All of us live in an internal world, influenced by our senses, and by the learning we received in our youth. Lech Lecha, Go! Go to yourself! Is a great translation of our Parsha's name. The Lubavitcher's weekly sermon refers to it (chabad Parshah) in those terms, the JTS weekly Parasha deals with it (Download Torah From JTS), Nehama Leibowitz deals with it, Rashi deals with it. They all think of it as a search for self-discovery, hence go to yourself, it is a separation from our country's mores, our family mores, and a break with all ties. It is to go boldly into new life of experiences where the ultimate goal is unknown (אֶל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ). I love the sentiment, the adventure. Life may be a series of pearls threaded through our having gone through them as we heard in some very good previous sermons, but Abraham's life is one hell of a Pearl and adventure.
I have always had problems with this Parasha and the following one. In them Abraham performs the most despicable acts any human can perform. He passes off wife as his sister twice, and does so to obtain advantage and escape danger. He attempts to sacrifice his son to his God, just as all the Canaanites were doing to Moloch. He also does the most admirable act a person can perform, he challenges even God to both protect the innocent and show us, in human terms, his justice. I love the challenger, but who is the pimp? And who is this father who can sacrifice his own son? In Lech Lecha I'll deal with the first problem, passing his wife as his sister. I wish I had a resolution to the second problem, his willingness to sacrifice his son.
The Rabbis are not of great help in explaining this behavior. The paragraphs in question are Gen 11:10-12:20.
Nehama Leibowitz in her studies on BERESHIT passes over this item.
Rashi spends a paragraph telling us about Abraham's צניעות.
וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר הִקְרִיב לָבוֹא מִצְרָיְמָה וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל שָׂרַי אִשְׁתּוֹ הִנֵּה נָא יָדַעְתִּי כִּי אִשָּׁה יְפַת מַרְאֶה אָתְּ (Gen 12:11)
Now it came to pass when he drew near to come to Egypt, that he said to Sarai his wife, "Behold now I know that you are a woman of fair appearance.
Rashi gives 4 explanations for this sentence:
Rashi quotes Tanhuma, which tells us that until now he did not recognize her beauty because of their mutual modesty. Tanhuma also relates "שלא היה יודע אותה קודם לכן" he did not know her (in the biblical sense) before this. This may explain his lack of children into advanced age.
A second explanation is that the hardships of travel make one unattractive, yet she remained beautiful.
The third that the plain meaning of the words (peshat) (from Gen. Rabbah 40:4) is that they were going into a dangerous place full of ugly dark people, the brothers of Kushim, who were unacquainted with beautiful women: "ועכשיו אנו באים בין אנשים שחורים ומכוערים, אחיהם של כושים, ולא הורגלו באשה יפה"
I find this paragraph a bit jarring because of the non-Politically Correct expressions involved. Ramban criticizes the quote on the grounds that Abraham did the same thing in Canaan, where the racial component was missing.
The next 2 Sentences are the really troublesome ones:
12. And it will come to pass when the Egyptians see you, that they will say, 'This is his wife,' and they will slay me and let you live.
יב. וְהָיָה כִּי יִרְאוּ אֹתָךְ הַמִּצְרִים וְאָמְרוּ אִשְׁתּוֹ זֹאת וְהָרְגוּ אֹתִי וְאֹתָךְ יְחַיּוּ:
13. Please say [that] you are my sister, in order that it go well with me because of you, and that my soul may live because of you.
אִמְרִי נָא אֲחֹתִי אָתְּ לְמַעַן יִיטַב לִי בַעֲבוּרֵךְ וְחָיְתָה נַפְשִׁי בִּגְלָלֵךְ
Rashi makes matters worse by explaining: למען ייטב לי בעבורך: יתנו לי מתנות So that it go well with me means "they will give me presents." The question can then be raise: Presents for what? Her body?
Sforno comments that the Egyptians will try to wed her, and give him gifts so that he will allow the marriage.
Nachmanides is bothered by this as well. He asks why Egypt is different from Canaan, where Abraham was already residing, especially since he seems to have the same problem in Canaan later on with another prince (we translate Avimelech as my father is a king, hence a prince, not a name). He dismisses the reasoning that it was done because Egyptians, being ugly are adverse to beauty. He argues that perhaps the problem was restricted to the city where the king dwelt, since it may have been the custom to bring pretty women to him, after disposing of their husbands.
Tanhuma (פרשת לך לך,מדרש תנחומא סימן ה) tells us a delightful story about Abraham trying to smuggle Sarah into Egypt in a closed barrel and what happened with (המוכסין) customs. Abraham, the story goes, hides Sarah in a box. Customs officials ask him:
What is in the box? He responds: Barley
They said, it must be wheat! He answers, charge me for the wheat.
They said, it must be Peppers! He responds, charge me for peppers.
They said, it must be gold! And then demand that he opened the barrel.
The story then continues with Abraham and Sarah both praying to God for help and God responding by reassuring them, and by actively protecting her from any harm.
The Rabbis use Haggadah to explain Abraham's decision. The story does not sound true to me, it is totally unsatisfactory, although entertaining.
Since my traditional sources seemed insufficient, I turned to modern science and archeology for a new Drash, one that would save Abraham as my hero
I highlighted most of the notes on this portion of the Anchor's bible, as translated by Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, one of the editors of the New JPS Version of the Tanach. In the notes on this section he discusses a Hurrian custom where the bonds of marriage were strongest when a wife/sister relationship was involved through the adoption of the wife by her future/present husband or by her future father in law before the wedding. This custom, if practice by Abraham in Haran, would mitigate my problems with the stories since we could claim the writers of the bible had simply lost the context of the stories they received by word of mouth, and invented the "Abraham and Isaac are cowards" spin to account for his incomprehensible actions.
To quote Speiser: "Both Abraham and Isaac were married to women who enjoyed a privileged status by the standards of their own society. It was the kind of distinction that may well have been worthy of emphasis in the presence of their royal Hosts."
There have been neigh Sayers to Speiser's position. I found the Tyndale Biblical Archeology Lecture of 1974 where M. J. Selman tries to show Speiser wrong. But even if he is correct, a drash is not about absolute objective truth, it gives us an opportunity to create a meaningful world for ourselves, one which matches our understanding of the world and seems reasonable. The Rabbis preferred magic and direct intervention by God. I find Archeology, and a misunderstanding of orally transmitted history to explain Abraham's behavior more convincing. All of us who love the Torah, and try to make it part of our life, need to make sense of it, struggle, if necessary, to understand its meaning at every level we can reach. For me, the Hurrian sister/wife custom does it. It leaves my hero Abraham a moral person, who when asked: Is this your wife? Could answer proudly: Yes, and we have the best marriage because she is also my adopted sister!
Lech Lecha begins with the imperative: Go, go to yourself, separate your thinking from the multitude, even the family, and strike out on your own to who knows where. We need each of us make sense of the world we live in, create a real, perhaps fanciful, but livable environment in which we have been true to our principles, and true to ourselves.
I still don't know how to account for the Akeda. My journey is not over. Hopefully I'll someday understand.
Shabbat Shalom.
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