By Charles A. Kroloff, Reprinted from ReformJudaism.org
The Trip of a Lifetime
Think of the most challenging journey you ever took. Was it your first day at school or when you were dropped off at sleepaway camp for the first time? Perhaps it was a trip to the hospital for surgery.I think mine was when I was ten years old. My parents were relocating from Chicago to Atlanta and they arranged for me to stay with loving relatives in northern Indiana for six months while they got "settled" in the south. Well, it may have been settling for them, but it was anything but settling for me.
I thought about that childhood experience as I read God's command to Abram in Lech L'cha: "Go forth from your land, your birthplace, your father's house, to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you. I will make your name great, and it shall be a blessing" (Genesis 12:1-2).
Abram was seventy-five years old at that point, with a family and plenty of possessions. But the uncertainty must have been overwhelming. When I confronted my journey at age ten, I had no choice. But Abram did. He could have said: "God, I'm honored that you chose me, but I'm too old. We're well established in Haran. Thanks, but no thanks."
So why did he obey God's command? And what can we learn about ourselves and the Jewish people from his journey? According to Professor E. A. Speiser, Abram's journey was "no routine expedition of several hundred miles. Instead, it was the start of an epic voyage in search of spiritual truths, a quest that was to constitute the central theme of all biblical history" (The Anchor Bible, Genesis [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964], p. 88).
If you react to this parashah as I do, you may be flooded with questions. Why is God interested in showing Abram a "particular land" and making of him a "great nation"? What does it mean to be a great nation? What are the blessings that will flow and what kind of spiritual truths was he looking for?
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