Divrei Rav Josh- Parshat Lekh Lekha

This past week, students in our Upper School and parents from across grades at Schechter had the opportunity to learn from Doug Rosen, the Director of Partners in Prevention at Beit Teshuvah in Los Angeles, California, the only Jewish residential treatment center for people suffering from addictions and other harmful behaviors.   At Doug’s parent program, he spoke about the importance of teaching children resilience, and how the most important thing parents can do to help their children avoid addictive behaviors is teaching children how to be OK messing up.   

To highlight this point, Doug mentioned Paul Tough’s recent book How Children Succeed, where Tough interviewed teachers in affluent suburbs about what are the essential skills to helping those children succeed.    According to Karen Fierst, a learning specialist at the Riverdale Country Day School,

“Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it okay for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens” (Paul Tough, How Children Succeed, 84).

In order to help children succeed, we must help not see their lives as pre-written, in any sense, but rather a constant exploration of opportunities, challenges, mistakes and triumphs, each of which the individual child must learn how to handle on their own, as if they were entering the world for the first time, a lesson that we learn from Abraham in this week’s parasha of Lekh Lekha.

In contrast to Parshat Noah, where we are given a specific motivation by God to call Noah into service, Parshat Lekh Lekha provides no reason for why God chooses to call Abraham at that particular time and place, and also provides no reason why Abraham was chosen over others.  For many of our commentators, knowing little about Abraham’s pre-story is considered highly problematic, and thus many of our rabbinic commentators recount legends of Abraham’s precocious monotheism, such as the midrashim where Abraham destroyed idols in his father’s idol shop, or when Abraham determined that one God existed by viewing the sun and the moon passing over one another in the sky one night.   

However, according to Nahum Sarna, it is precisely the ambiguity of Abraham’s origins that make his story so unique, for it challenges the reader to see how Abraham’s willingness to answer God’s call represented Abraham’s rebirth as a human being.   Sarna writes:

“The story of Abraham opens without an identifying formula or preliminary observation of the type that introduces the Noah narrative.   The patriarch bursts upon the scene of history with astounding suddenness.   The first seventy-five years of his life are passed over in total silence.  God’s call comes in an instant, without forewarning or preparation.  It is brief and compelling in its demands, and Abram’s immediate response marks the true beginning of his life.  The momentous event unfolds with startling rapidity, and any introductory embellishment could only have a diminishing effect” (Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, 88).

According to Sarna, by not telling us a story of Abraham’s origins, we see Abraham as someone who simply heard God’s call and answered it, willing to take the risk that would lead to the reward of a unique covenant that marked a new beginning in the Torah narrative.   

In a Hasidic commentary on this very question, Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk writes in the No’am Elimelekh that Abraham’s lack of distinguished family origins provides a paradigm for how we ought to understand the way in which each individual person should strive for righteousness.  He writes the following:

“There is one who is righteous because of the merit of his fathers or because he is always found among the righteous. The truth, however, is that one must pay no attention to this. A righteous person who is the son of a righteous person must pay no attention to the merit of his fathers, saying that the merit of his fathers will be available to him, and so he need not exert himself in the service of the Creator. He must pay no attention to this, but rather he must greatly exert and reinforce himself in his service of the Blessed One. And a righteous person who is not the son of a righteous person must not despair of himself, saying that since he lacks the merit of his fathers to help him, he will be unable to reach the service of the blessed Creator. He must not say this, but rather he must serve God, may He be blessed, and one who comes to purify himself is assisted by heaven. He must only keep in mind that God, may He be blessed, does all this for him to help him” (No'am Elimelekh, Lekh Lekha).

In this commentary, the Noam Elimelekh points out that by lacking a distinguished family lineage, we are challenged to see Abraham as one who did not allow his past to dictate his pursuit of righteousness.   Similarly, when helping people locate their moral compass, it becomes essential to help them no allow their past to dictate how they see themselves in the present, for who does not know someone from humble beginnings who rose to great heights, or someone from lofty beginnings who descended into tragedy and despair?   Instead, by seeing ourselves as an Abraham, who simply looked at their world for the first time, we are embracing the possibility of holiness in our lives that can lead us to the kind of worship of God the Torah envisions.

Abraham saw himself as someone who was going to write a new chapter in his life, one so significant that it would be as if everything that came previously was somehow insignificant.  While this analogy is extreme, it provides us a useful model for how we can educate our students, helping them see every challenge in their life as an opportunity to write a new story about themselves, an opportunity to begin anew, no matter what that child feels about their past performance.  May each of have the merit of helping see the potential that comes with making mistakes, and help them write a story where each stumbling block can become a stepping stone.   

Shabbat Shalom!