Parashat Lech Lecha - First Aliyah
Read the biblical text and try to understand it on your own, before reading the commentary.
Abram sets out with a promise that he will become a great nation and receive blessing. He reaches Canaan, hears that the land will be given to his descendants and builds altars to God. Then famine comes. Before the first aliyah is over, he goes down to Egypt, and as he approaches it he fears being killed because of Sarai’s beauty. How do thirteen verses take us from such a far-reaching promise to fear for one’s very life?
Leaving becomes more personal
me’artzecha umimoladtecha umibeit avicha
Translation: From your land, from your birthplace and from your father’s house.
Excerpt from Genesis 12:1
The command names a land, a birthplace and a father’s house. Ramban explains why all three must be mentioned: it is hard to leave the land where one lives, along with the friends and loved ones there; harder still when it is also one’s birthplace; and harder again when one’s father’s family lives there. Abram is therefore called to leave all of these out of love for God. In this reading, the words move progressively closer to what is hardest to leave behind. Ramban on Genesis 12:1
Against this detailed account of what must be left, the land to which Abram is sent is not named in the command itself:
el ha’aretz asher ar’eka
Translation: To the land that I will show you.
Excerpt from Genesis 12:1
We can hear in the verse a gap between the familiar, with its names and relationships, and a future still to be revealed. Abram leaves Haran at seventy-five, with Sarai, Lot, their possessions and the people accompanying them. He is leaving a life already built. Genesis 12:1-5
Who are the people they made in Haran?
ve’et hanefesh asher asu veCharan
Translation: And the people whom they had made in Haran.
Excerpt from Genesis 12:5
How can someone make a person? Rashi offers two readings and distinguishes between them. In the plain sense, these are male and female slaves they had acquired, and the word “made” means acquiring and gathering. In the midrashic reading, these are people they brought under the wings of the Divine Presence: Abram converts the men and Sarai converts the women, and Scripture regards them as though they had made those people. Rashi on Genesis 12:5
The midrash gives Sarai’s work a place alongside Abram’s. In this reading, already in Haran both are working among people and bringing them closer to faith. The journey to Canaan carries with it the relationships formed there.
When famine comes to the promised land
vayehi ra’av ba’aretz vayered Avram Mitzraymah lagur sham ki chaved hara’av ba’aretz
Translation: There was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.
Rashi interprets the famine as confined to that land, intended to test Abram: would he question the words of God, who had commanded him to come to Canaan and now brings him to leave it? In this interpretation, the test concerns the gap between the command and what Abram encounters as he fulfills it. Rashi on Genesis 12:10
Near Egypt, another fear arises. Abram fears that the Egyptians will kill him to take Sarai, and asks her to say she is his sister. Here Ramban offers sharp criticism: in his view, Abram committed a great sin inadvertently by exposing his wife to the danger of a transgression out of fear for his own life. He should have trusted God to save him, his wife and all that was his. Ramban also regards leaving the land because of the famine as a sin, and even connects the act to the decree that Abram’s descendants would be exiled in Egypt. Ramban on Genesis 12:10
The aliyah ends with Abram’s request to Sarai, before we learn what will happen in Egypt. Read in sequence, the opening promises now sound alongside these words:
vechaytah nafshi biglalech
Translation: And my life will be spared because of you.
Excerpt from Genesis 12:13
The future of a great nation remains in the background. In the foreground stand a man afraid for his life and a woman on whom his request places a decisive role.
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