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Go Forth
Rabbi Mark Diamond
Torah Portion: Lekh Lekha ("Go forth..."), Genesis 12:1-17:27
Haftarah Portion: Isaiah 40:27-41:!6
The weekly Torah reading opens with the sudden call to Avram (Abram) to leave his homeland and set out for a new land. God tells the patriarch: "Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you." (Gen. 12:1)
In the Hebrew text, the portion begins with two simple words-Lekh lekha, "Go forth." This is a somewhat unusual verb form in the Hebrew, akin to saying "You...go" in English. Many of the great sages of the Jewish tradition have speculated about this apparent redundancy in the Biblical text. A beautiful Hassidic interpretation tells us that the words Lekh lekha may be understood as "Go to yourself." In other words, go to your roots; go to your past, in order to discover your true potential.
Contemporary Jewish life rests upon the strong and sure foundation of the past. Jewish customs and rituals, commitments and concerns are part of an ancient tradition that began with Abraham and Sarah and continues to this very day. Our privilege and challenge is to honor this precious legacy by adding new layers of meaning and expression to time-honored beliefs and practices.
This week I was proud to take part in an educational experience that fulfilled this mandate of tradition and change. On Wednesday, the Board of Rabbis and a cohort of cosponsoring synagogues welcomed a large and diverse audience to the opening program of the One People, One Book community learning series. This year's book selection is Dara Horn's The World To Come, a fascinating novel that garnered the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.
The author herself was the featured speaker at the opening program, and treated attendees to an oral and literary tour de force of her acclaimed novel and distinguished career. The World to Come is a mystery that draws upon a colorful tapestry of literary sources and real people and places--the theft of a Marc Chagall painting in New York City; Chagall's post-war collaboration with a circle of brilliant young Yiddish writers and artists; rabbinic texts about olam ha-ba (the next world); scenes from Soviet Russia and war-ravaged Vietnam.
Somehow, Dara Horn succeeds in weaving threads of art, literature, biography, history and theology into her masterful work of fiction. The World To Come is no ordinary mystery, as evidenced by this passage that bids us to ponder the mysteries of life and death:
"It is a great injustice that those who die are often people we know, while those who are born are people we don't know at all. We name children after the dead in the dim hope that they will resemble them, pretending to blunt the loss of the person we knew while struggling to make the person we don't know into less of a stranger. It's compelling, this idea that the new person is so tightly bound to the old, but most of us are afraid to believe it. But what if we are right? Not that the new person is the reincarnation of the old, but rather, more subtly, that they know each other, that the already-weres and the not-yets of our world, the mortals and the natals, are bound together somewhere just past where we can see, in a knot of eternal life? (The World to Come, p. 283)
Novelist Dara Horn inspires her audience of learners and readers to "go forth" to uncover hidden gems of Jewish life and thought. In so doing, this gifted young author provides a taste of the world to come:
The following are things for which a person enjoys the fruits in this world, while the principal remains in the world to come: honoring parents, acts of love and kindness, and making peace between people. But the practice of talmud Torah (learning for its own sake) equals them all. (Mishnah Peah 1:1)
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