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Parsha by Gura

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Lech Lecha
Bereshit ch. 12
Written Oct. 30, 2000

Avraham makes his sudden appearance: no back story, no explanations. A full grown man, he is directed by G-d in these initial chapters to leave his country, his birth-place, his family's home. The ellipsis between Avram's birth and his call leaves much room for midrash, imaginative exposition, and philosophic incursion. Some stories relay to us Avram's youth as the son of the idol maker, his father Terach. Maimonides constructs an Avram as the almost perfect model of the questing philosopher. But, in any event, Avram, to be rename Avraham, the father of a multitude of nations, heeds G-d's directions, and starts off, at 75 years old, on the adventure of building a tribe and nation dedicated to the slow unfolded of applied ethical monotheism.

G-d promises then-Avram an inheritance of the land and his descendants to be a great nation (Genesis 13:14-17: YH"WH said to Avram, after Lot had parted from him: Pray lift up your eyes and see from the place where you are, to the north, to the Negev, to the east, to the Sea: indeed , all the land that you see, I give it to you and to your seed, for the ages. I will make your see like the dust of the ground, so too could your see be measured. Up, walk about through the land in its length and in its breath, for I give it to you-Fox translation). No seed comes forth, and by chapter 15, Avram, worrying aloud that he will have no heirs, fears that his inheritance will devolve to his servant, Eliezer.

So sets the stage for one of stranger sequence in our aged text: the Covenant of the Parts.

"Now he said to him: I am YH"WH who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land, to inherit it. But he said: My L-rd, YH"WH, by what shall I know that I will inherit it? He said to him: Fetch me a calf of three, a she-goat of three, a ram of three, a turtle-dove, and a fledgling. He fetched him all these. He halved them down the middle, putting each one's half toward it neighbor, but the birds he did not halve.

"Vultures descended upon the carcasses, but Avram drove them back. Now it was, when the sun was coming in, that deep slumber fell upon Avram---and here, fright and great darkness falling upon him!

"And he said to Avram: You must know, yes, know that your seed will be sojourners in a land not theirs; they will put them in servitude and afflict them for four hundred years. But the nation to which they are in servitude---I will bring judgment on them, and after that they will go out with great property.

"As for you, you will go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good ripe-age. But in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite has not reached full measure, heretofore.

"Now it was, when the sun had come in, that there was night-blackness, and here, a smoking oven, a fiery torch that crossed between those pieces.

"On that day, YH"WH cut a covenant with Avram, saying: I give this land to your seed, from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates, the Kenite and the Kenizzite and the Kadmonite, and the Hittite and the Perizziete and the Refa'ites, and the Amorite and the Canaanite and Girgashite and the Yevusite. (Genesis 15: 7-21, Fox translation).

The traditional commentators are seemingly at a loss to understand, first, precisely what is transpiring in this story and second what is it significance. The most common traditional understanding is to view these divided carcasses, and the fiery torch passing between the cut up bodies, as a foreshadowing of the sacrificial system eventually centralized in the Temple Cult in Jerusalem (which is reinforced by the final reference to the Yevusites, the original inhabitants of the city).

Nahum Sarna, drawing from a wealth of archaeological and textual materials now available to the contemporary scholar, argues in the JPS Torah Commentary that, like many of the legal and contractual instruments recorded in Torah, this particular rite parallels common Ancient Middle Eastern legal forms. Inotherwords, as we would now sign on the dotted line (or go to a notary, or have the document signing witnessed in a significantly particular way), back then certain types of contracts became binding upon performance of set rituals.

G-d enters into a contract with Avram: He passes, so it seems, in the form of a fiery torch, between the parts of the slaughtered animals to activate the contract. The content here of the contract is clear, but terribly one-sided: Avram's descendants, after long and terrible tribulations, gain title to the land in full.

But what does G-d get from this? That may, of course, seem like a peculiar question, because, in the final analysis, what could G-d want from His creations.

Consider perhaps these first chapters of Genesis as a conscious literary creation. Creation in the first instance is not understandable: Torah doesn't presume to tell us in the first case why G-d makes the world. We are left to speculate about that matter, but warned that such speculation could drive us crazy. On the other hand, our tradition teaches that each moment of existence, each moment of continued creation, is an act of G-d's infinite and uncompromised love for us.

Come Noach, and the story of the flood, however, and we witness that G-d's love, as we experience it, is mitigated by G-d's desire for us to act in specific and holy ways. The creation of the universe becomes focused on G-d's promise to Noach to never again destroy the universe, to see that the universe runs in an orderly and predictable manner. We, in turn, need to subject ourselves to an orderly, predictable and just social life. G-d shows His great, and undeserved, love for humanity by the act of creation. Human beings, unable to return that love in any real and substantive way, are given by G-d at least the guidelines, in the Noahide laws, for acting in some small way G-d-like and holy.

Maybe that is not enough however. G-d, through the odd chance of picking a not necessarily deserving people, creates a human vehicle to bring the message of holiness, both ethical and ritual, into the human sphere. Avram, later to be Avraham, and Sarai, later to be Sarah, are the progenitors of that human vehicle. To make the point, G-d gives Avram a very physical event to demonstrate His great, and undeserved, love for both humanity and Avraham's descendants, in the form of the Covenant of the Pieces. In short order, G-d tells Avraham to reciprocate, through the brit milah, the covenant of circumcision. G-d gives the Jews the land: the Jews promise to try to make transcendent holiness immanent and material.

These are only first steps: To bear the Jewish mission, we need be more than what these covenants create, a tribe. We need be also a nation and a faith community, bearing an explicit ideological message to the world. In this parasha, we take the first steps. Human life is created and reaffirmed in the previous chapters. Now, in these chapters of Genesis, the tribe starts to crystalize. Out of the tribe of Jews will come the faith of Jews. Out of the tribulations of the Jews will come the nation of the Jews. Here, we start with the tribe. All Jews are the children of Avraham and Sarah, all Jews share, even when they don't want to, a part of the covenant of the pieces, the tribal covenant. . After the Flood, G-d gave to Noah permission to eat the flesh of animals. Now, those same animals become, in a mysterious way, the symbols of a contract that ties us to G-d's directives. Through this, we each are called to get ourselves up and go the service of the One.

Shabbat Shalom.

Dennis