A D’var Torah for Parshat Lech Lecha by Rabbi David Dunn Bauer
Why does God call Abram to travel, why use the phrasing “Lech lecha” (literally, “walk towards yourself”), and why does Abram say yes?
To those familiar questions, I’m adding one that I have never posed before: What if Abram hadn’t been able to leave?
In answer to the first question, a famous and comedic midrash upstages the Torah’s laconic introduction of Abram at the end of Parshat Noach. Abram mocks customers at his father’s idol factory. He asks the age of one, and when told the man is 50, responds, “Woe to such a man! You are 50 years old and would worship a day-old object?!” (Bereshit Rabbah, 38:13) God chooses Abram for his skepticism of factory-made idol-worship and his curiosity about the possibility of a single, eternal, living God.
In a midrash on the opening verse of Lech Lecha (Bereshit Rabbah 39:2), Rabbi Berekiah adds poignancy and beauty to our understanding of Abram’s character, emphasizing not only Abram’s potential, but also the absolute necessity that Abram leave home and travel with God.
What did Abraham resemble? A phial of myrrh closed with a tight-fitting lid and lying in a corner, so that its fragrance was not disseminated; as soon as it was taken up, however, its fragrance was disseminated. Similarly, the Blessed Holy One said to Abraham: ‘Travel from place to place and thy name will become great in the world’: hence, ‘Lech lecha.’
God senses an irresistible appeal to Abram’s spirit that, to be appreciated, needs to be freed from its constrictive surroundings. Abram isn’t at home in Ur, his spirit is imprisoned there, sealed up and cast away as if worthless. I don’t picture an abandoned bottle of perfume. I picture Abram himself, lying asleep under a blanket, in the dark corner of an airless cell.
Sign up to receive (M)oral Torah in your inbox each week.
If the midrashim tell us why God calls Abram, the Izhbicer Rebbe (1801-1854, Poland) gives a strikingly beautiful explanation of why Abram agrees to go:
Abraham Avinu wanted to know just where the essence of his life was intensely joined to God and how far it reached. Thus God responded to him, “to the land which I will show you,” meaning that you are joined to me in a place called “which I will show you.” For God has no end, God’s endless light will continually increase within you, and this you will find in the land of Israel.
Abram senses the immensity of God but doesn’t yet grasp the truth of God’s infinitude. More than that, Abram knows there is more of God and of himself to be experienced. Abram feels his own unrealized potential. All that curiosity, that religiosity, that intoxicatingly fragrant essence of life — what if it had to remain trapped in a place where it could never be freed and his potential never fulfilled?
I am profoundly touched by these depictions of Abram’s and God’s mutual yearning, but I want to point out that Abram’s acceptance of God’s offer is an exercise of his patriarchal privilege. He not only is free to move (literally, to walk) wherever he chooses, he gets to take his whole family and entourage with him. He can leave home yet take with him all of home’s comforts. When it becomes prudent to separate from someone, from his nephew Lot, Abram can do so with ease and generosity.
Of all the places I have served in a rabbinic capacity, the maximum-security prison where I serve now is the most religious. As a chaplain, I teach Jewish text, practice, and tradition to anyone who is curious. I work in the most racially, religiously, and culturally diverse community I have ever encountered. Without irony, I say that prison is full of Abrahams, people (mostly men of color) of humor, curiosity, and awareness of the immensity of God. To learn with them is to encounter extraordinary imaginations and intellects, to inhale the ravishing fragrance of myrrh. This precious essence is sealed not in a fragile phial but behind steel, shatterproof glass, and razor-wire. I see prisoners who care about the good of the world. I have learned that prisoners are not their crimes. Americans need to know that prisoners are not the same at age 50 or 60 that they are at 18 or 23. They change, but remain prisoners, unable to move.
Find more commentaries on Parshat Lech Lecha.
What if Abram had been called but simply couldn’t leave?
In the Torah, God renews Abram’s vitality and Sarai’s fertility in old age. In modern-day America, many people whose essence of life we sorely need to encounter and nurture will die before they can bless the world with their beauty. It’s called death by incarceration.
We celebrate Abram’s call, Lech lecha. Walk towards yourself. Walk towards the essence of your spirit and the light of the Holy One within you. I feel the irony of that call to a random idol-maker’s son, when we as Americans are conditioned to bristle with fear or suspicion when we hear “Let him walk” said about someone in prison.
When we vote, in this election or in any future one, we need to press candidates on prison reform. We need to elect candidates who will end mandatory minimum sentences, who will increase funds for education, treatment, and support of the incarcerated. We, as a people, need to pay attention to the individuals we imprison, to stop warehousing them. We need to reverse the process of mass incarceration and fund the process that returns citizens to their lives.
I believe without a doubt that countless Abrahams are imprisoned here, have done their teshuvah, and that many have heard the call of the God of peace, justice, and imagination. We can no longer afford to prevent them from answering. We need our system to evolve to the same degree these people have, so that when they are called, we can let them walk.
Rabbi David Dunn Bauer is a member of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and served as Director of Social Justice Programming for Congregation Beit Simchat Torah 2013-2017. Based in the Philadelphia area, he writes and teaches — primarily on Queer Jewish thought and practice — and has worked as a prison chaplain since 2019.
