When God tells Avram “Lech lecha” he mentions three kinds of leaving:
Leave your country
Leave your birthplace
Leave your father’s house
Several scholars have noted that it seems strange to list the circles of attachment in this order. The text from Nechama Leibowitz and the commentary Haktav Vehakabala both offer an interpretation for this.
This next set of exercises and discussion plan explore these different ‘layers of leaving’.
‘Lech l’cha’ is generally taken as an expression meaning “Go forth”. But this isn’t the only way of reading it. While Lech l’cha on its own is a command (like sit! or stop!), lech on its own means ‘go’ and l’cha’ on its own generally means ‘to you’. What might these mean when put together?
In this unit we explore the following different readings of the phrase ‘Lechl’cha’.
Go forth: move forward, leave where you are (pick up your tent and go pitch it elsewhere)
Go for yourself: for your own benefit, for your own material good (financial, social, etc)
Go to yourself: discover yourself – go to greater self-understanding (as an inner existential journey – become aware of who you currently are, get in touch with yourself)
Go to the person you will become: Go toward you’re the person you will one day be (eg, your ‘better self’ or your destiny, or the person you are striving to be – as in the joke that has a mother describing her 6yr old son as ‘my son the doctor’) – this captures the idea that we are all on a journey of self-formation, and we become who we are over time.
Each of these offers a different understanding of Avram’s journey. The resources here both provide voices from within our tradition that speak to these interpretations and resources for students to apply the distinctions in their own lives and thus to come to internalize the different meanings as resources for making sense of different kinds of ‘Lech!’ in their own lives.
This text parallels strongly elements of the text in Bereshit 1:28-29. Yet there is a striking difference. In the account of creation in Bereshit, God blesses human beings and gives us dominion over all of creation, but only the plant kingdom is given to us to eat for food. In this blessing, God not only gives us plants, but also the animal kingdom as food. In this, it marks a transition for humans from being herbivores to omnivores (eating both plants and animals).
What does this transition signify? What might it say about our relationship to creation and about our nature as human beings? How do we decide what is acceptable to eat and how is this connected to our identity? To what extent are we what we eat?
This text parallels strongly elements of the text in Bereshit 1:28-29. Yet there is a striking difference. In the account of creation in Bereshit, God blesses human beings and gives us dominion over all of creation, but only the plant kingdom is given to us to eat for food. In this blessing, God not only gives us plants, but also the animal kingdom as food. In this, it marks a transition for humans from being herbivores to omnivores (eating both plants and animals). Whether we should eat meat is a contentious issue. Before delving into this issue it might be helpful to slow down and spend time reflecting on how we decide what counts as food and how we decide which foods we will eat. The issue is more complex than merely deciding between “meat or not meat”. The discussion plans and exercises here explore our relationship to food, how what we eat might affect us, and how we decide – culturally, religiously, and morally – the boundaries to what we choose to eat.
While the text now states we have permission to eat meat, there are distinctions and limits here as well – we can eat flesh, but not blood, and we will be held accountable for killing another human being. What does this transition signify? What might it say about our relationship to creation and about our nature as human beings? How do we decide what is acceptable to eat and how is this connected to our identity? To what extent are we what we eat? Does eating flesh make us more violent or is it a release that leads us to be less violent? If we start thinking that it is acceptable to kill animals will we end up thinking it is acceptable to kill people?
Both the Jewish textual tradition and philosophical discourse are animated around these questions, offering us multiple responses that can inform our inquiry
A related issue to that of eating meat concerns our relationship with animals overall. What does Judaism say about our treatment of animals; how we should relate to them and care for them? Secondary source materials relate to this question of our care for animals. These are particularly well suited to LPS (as well as being relevant to older students).
Leading Idea: Growth as the Realization of Potential
Another way of thinking about growth is as self-actualization – the realization of inner potential. This idea is also linked to Tu Bishvat. Situated at the midpoint of winter, Tu Bishvat is seen to symbolically mark the transition in trees from a period of dormancy to one of growth (and the coming of spring) in which they come to ‘realize their potential’ by sending out new growth, flowers and producing the next year’s fruits. This concept of growth as the realization of potential has led Tu Bishvat to be symbolically linked to such diverse endeavors as education (the laying of corner tones of universities), the building of Israel as nation and as a time to attend to our spiritual growth as human beings.
TuBishvat marks the ‘Birthday of trees’ – but what is it marking? Is it marking the tree’s age or the tree’s growth? In the case of trees, a tree is considered one year old on TuBishvat, even if it is planted a week before TuBishvat. This is important in Jewish law and tradition for determining when the fruit of a tree can first be eaten (fruit that ripens in its fourth year – that is, after its third Tu’Bishvat), and laws of shmitah (sabbatical year when the fruit is not harvested). Other meaning is derived from the time of year in which TuBishvat occurs – and this links it to the concept of growth. TuBishvat actually falls at the midpoint of winter – as spring approaches and the sap in trees begins to flow and trees begin to bud and flower. TuBishvat thus comes to mark a change from being in a state of latency to one of reneed growth.
Each year we get a year older – but how is this connected to growing up? When we talk about ‘growing up’, there are several ideas we might have in mind:
Growing up as getting older – the passage of time. Last year I was 8 and now I am 9 years old.
Growing up as physical development – growing physiologically from immature to mature. In children we generally also associate this with growing bigger. In older people we
Growing up as cognitive maturity – growing up as becoming wiser, more nuanced in our understanding of the world. Telling someone to ‘grow up’ in this sense is to tell them to act with more maturity.
Finally, does everything get older over time? Are there some things that don’t age or grow even as time passes?
Metaphors capture the qualities of one thing through the imagery of another (“He gave a lion’s roar”). It is more than a comparison (“His scream was like a lions roar”) becomes it suggests that the object (the lion) – or some quality of the object – is part of what he is (and expressed in the sound he made). The tree has been an important metaphor in Judaism for both describing the Torah and describing a person.
In this passage, God makes three kinds of claims regarding how Avram will be blessed:
I will bless you
You shall be a blessing
All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by/through you
What is a blessing? What does it mean ‘ to be blessed’? What might it mean to regard yourself blessed by the presence of someone else?
How might giving or receiving a blessing be different from being a blessing? Or being blessed? Whereas the activity of ‘giving or receiving blessings suggests a kind of transaction – with something being passed on from one person to another, the state of ‘being a blessing’ and ‘being blessed’ suggests some state of being – some inner active quality of a person. Here there is an interesting question – is ‘blessing’ being used transitively or intransitively? There is a difference between verbs used non-transitively (like “she is standing over there” OR “she Is crying” and transitive verbs (like “Sam was hitting the pillow”). Whereas non-transitive verbs like standing and sitting don’t have any direct object, you can only be ‘hitting’ if there is some object that directly receives your action (to hit you have to be hitting something).
A lot of verbs can be used both ways – and this seems to be the case with blessing. In this way ‘being blessed’ might grammatically be more like ‘being kind’ than ‘being happy’ – to say someone is being kind is to point to the way they interact with others and the world – it is doubtful you could be kind if you were totally alone on a desert island. (where there was no-one/nothing to be kind toward). While being happy is an inner state.
Another way of thinking about “being a blessed to others” might be the sort of thing that we might have in mind when we say of someone: “she is such a calm person, when she is here she has a calming influence on the whole room.” (or spiritual person, or agitated person – the point being their state of being has an impact on their environment). We might also think of ways that we are blessed because of the presence of other people in our lives.
How might these meanings shed light on the text?
In addition to blessing Avram, God says he will bless all who bless Avram and curse all those who curse him. This not only suggests that people (as well as God) are capable of blessing and cursing – but opens up the moral question of what it means for God to act toward others according to how others treat Avram. What are we doing when we bless and curse people? Is it just another way of wishing them something (for instance, good or bad luck?). Can the idea of giving or receiving a blessing have significance even if you don’t believe in ‘ a God who blesses or curses?
In Summary:
We might see being a blessing / being blessed as :
An Inner Quality or state (non-transitive)
Could just be in you
Could also radiate out from you (like a person who is calm can make the room calm by their presence – the person impacts their environment)
A quality you have that expresses itself outward to an object (like hitting – where you are hitting something)
Something you pass on to someone else through the act of blessing them
Through your interactions with others, their lives change in a substantial way (eg., they become a great nation)
We might understand blessing as:
Wishing or hoping
Something only God can give or something people can also give, or both.
the person being blessed is the one being changed, or the person giving the blessing is the one being changed, or both.
Having meaning only if you believe in God or having meaning even if you don’t believe in God?
These are fine (and somewhat complex) distinctions, but getting the students to think about these ideas is guided by different discussion plans – for example, the discussion plan on “giving and receiving blessings’ explores the transitivity of ‘Blessing.’
Leading Idea: Thinking about Journeys and Journeying
The books of Bereshit and Shemot are full of journeys. Several ideas are explored here that prepare students for the pieces of narratives that they will encounter. In this regard the first set of discussion plans and activities can act as induction exercises to ‘journeying’ in general, as well as being used to explore more deeply questions students raise. Attention is drawn here to two aspects of journeying that can prepare students for thinking about this Parashah.
The meaning of journeying– what makes something a journey and what does journeying involve?
The act of going on a journey – what do the things people take on a journey tell us about the kind of journey they are on?
