The (Not So) Good News

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country, and from your relatives and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you;  Genesis 12:1  NASB

Go from – Of course, by now you know that lĕk-l^ekā’ (lekh lekha), does not mean “Go from.”  It is literally, “Go towards yourself,” an idea we have investigated several times.  But perhaps we need to add Joseph Soloveitchik’s insights before we close the book on this verse.  Soloveitchik may not provide exegesis, but he has something quite important to say about its implications.

“ . . . the man of faith has no single home.  He is a wanderer striking roots in one community, only to then be uprooted himself and travel to another, in a perpetual cycle.  This continuous oscillation is a source of loneliness—and it cannot be overcome.”[1]

“But the overall dilemma – that retreat from the world is opposed to the divine will and yet today’s man of faith feels impelled to withdraw – defines the modern religious predicament forcefully.”[2]

“The role of the man of faith, whose religious experience is fraught with inner conflicts and incongruities, who oscillates between ecstasy in God’s companionship and despair when he feels abandoned by God, and who is torn asunder by the heightened contrast between self-appreciation and abnegation, has been a difficult one since the times of Abraham and Moses.”^[3]

Is this where we are?  Wanderers?  Aliens in a strange land?  Outsiders?  Are we not Abram, seeking God’s will in a journey not of our own choosing, compelled to proceed while all the while wishing for that inner peace that slips through the hands that try to clench it? 

Travel with me to places far beyond the comfort zone.  Feel the despair of the “happy” indigenous peoples, only “happy” because we Westerners think the simple life is the ideal.  Read the history of colonization genocide.  See what we enlightened souls are doing to our planet.  How can you not want to retreat?  And yet God calls—to the downhearted, the diseased, the impoverished, the abused, the victims of injustice.  They are everywhere.  There is no “heaven on earth,” no sheltered commune, no insulated monastery or convent.  We, those chosen ones, are called to the cross.  Not such good news after all.

Except . . . except that’s where God is to be found.  In the מִדְבָּר, midbar, the desert, the inhospitable, the wilderness, the place where Hagar found God.  Oh, by the way, you knew that Hagar is Hebrew for “the foreigner.”  Perhaps outsiders are more likely to encounter the living God in the place of desolation than those insiders who trundle off to church.

Topical Index: lĕk-l^ekā’ (lekh lekha), man of faith, midbar, wanderer, Genesis 12:1