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This week’s reading
לֶךְ לְךָ · Lech Lechá
Genesis 12:1 – 17:27. Avram is told to go — from his land, his birthplace, his father’s house — to a place he will be shown later. He goes. What follows is not a straight road: a famine and a lie in Egypt, a parting with Lot so that there is room for both, a war fought to bring one person home, a covenant made in the dark, Sarai and Hagar and the child each of them is promised, and a new name at the end.
This week’s theme comes straight from the opening words: finding yourself, when the only instruction is to go — and the destination is “the land I will show you”.
The seven aliyot
עֲלִיּוֹת
| # | Opening | What is read | Verses |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | לֶךְ לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָLech lechá me’artsechá | The call to go, and the promise that through him all the families of the earth will be blessed. Avram goes, Lot with him — and in a famine goes on down to Egypt, asking Sarai to say she is his sister. | 12:1–13 |
| 2 | וַיְהִי כְּבוֹא אַבְרָם מִצְרָיְמָהVayhí kevó Avrám Mitsráyma | Sarai is taken into Pharaoh’s house; plagues follow, and they are sent away rich. Avram returns to the altar where he began. | 12:14–13:4 |
| 3 | וְגַם לְלוֹט הַהֹלֵךְ אֶת אַבְרָםVegám leLót haholéch et Avrám | Too many flocks for one land. Avram lets Lot choose first — if you go left, I will go right — and Lot chooses the well-watered plain towards Sedom. | 13:5–18 |
| 4 | וַיְהִי בִּימֵי אַמְרָפֶלVayhí bimé Amrafél | Four kings against five. Lot is taken captive, and Avram goes after him with 318 of his household. Malki-tsedek of Shalem brings out bread and wine. | 14:1–20 |
| 5 | וַיֹּאמֶר מֶלֶךְ סְדֹם אֶל אַבְרָםVayómer mélech Sedóm el Avrám | Avram refuses the spoils — not a thread, not a sandal-strap. Then, in a vision, he is told to look at the stars and count them, and he trusts. | 14:21–15:6 |
| 6 | אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ מֵאוּר כַּשְׂדִּיםAshér hotsetícha me’Úr Kasdím | The covenant between the pieces, and a future exile foretold. Sarai gives Hagar to Avram; Hagar flees, is found by a spring, and names the one who sees her. Ishmael is born. At ninety-nine, Avram becomes Avraham. | 15:7–17:6 |
| 7 | וַהֲקִמֹתִי אֶת בְּרִיתִיVahakimotí et berití | The covenant of circumcision. Sarai becomes Sarah and is promised a son, and Avraham laughs. Ishmael is blessed too; that same day every male of the household is circumcised. | 17:7–27 |
Maftir 17:24–27. Transliteration follows the key in Tefiloténu. The Haftará this week is the theme — Lech Lechá is not one of the special Shabbatot, so the second reading is the one below. The traditional reading for Lech Lechá, for anyone who wants it, is Isaiah 40:27–41:16.
Drash · on the parasha
Lech Lecha: Finding Yourself
The parasha
Lech Lecha is the third weekly portion of the Torah, Genesis 12:1 to 17:27. It is where the story narrows from all of humanity to one family, and it follows Abram and Sarai from the moment they leave Haran to the moment they receive new names.
Abram sets out at 75 with Sarai, his nephew Lot and the people of their household, and arrives in Canaan. Famine drives them to Egypt, where Abram passes Sarai off as his sister and Pharaoh takes her into his house until plagues force her release. Back in Canaan, Abram and Lot part ways; Lot settles near Sodom. When Lot is taken captive in a war between local kings, Abram rescues him, is blessed by Melchizedek, king of Salem, and refuses to keep any of the spoils.
The second half turns to the promise of descendants. Abram is taken outside to count the stars, and a covenant is sealed among the halves of animals cut in two. Still childless, Sarai gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abram; Hagar conceives, flees Sarai’s harshness, and is met by an angel at a spring before giving birth to Ishmael. The portion ends with the covenant of circumcision, when Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, and a son, Isaac, is promised to them. Read as our people’s literature, it is a story of migration, rivalry, doubt and renaming, told about a family trying to become something new.
The call
The portion opens with the first words addressed to Abram: lech lecha, “Go, from your land, from your birthplace and from your father’s house, to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). For a humanistic community the interesting question is not who spoke, but what kind of call this is, and whether we hear it too.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, the Jerusalem scholar who reads Torah alongside literature and psychoanalysis, offers a reading that needs no voice from the sky. In The Beginning of Desire, her book on Genesis, lech lecha becomes the Torah’s first portrait of a person becoming who they are. That is a call any of us can hear, because at its heart it is a call to find yourself.
The strange order of leaving
Zornberg notices that the order is backwards. A real traveller leaves the house first, then the town, then the country. Abram is told to leave his land, then his birthplace, and only last his father’s house: from the widest circle to the most intimate.
She reads moladtecha, “your birthplace,” through its root, birth. To leave it is to leave what produced you, not by rejecting it, but by seeing that it made you as one possible version of yourself rather than the only one. Rashi heard lech lecha as “go for yourself, for your own good”; later teachers heard “go to yourself.” You cannot find yourself while you still mistake your origins for your limits.
The text adds a quiet detail. Abram’s father Terah had already set out for Canaan and stopped halfway, in Haran (Genesis 11:31). We all inherit journeys our parents began and did not finish. The question is whether we stay where they stopped.
A journey without a map
Every earlier departure in Genesis is a loss: Adam and Eve sent out of the garden, Cain made a wanderer, the builders of Babel scattered. Zornberg points out that Abram’s is the first journey where leaving is not a punishment. Displacement itself becomes the formative experience.
What strikes her most is how open it is. What Abram leaves behind is named precisely; where he is going is only “the land I will show you.” In her reading, he will recognise the place only when he sees it in a new light, and he becomes the kind of person who can see it by walking.
A humanist has no promise of a destination. We have the willingness to go, and the attention to know our land when we arrive. Meaning is not handed over at the start; it is made on the road. So is the self: we do not find it waiting at the end of the journey, we find it in the walking.
Tearing up fate
The Talmud teaches that four things tear up a person’s decree: generosity, crying out, a change of name and a change of deeds. Some add a fifth, a change of place, and prove it from lech lecha (Rosh Hashana 16b).
Zornberg builds on this. The Sages insist that a destiny which looks fixed can be torn open, and Abraham is the first to live it: he leaves an old way of being, takes apart its structures and makes new ones. Later the text says he was taken “outside” to count the stars (Genesis 15:5), out of a present that had grown closed and barren. Abram, father of one known place, becomes Abraham, father of many.
Notice that every item on the Talmud’s list is a human act. Giving, speaking up, renaming ourselves, changing how we act, moving. Nothing here needs a miracle; it needs agency. To find yourself is not to uncover a fate already written, but to discover that you can rewrite it.
The palace aglow or aflame
The midrash asks why Abram, of all people, heard the call (Beréshit Raba 39:1). It tells of a traveller who sees a birah doleket and asks, “Can this palace have no one looking after it?” The owner looks out and answers, “I am the master of this palace.” So too Abram looked at the world and asked, and the answer was lech lecha.
Doleket can mean lit up or on fire. If the palace is aglow, Abram is moved by the beauty and order of the world. If it is aflame, he is moved by its suffering and asks who will answer for it. Either way, the journey begins with a question, not a revelation.
A Spinozist can read the owner’s reply differently. For Spinoza there is no owner standing outside the palace: Deus sive Natura, God or Nature, is the order of the palace itself. The world answers our wonder by being intelligible. And if the palace is burning, no one outside is coming; the call to carry water is addressed to us. Finding yourself, then, is not a private retreat; it begins with a question about the world.
Beracha: be a blessing
The call ends with a promise: veheyé beracha, “and be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2). Not only “you will be blessed,” but “you will become one.”
In 1656 the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam placed a 23-year-old under ḥérem. His name was Baruch, “blessed.” He left the community he was born into, and went on to write in Latin as Benedictus, which also means blessed. His own lech lecha was a journey from inherited belief toward understanding, and his new name kept the old one’s meaning.
In the Ethics, Spinoza writes that each thing strives to persevere in its own being (Part III, Proposition 6). Read this way, lech lecha is that striving made conscious: becoming more fully what we are. And it is not selfish. Spinoza also writes that the good a person who lives by reason seeks for themselves, they will also want for others (Part IV, Proposition 37). Becoming ourselves overflows into blessing: a person who has found themselves has something to give.
For discussion
- What “land, birthplace and father’s house” have you had to leave? In what order did you leave them?
- Which journey did your parents begin that you are continuing, or have chosen not to?
- When did you recognise a place, a community or a self as yours only after you arrived?
- Of the Talmud’s five changes (generosity, voice, name, deeds, place), which has changed your life most?
- Today, does the palace look to you more aglow or more aflame? What does each ask of us?
A closing intention
May we have the courage to leave what is merely familiar, the patience to walk without a map, and the clarity to know our land when we see it. May we keep finding ourselves, striving to persevere in our being and to become more fully who we are. And in becoming ourselves, may we be a blessing.
As Spinoza ends the Ethics: all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
Sources
- Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (1995), chapter on Lech Lecha
- Beréshit Raba 39:1 (the lit palace)
- Rosh Hashana 16b (what tears up a decree)
- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677), III P6 and IV P37
- Sefaria source sheet with Zornberg excerpts on Lech Lecha
Haftará · this week’s theme
הַפְטָרָה · The second reading
On the special Shabbatot we read the prophets. On every other week the quality set for the year takes the slot — the second reading that answers the first, which is what a Haftará has always been. The blessings before and after are the same either way.
לֶךְ לְךָ
Finding yourself
Lech lechá
- When have you felt most like yourself, and what were you doing?
- Is the self something we discover, or something we build?
- Who helped you find yourself — and whose voice did you have to stop listening to?
Three ways in, not an agenda — most weeks one of them takes the whole hour, and should.
And one against it
Spinoza on the self we think we know
“Men think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire.”
Ethics I · Appendix
The popular idea of “finding yourself” imagines a true self waiting inside, untouched by family, language and history. Spinoza would say that the self we meet first is mostly causes we never chose — and that we mistake them for our own free choices because we cannot see them. Freedom, for him, does not begin by escaping those causes but by understanding them. It is the drash’s point about moladtecha from the other side: your origins stop being your limits once you can see them as origins. Worth putting to the room: when you say “that’s just who I am”, how much of it could you trace back to where you came from?
Practical tools
Three things to do this week
מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ
Trace one habit homeMe’artsechá umimoladtechá
Pick one reaction you would describe as “just me” — how you handle money, conflict, praise, being late. Ask where you learned it, and from whom.
Avram is asked to leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s house — not to hate them, but to see them from outside. Once you can see where a habit came from, you can decide whether to keep it. Keeping it is fine. The difference is that now it is a choice.
אִם מִחוּט וְעַד שְׂרוֹךְ נַעַל
Not a thread, not a sandal-strapIm miḥút ve’ád seróch ná’al
After the war, Avram refuses the spoils, so that no one can say “I made Avram rich”. He will not let someone else write his story. Notice one place this week where you are living by someone else’s account of who you are — a label, a compliment, an old expectation.
Then do one small thing that is yours: say the opinion you usually swallow, take up the thing you were told was not for you, or simply decline a role you have outgrown. Finding yourself is partly a matter of what you stop accepting.
הָלוֹךְ וְנָסוֹעַ
Going on, still journeyingHalóch venasó’a
Do one new thing three times this week — a walk on an unfamiliar route, a class, a conversation with someone outside your usual circle. Keep a note not of what it achieved but of who you were while doing it.
The Torah’s word for Avram’s life is הָלוֹךְ וְנָסוֹעַ — going on, still journeying. He never fully arrives; the only land he ever owns is a burial cave, bought at full price. The self, like the land, is not handed over at the start. You find it in the walking.
Lech lechá is usually read as the courage to leave. The parasha is just as interested in what comes after — famine, quarrels, long waiting and, at the end, new names. The self it finds is not discovered once and kept. It is made on the road, and renamed when it has changed.
From the community
Notices
Yahrzeits
We read the names each week. Send us the name, the relationship and the Hebrew or civil date, and we will keep it in the cycle.
spinozahavurah@gmail.comHumanistic Judaism 101
Several of you have asked whether we will run Humanistic Judaism 101 again. If you would like to take it, email us and tell us which time zone you are in — once we know numbers and the times that work, we will announce dates.
spinozahavurah@gmail.comShabbat service · Lech Lecha: Finding Yourself
Saturday 24 October, 11:00 am EDT · 4:00 pm in the UK. On Zoom, siddur Tefiloténu, with conversation and song. All are welcome; no Hebrew or experience needed. Register on Zoom.
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