of situatedness — the truth of our self’s connection to all that vastness.
Photo by Yuting Gao at Pexels
