Lech lecha ~ the journey of a soul

~ How do you explain the opening of what God tells Avram, "lech lecha"? Why say it like this, and not just the simple "lech", "go"?

Now a big deal is made with the comparison between Noach and Avram. Which one was better? Really, we will never know. The dispute is old as the Torah itself, since the stories are linked by the very same verb, hithalech, translated as walk but really meaning walk yourself. It is the reflexive action of the root hey lamed chaf. The two stories are further connected by the word "tamim", blameless. But what if the stories are here to teach us different lessons regarding the pathways and doings of a soul? Then none need to be better than the other, they are merely complementing each other.

Noach begins blameless, and ends disgraced in his tent, cursing his own child and grandchild. Can a soul come to this world and debase itself, forget its connectedness with the presence of God? Can the pain of coming down to this world become anger and rage? Can the brokenness and destruction in the world enter own very hearts and make us blame everything and everyone, cursing our way through life? Sure.

Avram begins walking, and then receives the command to be blameless. Avram will only speak up when the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are in the brink of destruction. Avram fights for Lot, ties up his very son for an almost sacrifice, but never speaks up about those moments. Noach never ever speaks up - it is only when he curses his grandson to get to his son that he actually speaks.

So maybe Noach is a soul that stays in the first three levels, and feels no connection to people. This is why, says Menacham Mendel, that the ark has three levels. But imagine that the story of Noach wants to teach us something about raising our own souls. Imagine, for a moment, that the teivah, the ark, the boat, is a symbol for our own souls, our own words, our own prayers.

It is the very destruction caused by the waters that raises the ark, and makes it "walk". In that sense, we can only experience hope if we experience chaos and destruction. We can only raise ourselves higher if we are seeing those who are bent into pulling everything to the lowest common denominator, and we resist that, and we go high precisely because we see others going low.

Now, what about us?

This moment of the year is supposed to signify the culmination, the reaping of everything we experienced in the past two months. The beginning of the work of teshuvah, of return, that is done on the last month of the Jewish year, Elul, passing to the highs of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and the slow descent to regular, common life, of after Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.

The work of those last holidays are very much physical: we build a sukkah, in which we shake the four species, we dance with the Torah. It is all physical to counterbalance, in a way, the very intellectual and spiritual experience of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. We begin our decent to the walk of the rest of the year. That walk is symbolized by the next verse:

It is at this moment that Yaakov realizes how much he has been blessed. He is at the very stage when, after leaving Lavan's house, he has enough to separate the family into two camps, to save some in case Esau attacks. It is at this moment that he says one of the most beautiful prayers: I feel small, katonti, faced with all the blessings You, oh God, have given me.

At this point our souls, too, are called to bless our abundance. All that we take for granted. All that we worked for. All that we received.

Because in six months we begin our ascent again, by revisiting the collective birth of our people at Passover.

May we encounter the courage to name our blessings as we go into our ways, inspired by Avram and Sarai, and by Noach, and later by Yaakov. Shabbat Shalom.