Excerpted from Rabbi Aaron Goldscheider’s Torah United: Teachings on the Weekly Parasha from Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and the Chassidic Masters, co-published by OU Press and Ktav Publishing House
Dowsing for God
In God’s first call to Avraham, He charges him with the words lech lecha (Genesis 12:1), conventionally translated as “go for yourself.” It would have been enough to communicate to Avraham that he should go to the land that God would show him by simply ordering lech, “go.” What did God intend by adding lecha?
A Clean Break
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik understood lecha to add an air of finality to the command lech. “Go for yourself” meant that Avraham had “to leave the past, to blot out his memory, to emigrate from his country to a new country.” If God had only said lech, “go,” Avraham might have understood that he was to journey to one place but then could continue on his way. Lech lecha makes it final: stake your place in the world. As Rabbi Yosef Bechor Shor phrased it: “Abandon your land entirely; do not entertain the notion of ever returning to it!”
The Rav found support for this from the lover’s charge to his hesitant beloved: “Rise up (kumi lach), my love and fair one” (Song of Songs 2:10). Lach in this context emphasizes the finality of the action. “Enough, let’s go already” he says to her. And thus did God say to Avraham.
Complementing this reading is the Rav’s observation that lecha, “for yourself ” in the singular, connotes “by yourself.” Avraham had to leave everything familiar behind, anything that rooted him in his old life. This is made clear from the specification: “from your land, and from your birthplace, and from your father’s house” (Genesis 12:1).
This notion fits the well-known designation of Avraham as ha-ivri, the Hebrew. Literally, the epithet ivri (עבִרְִי ) means from the other side (עֵברֶ) of the river. Originating in Mesopotamia, Avraham was from the eastern side of the Jordan. But does it just mean “Avraham the immigrant”? The Rav believed that it marked Avraham as different, as someone who charted a distinctive lifestyle that stood in stark contrast to everyone else. That is why the Jews will forever be called Ivrim, for we are a people of unique beliefs, behavior, and goals.
To the Land of Promise
Rashi interpreted lecha, “for yourself,” to mean that the journey would be for Avraham’s own benefit. “There I will make you a great nation; here, you will not merit children.” The Talmud explicitly states that the special merit of the Holy Land benefited Avraham. But why did Avraham need to be in the Land to receive this blessing?
The seminal medieval philosopher and poet Rabbi Yehudah Halevi explained in his Kuzari that the Land of Israel is uniquely suited for the encounter between God and man, given its special metaphysical properties. In his famous dirge “Tziyon Ha-lo Tishali,” Halevi wrote: “The air of your land is the breath of life for our souls,” and many other medieval rabbinic figures adopted this line of thinking about the land’s holiness.
In his eulogy for Rabbi Wolf (Ze’ev) Gold, a leading figure in Religious Zionism and a signatory of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the Rav said:
I will never forget the evening in 5695 [1935] when I visited Rabbi Gold in Ramat Gan in Eretz Yisrael. He took me out to the orange groves near his house. It was a beautiful night, the sky was a perfect blue and there were endless stars. The bright moon of Eretz Yisrael shone all over the enchanted beauty. From afar we could see the lights of the new all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv glistening in the dark. The lights were telling us the thrilling and intoxicating news of the rebuilding of the Holy Land. Overwhelmed with emotion, Rabbi Gold gazed toward the horizon and then turned to me and said: “Whoever does not feel the presence of God in Eretz Yisrael on this beautiful night while looking at the magnificent moon and at these beckoning stars, breathing the clear and pure air filled with the fragrance of blossoming growth, and above all when looking at the glistening lights of the city that was built entirely by Jews, is simply blind.”
Rabbi Gold continued, “Rav Yehudah Halevi was right when he said that prophecy flows unhindered in Eretz Yisrael and we need only a proper vessel to receive its message.”
As we stood there, Rabbi Gold picked up a small pebble and kissed it, to fulfill Rav Abba’s dictum in the Talmud that he would kiss the rocks of Akko. That night, I thought to myself how insignificant I was compared to this special Jew who was able to experience the glory of God through the grandeur of the landscape of the Land of Israel.
The atmosphere of the Land of Israel is redolent of and with God.
A Natural Divining Rod
This explains why God said “to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1), usually understood to mean that Avraham was not informed of his destination. Rashi said its identity was withheld “to make it beloved in his eyes.” The Ramban explored this a bit more deeply. He theorized that Avraham was not told where to go and wandered until he settled on Canaan, “not knowing that this was the land about which he was commanded.” Rabbi Soloveitchik elaborated that the journey was not linear, so that Avraham explored many countries, wondering if he had found the place that God had intended. At that point, God confirmed that he had found it by promising him, “I shall give this land to your offspring” (Genesis 12:7).
The Rav pointed to a strikingly similar scenario later in Avraham’s life. When God commanded Avraham to sacrifice Yitzchak, He said to do so “on one of the mountains which I shall tell you” (Genesis 22:2). Apparently, Avraham would need to identify it intuitively.
What is the significance of Avraham locating these holy sites on his own? The Rav thinks the notion that kedushah, holiness, is an attracting force might be “the greatest discovery made by Avraham.” The fact that Avraham could find his way to the holy sites without guidance suggests that “the Almighty has implanted in the Jew a sensitivity to kedushah, to the holy.” In other words, the Jew naturally yearns for holiness and seeks to uncover and recognize it even when on the surface it is not apparent. This further indicates that knowledge of God is not merely abstract and intellectual but passionate and experiential.
This explains why Jews have a special place in their hearts for the Land of Israel and leave reason at the door in all that concerns it. It is our special place, a place where Avraham would go to birth our nation:
[O]ur relationship to Eretz Yisrael is that of segulah. Whenever segulah comes to the forefront, to the foreground, ratiocination resigns. You cannot rationalize events which revolve around segulah. There is an element of diminuendos, of the frighteningly strange, and of the hidden ineffable in the segulah’s charisma.
Exploring the Rav’s Insight
What are we to make of this somewhat mysterious notion that a Jew has an internal divining rod that leads him to holiness? The Rav asserts that “there is an eternal commitment in the Jew to the Almighty,” whether conscious or not, which he identified as what Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidut calls ahavah tiv’it: “a natural instinctual drive and urge in the Jew to find God.”
In Tanya, Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liady, the Alter Rebbe, explained that every Jew has an inherent drive to seek God and holiness by virtue of being a descendant of our forefathers. This longing is not logical or rational because it emanates from the part of our soul that in kabbalistic thought is beyond reason. It is “wisdom” (חכָמְָה) of our soul, the “power of the what” (כחֹּ מָה), that is to say, that which one cannot even ask “what” about. It is a simple desire embedded in each and every Jew to unite with God. In the same way the flame of a candle seeks to jump off the wick to unite with the source of elemental fire above, the Jewish soul yearns to leave the body and unite with God.
Like a nomad in the desert who can find his way to water, Avraham was able to discover holiness in the spiritually desolate world of polytheism. We, his descendants, have been gifted this skill for discerning holiness, but it often remains underutilized. Like Avraham, we need to be called to use it in our lives. And so lech lecha is not only a command to Avraham, but to every one of us. It is imperative that each and every one of us seek out what is holy, even when there is no one providing us with map, and surely no X’s marking any spots.
Two simple words, lech lecha, have resonated in the minds and hearts of our people for thousands of years. As the famed Kotzker Rebbe once taught, not only did Avraham hear this call from heaven, but in every generation we are summoned to hear these words and allow them to pierce our hearts.
