וַיֹּ֤אמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃
God said to Avram – Go forth from your country and from your birthplace and from your parental home
to the land that I will show you.
(Genesis 12:1)
God lays out for Avram here the basic parameters of a journey – move away from this place and towards this other place. I understand this as God’s definition of our inner spiritual journey, what we are to turn away from and what we are being invited into, the inner landscape that we are being called to move towards and inhabit.
Not Knowing
What are we being drawn towards? El ha’aretz asher areka. To the land that I will show you. An unnamed land, an unclear destination. That I will show you as you go. You won’t know where you are going. It will be a mystery, a surprise. This is a land that cannot be reached by plotting too definite a course, being too certain, having an agenda. The only agenda is God, following God wherever that leads. The journey is shown, not known, shown, slowly and gradually, not known ahead of time, and that requires of us a continual openness and humility and a willingness to sit in uncertainty with patience, to allow ourselves to have the very uncomfortable feeling of not knowing where we are going, to walk around in that, in the fog of that, to wait in the fog for things to open and reveal themselves.
But Not Alone
The thing is that even though it’s scary and uncomfortable to not know, to be on this unclear journey, it feels better than you might imagine. Because you don’t do it alone. This is crucial. God is not asking you to set out on a lonely uncertain groundless journey on your own. To the land that I will show you. I, God, will be right there with you, guiding you. The verse is emphatic in expressing this. The beginning of the verse has only you, the human, involved; the ending for you or your, kha – lekha, artzekha, moladetekha, bet avikha, kha, kha, kha – is used again and again, there is only you involved, you are by yourself, that is the place you come from, but then, as we are called into this journey, then God, too, appears, in the alef of areka, representing the I of God. I will show you. I am here with you in the fog.
The Word Areka
Areka [אראך] is one of those beautifully succinct Hebrew words that is only four letters long but includes both subject and object as well as the verb. I and you are on either end of the word, the alef at the beginning and the kaf at the end, and in the middle is the two letter verb, “show,” the bridge, the connection between you and me. God is not just inviting us into a journey here, but into a relationship. I and you.
Stuck Without God
And the truth is, this journey we are on, we can only really make it in the context of that relationship. Because think about it – Avram was in many ways stuck before he met God. He and his family had begun the journey towards the land of Canaan but they had stopped along the way in Haran and not continued, as if they could go no further on their own steam. And Avram was stuck, too, in terms of bearing fruit, unable to have children through his own efforts. These stuck places for Avram are physical manifestations of a basic truth in our spiritual journeys – we can only get so far on our own. We can only go so far on our own.
That’s what the first half of that verse represents – our own efforts – kha, kha, kha, you, you, you, on your own. You try so hard to move forward in life, to change, to improve, to succeed, but it is like quicksand sometimes, as if your feet are mired in the thick mud of your past, as if your land and birthplace and parental home – all the habits and conditioning and cultural assumptions and legacy burdens and preconceived notions and traumas of your past – all of that weighs you down so much that you are stuck, immobilized, all of that takes up so much space in your psyche that there is no room for turning towards a new land, a new possibility. And even if sometimes, through your own enormous exertion and struggle, you do make it forward out of the mud, at least a few steps, it is always only part of the way, like Avram and his family, and now, here you are in Haran, stuck and exhausted, lying on the ground and unable to proceed any further.
So God comes along and says to you – there is a way forward. I can help you. But you’re going to have to let go of some of those attachments and make space for Me. You’re going to have to be willing to not be in control and to not know exactly where you are going. It won’t be as concrete a ground as you are used to: this particular country and street address, this two story brick home. It will be a different kind of ground, the ground of relationship, a ground that can go with you wherever you go, lighter and more portable. It’s not made of mud, but perhaps of clouds; the Ba’al Haturim points out that the word areka has the same gematria, the same numerical value, as ba’ananim, “in the clouds.” We are invited to move out of the sticky mud of our past habituation and wounds, and walk “in the clouds,” walk along with God’s clouds of presence as our guides.
Our Past Conditioning
I’m not even sure we realize how sticky our past conditioning is, the way that the past and its wounds are patterned into our brains and our cells, are the lens through which we view the world – what we consider safe or dangerous, what feels hurtful to us, how we conceive of ourselves and our own worth, how we read other people and their responses to us, often very wrongly, based on our own history. To live out of this unconscious preprogrammed place leaves little room for freedom and agency and movement, for something new to emerge, for exactly the type of surprise that God calls us into here. We can’t imagine anything new from this conditioned lens because we are living in the past, and there are no surprises in the past. But God’s nature is newness, surprise, unfolding, emerging. History may repeat itself, but we don’t have to live in history. We can live in this alternate divine universe where old patterns dissolve in the spaciousness of divine possibility so that something unexpected emerges, shining and bright and so much better than we could have ever imagined.
It’s like we are living in a beautiful open field of flowers, brightly colored and magnificent, beyond anything the eye has ever seen, and we spend our lives closed off in a box with one tiny slit of a window aimed at a barren patch outside. Maybe our family has been living in this box for generations and we don’t even know there is a field. The box feels comfortable and safe and familiar to us. We are habituated to living like that, but we are missing so much.
Seeing the Vastness of Possibility
The root of areka, of showing, is ra’ah, to see. God called Avram to go out of the box and look up and around, to look north, south, east and west, to look up at the stars, to see ten generations into the future, to see all the vastness of possibility that is God. It’s a little frightening and overwhelming, yes, but it is also freeing and exciting and dynamic. Life could be so much better than we have ever imagined or tasted or expected. We have self limited our experience of it based on our past, narrowed what we can even see, but God calls us into the unexpected, the unknown, the surprises that twinkle like stars in the sky. Areka, God says, I will show you. It’s better than you thought.
It’s like if I am sitting with a client and I think I know what’s going to happen based on past experience, I am limiting what is possible; I have not allowed God into the room. God is in the surprises that arise when we relax, in the places where we let go of control and agenda and expectation, of thinking we know where we are going, so that something new can emerge that was not known before. That is the land that I will show you. If we get out of the way and let ourselves be guided, that land might just turn out to be flowing with milk and honey.
What’s Possible In Our Relationships
I invite you to feel how this might be true for you in many of your relationships, that there is this pre-patterned way of interacting based on the past. What happens if you imagine leaving the land that you came from for a moment, leaving the imprint of your personal and joint past, and following God into a new land that you have never seen before? Letting it be fresh, beginners mind, as if you are meeting for the first time, opening to possibility. Who knows? The sky and its stars are the limit. As if you are taking off a lot of heavy overcoats, one after another, so that you can move better. Or as if you are taking blinders off, or removing the film that’s been covering your eyes all this time, like cataract surgery, and suddenly everything is in color. Things feel possible. This person before you, who knows what they are capable of? And you, too, maybe you’ll surprise yourself. Maybe there is something magical possible between you that you never even imagined.
Our Thoughts
This applies to your inner thoughts, too. Our minds are so crowded by old thoughts, messaging and conditioning from the past – artzekha, moladetekha, bet avikha, that’s a lot of words and past baggage to carry – by a kind of looping energy that recreates the same inner dialogue a thousand times. Next time you are caught in such a loop, ask yourself – have I thought this thought before? Many times before? Then maybe it’s time to move out of artzekha and moladetekha, out of my conditioned habits, and open to something new. God is the key here, the essential ingredient that allows for dynamism, for movement, like a breath of fresh air in a tight room. So in that moment, maybe turning your attention from those looping thoughts towards God, maybe bringing God in on your breath, allowing the looping thought to be there, but breathing some divine space in alongside it – like the heh in the middle of the name Avraham – breathing in that divine hah into your body so your lungs expand and you get a more expansive perspective, so God can enter, turning your attention away from the habitual looping thought and toward God, towards spaciousness, towards newness, beginning to see the sparkling land of possibility that God is drawing you into, that is wanting to emerge in you, like a garden growing inside.
A New Song
Shiru lashem shir hadash. Sing to God a new song, there’s a new thought, a new song wanting to emerge. Feel how fresh and open and unencumbered and simple that feels. When it all gets super crowded and complicated in your head, just relax into God, let God clear the way. It doesn’t have to be so weighty and confusing.
El ha’aretz asher areka. Go towards the land that I will show you. Today and tomorrow and the next day, over time, letting God show you, opening to the gradual revelation that continually unfolds in you.
Photo by Victor at Pexels
Beautiful – Thank you