Parashat Hashavua: Lech-Lecha
Jewishness is a complicated phenomenon, which resists easy categorization. It sometimes seems like an ethnic group, although usually we don’t think of ritual commandments – so central to Judaism – as a feature of ethnicity. It sometimes looks like a religious faith with a range of expected beliefs and behaviors, although the typical way to become Jewish is not to embrace a creed, but simply to be born. The elements of Judaism which are rooted in faith, behavior, and choice sit somewhat uncomfortably alongside the elements rooted in lineage, family, and blood.
We can see the beginnings of this dynamic in this week’s parasha, Lech Lecha. God’s call to Avram comes with a promise that Avram will be the founder of a great line, a family by which all the other families of the earth will bless themselves. The central tension of Avram’s and Sarai’s life for a great many years is the fact that, despite this divine promise, they remain childless. Although later Jewish tradition will come to consider Avram as a spiritual father to many nations, when Avram voices his fears and doubts to God, he is reassured with a promise that his literal – not spiritual – offspring will be as numerous as the stars of the sky. Parashat Lech Lecha seems to emphasize above all what the Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod called “corporeal election” – the mysterious idea that God’s covenant with the world is mediated by a biological family.
And yet our parasha can also be read as the founding document of a very different conception of Judaism and Jewishness. Early in the parasha, we read that “Avram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the wealth that they had amassed, and the persons that they had acquired in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan.” The phrase “the persons that they had acquired,” which according to its plain sense refers to the slaves added to Avram and Sarai’s household, reads ha-nefesh asher asu – which could, hyper-literally, be rendered ‘the people that they had made.’ A midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 84) seizes on this possibility and observes: “Were all the inhabitants of the world to assemble, they would be unable to create even a small gnat, and yet the verse says: “And the people that they had made”?! Rather, these were the people that Avram had converted. Why, then, did it say “made” and did not say “converted”? It is to teach you that anyone who draws a convert near, it is as though he created him.” The midrash continues on to provide additional proofs that Yitzhak and Yaakov also engaged in prostylization, as if actively spreading God’s word to outsiders, and not just building the holy family, were an inseparable part of what it means to be a founding figure of Judaism. What is most striking to me about this midrash is the way it invites us to imagine a period of time, before the birth of Yitzhak, in which there was a living Jewish community composed entirely of people (including Avram and Sarai) for whom Judaism was a matter not of inheritance but of choice.
As a person who embraced Judaism as an adult, my relationship to the sources which emphasize the centrality of lineage and blood is a complicated one. I find the idea of corporeal election to be oddly compelling, even as it means that my own place in the Jewish people is in some ways marginal. But sources like the midrash we explored above mean that our understanding of what it means to be a Jew can never be simple or unequivocal. Alongside the Jewishness which is passed down from parent to child sits a Jewishness which is received by students from teachers – and according to our midrash, it is this sort of Jewishness which came first.
Rabbi Vincent Calabrese
High School Limudei Qodesh Teacher
