For some people, going somewhere unknown is thrilling. It provides excitement and adventure. And for others, it can be a completely terrifying experience. I think I’m a little mixture of both. I like the sense of adventure, and I also like to know what to expect.
This week is when the Israelite journey begins with Avram, and he has no idea where it’s going to lead him and his people. So much so that God tells him to go on a journey - Lech Lecha - and just says “go to the place that I will show you.” To be honest, this sounds terrifying to me. Leave my home, pack everything up, take my family…. to some undisclosed location?
I think the commentators felt this anxiety as well, because they try to mitigate it with a teaching: When Avram began a journey without a destination, he had the capacity to be made anew. God tells Avram to go - Lech - but it’s more complicated than that. Lech Lecha, with the inclusion of that second word, can be best translated, literally, as “go to yourself.” The journey of going to a place without a destination, then, not just for Avram but for all of us, allows us to reinvent ourselves. This interpretation might imagine that having a particular destination in mind is actually limiting, and it narrows our possibilities of who and what we can be.
Avram is one of our spiritual ancestors because he modeled this journey for us. Biblical scholar Aviva Zornberg teaches that this mission of Lech Lecha, of traveling to oneself, is about vision. It’s not travelling to the present, resident self, but to the self of aspiration, the perhaps unimagined self.
We’ve been making our way through the Strategic Planning process, gathering opinions and understanding where we are as a congregation. If you haven’t been to one of our Community Conversations, I hope you’ll join us either on November 13th or November 18th to share your voice. What I value so much about the structure of the program is that we don’t start with a destination in mind. It’s like our own version of Lech Lecha, our own version of travelling to the self of aspiration.
