Go Forth
Jerusalem, 1993
Rabbi Ben Hollander stands at the front of the classroom in a wardrobe from the 1970s. You can tell, based on a person’s wardrobe, when they emigrated to Israel.
This 1958 graduate of the seminary is tasked with teaching us first-year rabbinical students—to be ordained in 1998—Biblical Commentary
Our Bibles are open to Genesis 12:1—which, in Jewish circles (as some of us recently learned and some of us already knew) is referred to by the first significant words of the portion—“Lech Le’cha.”
Lech like the disapproving informal exclamation used to express disgust or distaste—blech. L’echa like “To Life”—l’chaim—just without the eye-eem part.
Rabbi Hollander asks, again, the question he introduced at the top of the lesson—? מה קשה לרש”י—Mah kasheh l’Rashi?”
We haven’t a clue.
—
In some Bibles in English, Genesis 12 bears the title “The Call of Abram.”
Chapter headings were added to the Bible in the 1200s. Chapter and verse numbers (even more recent) were introduced in the mid-1500s.
And as the Torah also pre-dates Arabic numerals (and the idea of a second set of scripts to indicate numbers), Judaism developed a different system for navigating the Torah. The approximately 80,000 words of the five books of Moses are divided into 54 sections.
Each parshah (Hebrew for “portion”)—some longer, some shorter—is named after the first few important words in it.
In this case, it’s Lech Le’cha.
God tells Abe to “Go forth.”
“Lech”—literally means “Go/Get out”
and
“Le’cha”—“to yourself.”
—
As a class, we sound out the Hebrew and translate as we go: “Abram” “Go/Get out” and “to yourself” and “leave.”
And then a flurry of words—“of your country” and “from your family,” and “from the house of your father” and finally “to a land” “I will show you.”
We get the idea. God is calling the progenitor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to leave everything and follow God’s command.
—
With intonation that makes it seem like the answer should be obvious if he were to just say it again with an upbeat tone, Rabbi Hollander repeats in both Hebrew and English, “So, what worries Rashi? Mah kasheh l’Rashi?”
He’s looking for us to tell him why Rashi, the medieval French commentator, made a comment on this text, knowing that Rashi comments only when he finds something problematic therein.
He softens, and it seems he is musing “how can I explain what’s clearly obvious to me to those who just don’t see it?”
He explains, “What’s bothering Rashi is the seeming linguistic error. Why would God list three parts—leave your country, leave your family, leave your father’s house—where God could have used just the word country, which would have included the others.”
We make some sounds of affirmation.
—
Here’s the idea: if the words in this scroll are exactly what God wanted written—therein perfect—then any apparent imperfection is there to teach us. Restated: if every jot and tittle of the Bible was given by God, then Rashi, the medieval commentator, can conclude that the apparent extra words are there for a reason.
An example: later in the book, Joseph’s brothers leave him in a well. The text describes this well as “Empty and with no water in it.”
Why would God reiterate? If the well is empty, it has no water. Rashi explains this apparent redundancy of “no water” to mean there was something else in it—scorpions.
So why this three-part command: “leave your country,” “leave your family,” and “leave your father’s house.”
Rabbi Hollander explains this to mean that when God calls a person, God requires them to “Go forth from everything large, to what is held—even held close, and even that one must be willing to not follow one’s own father’s house—to lose one’s very one sense of self.
A beautiful moral hidden in the apparent mistake in the text.
Beautiful.
—
I love this story.
Love, love, love, love.
I love the story’s nudge toward the wisdom of what one must accomplish upon taking a leap of faith—how it is an abandonment/a going out/a leaving/of oneself—from the expansive to the local to the individual.
This normal aligns with my lived experience of what it feels like to listen to the still small voice advising me to abandon everything familiar and live a different life.
—
I also call bullshit.
I must go forth from my tradition and not follow.
The Bible—the most popular book of all time (which means it deserves respect whether you believe it is divine or not)—is not the inerrant word of God.
It is errant words about God written by people.
Looking for extra lessons hidden in “seeming errors and redundancies” is doubling down on a leap from reason.
The Bible is a book of words about God written by people.
No one was trying to hide messages in it DaVinci Code like.
—
My insistence to not pretend that the Torah is of divine origin—and furthermore that there aren’t secret, hidden, morals and lessons in it— separates me from my colleagues. And, at times makes me feel a bit lonely.
I have left.
I have gone forth.
It is good.
-💙rB
