Parshat Lech Lecha 5769: Two Songs, Two people

This week we read Lech Lecha, with its famous words

“And the Lord had said to Abram, Get out from your country, and from your family, and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1).

Abram, along with wife Sarai, Lot, and the “souls that they made” leave for a place unknown. Along the way, they stop in Canaan, until a famine forces them to Egypt where Abraham half-lies about Sarah to save his own life, only to benefit in a huge financial apology by the Pharaoh of Egypt. Then he returns to Canaan somewhere around Hebron, only to end up leading a military alliance with Sodom and Gomorrah to save Lot from a hostage situation. Abram then refuses to take any war booty, but Lot decides to live in Sodom. Abraham then does a rather strange sacrifice, getting a promise and a prophecy about the Exodus from Egypt. He half-lies again about Sara, this time to the Philistine king Abimelech. Then he has a son Ishmael by Sarai’s handmaid Hagar. God tells his to change his name to Abraham, his wife’s to Sarah. Finally God literally “cuts a contract” for Abraham, Ishmael and all of Abraham’s male descendants: circumcision.

I tried several times this week to write something. I had a lot of ideas but could not get any of them work. I thought about Abram and how he views the issues of the king and his religion. I looked at Milchizedek, and the King of Sodom trying to figure out why Abram accepted one tribute and rejected another. I had lots of good sources, but it just wouldn’t come together. Thus I went back and decided to update an old Shlomos Drash, this one from 2004, because like the Torah reading themselves sometimes we need to re-vist issues we’ve looked at before.

When reading a Torah scroll, at the beginning of this chapter there is an interesting letter pattern: LCh LCh. The same word seems to repeat, though vocalized it is read Lech Lecha. Literally, Lech is the command to walk or go in the masculine, and Lecha is to you or for you. When read, this becomes go to yourself or go for yourself, but really it is just a very emphatic go. In Tanach, this phrase occurs only twice in the text. Once here and once in relation to the Sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:2). In the case of the Akedah, it is not exactly the same. In that case there is a Vav in front of Lech, the word looking like a cane an old man is carrying with a boy running after him.

Debbie Friedman, in her song Lech Lecha, alternates verses with the feminine version of the same phrase: L’chi Lach. L’chi Lach also occurs only twice: in the Song of Songs [2:10-13] where it begins and ends a poem where the male lover adjures the female to come out and play:

My beloved answered [and spoke] to me:
Arise, for yourself my love my beautiful one,
Go for yourself
For, here, the winter passed over
The rain passed on
Blossoms appear on the land
The time of song (bird) arrives
The voice of the turtledove is heard on our land
The fig tree makes spicy the early fig
The blossom of the grapevines gives fragrance
Arise for yourself, my love my beautiful one,
Go for yourself

The Song of Songs is read in the spring, while Parshiot Lech Lecha and Vayera are read in the fall. The feminine and masculine versions of the same command are read in opposite seasons. In the season of increasing darkness or bright colors becoming gray we have the male. In the season of increasing brightness, or gray becoming bright colors again, we have the female.

A long time ago, I was involved with a distance relationship, spending hours on the phone with this woman. Instead of a romantic time at our first face to face meeting of a distance, I broke up with her, knowing full well that the breakup was completely my fault. Walking around with that guilt and pain I walked into Friday services that week, not to be consoled, but to be ordered around like a slave, not a human being with feelings. Instead of sympathy, I got scolding. I decided that night to Lech Lecha to another Synagogue, preferably as quietly as possible. However for one or two individuals, for the next two months, they delighted in kicking me while I was down. One of these people expressed their opinion that I left because I hated women. Although completely untrue, for a guy still getting over a breakup, nothing hurt more. But it confirmed my feelings: it was time to go, and like Abraham and Haran, I was never to return there. As of this writing I’m definitely in a different place, a different chapter to say the least, one of far more hope than that time.

Back then, sitting with my coffee on an appropriately gray and gloomy day, I read that passage from the Song of Songs, illustrated with several rather bright, beautiful paintings I did even more years ago. I remembered something. Lech Lecha, although directed to a single person, was not just one person, but two- Abraham and Sarah. Abraham took Sarah with him, and as the Midrash explains she is an important part of the journey. The Midrash explains that the “souls they made” meant converts, and Sarah converted the women just as Abraham converted the men. This was a partnership of equal but not quite the same as the two words Lech and Lecha look alike on the torah scroll but are not quite the same in sound or meaning. One cannot be without the other. Together each makes the other better.

In the Song of Songs Lechi Lach is a calling out from the male lover to the female to be in the world of the male lover. It is followed by this (2:14)

My dove is in concealment of the cliff
In steep hiding places.
Show me your appearance
Let me listen to your voice
For your voice is sweet and your appearance is beautiful.

The male makes this second call to come out, this one not to the call of nature, but to the beauty of her appearance and voice. Here the male uses the term my dove to address the female. Doves are one of the most strongly monogamous birds. Many dove species do everything together with their mate, unlike other bird species, denoting their monogamous connection. They will only take one mate, then live alone when that mate dies. I learned how much so while once walking to get my morning coffee in Providence Rhode Island. A mourning dove had flown into a window of a store and smashed its skull. Its mate could do nothing but walk around it cooing, not paying the slightest attention to me. It could not leave its mate, even at its death.

Through everything in Abraham’s and Sara’s trip, much of which could easily derail a relationship, Abraham and Sarah stay together. Sara is that dove. Abraham says to Sara “you are beautiful in appearance” [Genesis 12:11] Her voice is sweet in its wisdom, as the text and God remind us “in all that Sarah has said to you, listen to her voice” [Genesis 21:12]

In the Song of Songs, L’chi Lach is not enough to get to that relationship. It will require the entire Song of Songs for them to be completely together. Like it did when I first looked at this topic back in 2004, I’ve been thinking about that lately. What my journey, indeed all of our journeys is about, is to get to the relationship at the end of the Song of Songs, both with a wonderful partner and with God. Like the story of Abraham and Sarah or the Song of Songs, it will require many trials, a few losses, a few gains to get to my land. I’ve moved along from where I was many years ago, yet Like Abraham who will do more journeying. I’ve made mistakes, like he did with Pharaoh and Abimelech, well intentioned or not. In time, we learn to love. We learn to receive love and we learn to give love.

I think in the fall, many have depressing thoughts as the world begins to turn dark and cold. But the time of light and warmth will come. Maybe it will take a very long time, but it will happen. Even though as things get dark in the fall, spring will follow. In this time of the male of the fall, the female of spring will be there too; we just have to be patient.