The Land Which I Will Show You

And G-d said to Avram: Take yourself (Lech Lecha) from your nation, your community and your father’s house towards the land which I will show you. And I will make you a great nation, bless you and exalt your name; it will be for a blessing. And those who bless you shall themselves be blessed, those who curse you shall themselves be cursed and, through you, all the nations of the world shall be blessed.

These three verses-- the first in which G-d addresses a Jew -- may well, on that account, be the most critical in the Bible. In them, G-d presents to Avram, and, one presumes, his descendents, the mission and purpose that G-d has in store.

The precise nature of G-d’s command may be hard to grasp. One complication is the odd, double, phrase Lech Lecha. Rashi understands it as “Go, for yourself, for your benefit”, as if G-d was not appealing to the better angels of Avram’s nature. Another, easy, observation is that the command is ordered backwards. One must first leave his parent’s home before leaving his community, and his community before leaving his nation. This can be understood, then, as a psychological, rather then geographical, command. If so, however, it could lead to its being understood as more generally applicable. In any case, as Rashi notes, Avram had already left his homeland, taken by his father, and was en-route to Canaan, which, lo and behold, turns out to be just the land G-d had in mind. While Avram would hardly be the last to hear G-d sanctify an undertaking anyways underway, one would like to imagine that there was more at play here.

It is tempting – one cannot but question whether the land we call Israel is indeed what is here promised – but probably ultimately foolish to read the “I will show you” as forever in the future. Rashi, more modestly, explains that the term was used to make the Promised Land more desirable. This explanation is far from innocent. Something fundamentally undesirable may become desirable when mystery and tension are added, but something fundamentally desirable needs, wants, no such artifice.

Parenthetically, the command of the Posuk is the conceit of the Scientist: A scientist must separate himself from the biases of one’s own and follow the truth where-ever it leads. That Avram is portrayed in the Midrash as a natural philosopher is then not irrelevant. Nor is it irrelevant that the where-ever-it-leads winds up being the original destination and the separation from one’s own in this Posuk, becomes the creation of a new nation – a new subjectivity – in the next.

The blessings of the second verse – fecundity, wealth and fame – are not, Rashi points out, blessings in their own right, rather they are compensations for the rigors of travel. One can go farther then Rashi and note that the three blessings roughly map to the three goings-out in the first Posuk.

Be that as it may, it leaves the third verse as, ultimately, the explanation of the purpose of Avram’s mission. The verse appears not entirely self-consistant – if nations are cursing Avram and, thus, themselves, cursed, then all the nations of the world are not blessed. Perhaps the first two clauses can be understood as a historical process through which the final one will come about.

Strauss writes the following: “The emergence of nations made it possible that Noah’s Ark floating alone on the waters covering the whole earth be replaced by a whole, numerous, nation living in the midst of the nations covering the whole earth.” The limit of that comparison is precisely the difference between Noah – the Tzadik im Peltz – and Avram.