Parshah Commentary
This week’s parshah, Lech Lecha, was also the weekly Torah reading that followed the 2016 election. I remember feeling then that its description of God’s assurances to Abraham rang hollow in the face of my shattered liberal optimism. Now, I find myself an unsurprised but still despondent leftist, grappling with the déjà vu of returning to this parshah after the same awful result, consumed with the feeling that we have been unable to collectively change course.
The rabbinic commentators are also familiar with this feeling of living the same events over again. In fact, they read this disconcerting sentiment into the text of our parshah. Lech Lecha tells the story of Abraham’s early relationship with God, as mediated through the divine promise of land and progeny. The rabbis understand the events of this parshah as prefigurative: “You find that everything that is written in Abraham’s regard is written regarding his descendants.” Thus, just as Abraham travels to Egypt from the promised land of Canaan fleeing famine, so does his grandson Jacob and his family. Just as Abraham is threatened with death by Pharaoh, so are all the Israelite firstborns in Egypt. And just as Abraham leaves Egypt wealthy after conflict, so do the Israelites after their liberation from slavery.
The medieval mystical commentator Nachmanides follows the midrash in interpreting the events of this parshah as anticipating later parts of the Israelites’ story, employing the medieval commentarial principle of “maaseh avot siman l’banim” (“the actions of our ancestors are an omen for their children”), which holds that the stories of the core characters of Breishit often foreshadow later parts of the Torah. But while the rabbis of the midrash focus on Abraham, Nachmanides calls attention to our other ancestor featured in this parshah: Sarah. As Abraham and his clan enter Egypt from Canaan, he turns to his wife and asks her to lie for him: “If the Egyptians see you, and think, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me and let you live. Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you.” Sarah complies, and is immediately captured and taken into sexual slavery by Pharaoh. God (not Abraham—he is too busy being showered with wealth in the form of livestock) intervenes on her behalf, inflicting a plague on Pharaoh and his household. This prompts the Egyptian ruler to realize what has happened. He summons Abraham to ask why he lied, and then sends him and Sarah away, with Abraham retaining all the bounty he had accumulated.
Nachmanides criticizes Abraham for his behavior, writing that he sinned in putting his wife in such a horrific situation out of fear for his own life. Abraham’s actions, according to Nachmanides, prefigure the later enslavement of the Jewish people: “It was because of this deed that the exile in the land of Egypt by Pharaoh was decreed for his children.” In the hands of Nachmanides, the principle of “maaseh avot siman l’banim” is thus not simply a means of noting narrative foreshadowing, but acquires a moral, causal valence. The feminist Torah scholar Rabbi Dr. Bonna Devora Haberman z”l extends this reading to speak to the way that harmful actions recur, casting our inability to break patterns as central to our wrongdoing. Writing about Abraham’s actions and the future enslavement of his descendents in Egypt, Haberman notes, “Generations later still, many Jews and non-Jews continue to practice the same abuses in our families, communities, and between nations.” That is to say, there are consequences when we fail to learn the lessons of the past, and the repetition of earlier misdeeds will lead to catastrophe.
We need to learn how to break patterns in order to create structural change, rather than taking pride in small wins that we soon discover are easily reversed. Yes, Sarah was freed from Pharaoh, but we have no indication that Abraham repented, or that he taught his children a different way of behaving; indeed, a few short generations later, Sarah’s descendants were back in Egypt, suffering as she did. We can sink into the same patterns, read the same parshiyot, and end up back in the same narrow places. But we can also seek out the places where our ancestors broke free and never went back—such as Abraham’s bold decision in our parshah to renounce the idolatrous ways of his parents and commit himself to the God of the Jewish people. There are moments when iconoclasm shifts the course of the world, when our stories change permanently. And so yes, we read the same sections of the Torah each year. But we read them as different people in a different world. And this in and of itself can be the start of change.
Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.
