Post by Rabbi Neil on Oct 15, 2021 21:11:26 GMT
On this Shabbat Lech L’cha, I find myself returning to a Franz Kafka passage that I quoted over the High Holy Days, a passage which says, “I gave orders for my horse to be brought round from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call, I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking, ‘Where are you riding to, master?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.’ ‘And so you know your destination?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘didn’t I say so? Away-From-Here, that is my destination.’ ‘You have no provisions with you,’ he said. ‘I need none,’ I said, ‘the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’”
The most likely meaning of the passage is an allegory to the High Holy Days, to the journey of repentance that should be transform us every single day. On the week where the Torah portion is Lech L’cha, though, this passage reads differently to me. In Lech L’cha, God calls to Avram to go forth from his land, his birthplace, his ancestral home, and journey to a land that God will show him (Gen. 12:1). When he does that, God promises to make of him a great nation and to bless him. The name Avram is a pointer to who this man truly is – the Hebrew verb avar means to cross over, to transcend. We, the Jewish people, are descended from him, thus we are the ivrim, the Hebrews, meaning those who cross over, those who transcend. In short, Jews don’t settle. Historically speaking, that has been the case not through our own desires but through repeated expulsions and oppression. So, once we are able to settle physically, we tend to embrace being settled, we relax into the comfortable and comforting. We feel, fairly enough, that we’ve earned some repose.
During a pandemic, we have for a year and a half very much been going “away from here,” with “here” being our previously established social lives, religious experiences and, indeed, the way we run our daily lives. We were expelled from normality in a similar way to how Jews of the past were expelled from their homes and their land. Change was forced upon us, just as it is forced upon Avram in this week’s Torah portion. What Avram doesn’t do is fight the change, or opt out of the journey, because to journey, to transcend, is the Jewish experience. Instead, he brings with him that which is familiar – he takes his family, his possessions, and his companions – and journeys with them. Total change without bringing that which has been familiar to us into the future with us can be deeply disturbing, even traumatic. The challenge, of course, is how to bring the past into the future without totally defining the future by the past and also without creating a future that is untethered from the past. That’s the balancing act, which I believe Avram achieves in this week’s portion.
Human beings naturally want to venture in the unknown, to push boundaries, and Jews in particular. Rabbi Tony Bayfield once taught that Jews are not a rooted people – r-o-o-t-e-d but a routed – r-o-u-t-e-d people. (I do appreciate that that jeu de mots works better in the Queen’s English than in American English where people sometimes say “rowt” and “rowted.”) Rabbi Leo Baeck taught that the Jew is the great non-conformist of history, its great dissenter. We don’t accept that which is in front of us, but (to quote one rather famous boundary-breaker this week) we seek “to boldly go where no-one has ever gone before.” So, our journey is away-from-here, but ultimately to where? The challenge of the Kafka passage is that looking back and journeying from the past without any sense of where we’re going in the future can leave us wandering aimlessly. Think of the Israelites in the wilderness – they were journeying to the Promised Land until God forbade them from entering it due to their lack of faith. As a result, where did they go from there? Into forty years of wandering aimlessly in the desert! “Away-from-here” works for personal internal repentance, but for planning our lives, our communities, indeed, any kind of shared existence, we need a direction. That is why Judaism has for so long held onto a vision of the perfection of the universe, which became embodied in the figure of the Messiah. That was our vision, our ultimate goal, our direction, but that is so far beyond our current experience that we need to set goals in between. Away-From-Here only works as the inspiration for the journey, but it doesn’t totally set the direction. God, however, clearly establishes the direction with Avram – “to the land that I will show you.”
If we follow in Avram’s footsteps, if we continually cross over, transcend normal living, if we are en route, if we are to boldly go where no-one has gone before, that takes real strength. It can be exhausting. We need to rest… and that’s where Shabbat comes in. In some sense we don’t rest on Shabbat because our prayers need to be renewed, we need to journey to new spiritual places every time we recite traditional words. But that can happen when we reflect on the week that has passed and the week that is to come, and to bring the memories of the past and the vision of the future together in our prayers. We don’t pray in order to receive from some supernatural vending machine, we pray in order to change ourselves and to establish how we might become the best us we can be, and thereby help make the world the best world it can be, that is, bring about the Messianic Age. The call to Avram – lech l’cha – is reflexive in its grammatical form. It might best be translated as “take yourself.” That’s not just a case of packing bags and leaving one place, it’s an entire personal journey. Jews tend to look back very often – we are commanded to remember the past, but to take Rabbi Bayfield’s quotation, it’s not our connection to our roots that defines us as Jewish as much as it is the route that we take through life. Our prayers are a time for us to pause and reflect, to rest in some sense, but only in order to set the vision for the future.
The pandemic has uprooted all of us but that doesn’t mean that it has taken our future route from us. In a time of inconsistency, a time of discombobulation, holding not just the memories of the past but also the vision of the future can be extremely comforting and empowering. Our Shabbat service ends around Aleinu, the prayer that sets a vision for the future. As we continue praying this evening, let our journey not just be away-from-here - away from this wretched pandemic, away from social distancing and masks, away from all the tzuras in the world – but let it be towards something. May the journey in our prayers be a journey towards great connection with the Divine and with all of creation. May that journey in our souls match the journey in our lives, so that we may boldly go where our community has never gone before. And let us say, amen.