Dvar Lech Lecha: Where Do I Go from Here?

The day olive trees breathed deeply

and the hills learned again to dance like lambs

I saw my son’s face when I was alone.

I was so alone that I saw.

Sleep in me, said the landscape, sleep, sleep.

I saw birds flying up and birds flying down

as when people leave you

and others come in their stead.

I saw men sitting in their homes

crying: “I want to go home!”

with the calm faces of men sitting

in their homes.

Sleep in me, said the landscape, sleep, sleep.

I resonate with this untitled poem by Yehuda Amichai, from his collection Time. It is like a mysterious prophecy, a somnambulant déjà-vu that evokes a truth I know I know, something I believe in. It has a reassuring, peaceful effect. The speaker doesn’t seem troubled. He feels safe in the landscape, surrounded—protected—by breathing olive trees and dancing hills. The hills are not jumping with fear, like the mighty mountains of the Lebanon at the sound of God’s voice in Psalm 29. Here, nature is rejoicing like the lovers in Shir HaShirim, conjuring up their reunion.

This bucolic atmosphere notwithstanding, the main sensation which emanates from the poem is loneliness. It is even stated twice: I saw my son’s face when I was alone. I was so alone, that I saw.

These two lines describe a vision: either of someone from the past—an absent son—or of a future son. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that an experience of loneliness lies at the core of prophecy. This loneliness arises from being different, from knowing differently than most “others” and can be literal or figurative: the prophets were not alone in their environment, and they must have felt very lonely.

This reminds me of the popular wisdom to deconstruct the word “alone” and remove its perceived negative connotation by focusing on the more empowering reading of “all one.” Amichai’s poem in fact is a good example of the overlap of both meanings: The speaker is alone, he is the only one in the landscape. He is all one with the landscape, he is all one with his vision.

Abraham may be one of the loneliest people in Tanakh, and there are many lonely people in Tanakh. While he had wives, a concubine, servants, and followers—and two sons, plus other offspring—he is a person set apart by his “vision and mission.”

When I think of the midrash about the Burning Castle, which explores why Abraham left his land, birthplace, and father’s house, I imagine a surreal landscape, like in a painting that Dalí and Hopper created in a team effort. Not at all like the landscape in Amichai’s poem. In the middle of a bleak nowhere, Abraham comes upon a burning castle and wonders why it is burning. Doesn’t it have an owner? The owner reveals himself to Abraham and thus makes him a partner in extinguishing the flames. Now they have a pact.

This powerful imagery seeks to explain how and why God chose Abraham to become the patriarch of (not only) the Israelite nation. Naturally, it focuses on a dialogue between God and Abraham. And maybe this is precisely the nature of a vision: there is no distinction between dialogue and monologue, between inside and outside.

Did Abraham intend or hope to change his luck by changing his place? It’s unclear. All that which seems clear is that he knew he had to leave. And that he knew that making a pact means to honor the promises one gave to oneself and to the covenantal partner, even if some visions may not come true right away, or exactly as imagined. Renouncing one’s initial certainty, faith, and trust would mean letting the flames consume the castle, instead of putting them out.

Arguably this is why Abraham, at the end of his life, insists that his servant must not return his son Isaac to where he came from, should no woman want to cross over and become Isaac’s wife: “On no account must you take my son back there!” (Bereishit 24:6) Taking Isaac back to Haran would render the last 100 years of Abraham’s life as well as the pact he made with himself and with God in front of the burning castle meaningless.

Lech Lecha is a parsha full of promises and covenants between God and Abraham. There is the initial command to leave Haran and the oft-repeated promise of reward. There is the Covenant between the Pieces. There is the Brit Milah.

Theologically, these covenants are the foundation of the bond between God and the Israelites until today. On a lyrical, mystical level, they are the visions of a man who was so lonely and all one that he saw. A man who believed in himself and in God and who honored the pact he had made. A man who felt so at home in his new land(scape), that he trusted her to protect him while asleep. And that land made him see his future.

This dvar technically ends here. As a coda, I am adding a poem I wrote a few years ago. It can’t aspire to Amichai’s mastery, but it, too, in its own right, is inspired by this week’s parsha and Abraham’s visions:

DO NOT RETURN

Why don’t you go home, they ask the immigrant

after all that went wrong?

Back to health care, passport, security

Family, the Yemenite rabbi said

is a husband, children

Does a niece count as offspring?

Make a chart, my neighbor said:

Why stay?

I want to

I left

G-d promised

Land, blessings, a name

I am the earth -- One grain of dust

I am the sea -- One drop of water

I am the sky -- One star

(From the collection Do Not Return, Broadstone Books, 2019)