Rabbi Winston – Parshas Lech Lecha – Part I

 

R Winston – Lech Lecha

IT USED TO be important to me to make Torah and science square with each other. When you are involved in outreach, the issue often comes up because many secular people treat science like it is absolute truth. If they see a contradiction between Torah and science, they assume the Torah is wrong, having been written long before science had come to know so much about how the world works. 

Of course, that doesn’t make a difference if G–D authored the Torah, a fundamental of Torah belief. He made the world, He made science, and nothing man can ever discover or work out can exist outside His knowledge base, which is infinite. He is all knowledge, and He knew everything science would ever come up with at the time He gave the Torah to the Jewish people in 1313 BCE. A secular person however does not yet believe this, and this has forced outreach professionals to make Torah jive with science.

Science has a blinding advantage. It deals with the here and now, a world of which we are part and can participate in. The Torah, on the other hand, deals with ancient history and includes many events that we have not witnessed, making them hard to believe. I certainly felt a slight boost in my emunah when I read in Josephus that the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife became was still visible in his time. It was kind of scientific verification of a biblical event. 

The ironic thing is that the modern world’s advantage is also its shortcoming. When it gets something right, and that is not always the case, it is only dealing with the present. The only way it can apply its knowledge of the present to the past is by making the huge assumption that everything back then was more or less the way it is today. It has to assume that the rules haven’t changed much, and we’re just discovering today what has always been. 

But is it? Even the world of science on occasion has found reason to question this, especially since the Dark Ages shut down technological advancement for about 500 years. The modern secular world today, for the most part, was born in the 1500s during the Renaissance Period. Until 500 years ago, mankind groped in intellectual darkness, more than enough time to lost track of what came before. 

Then there is the G–D factor again. He runs the world and He directs history, sometimes overtly, mostly covertly. He decides what man can know, controlling the flow of knowledge in every generation. It’s easy to write G–D out of history. It’s just not accurate to do so, because leaving Him explains so much about the path of mankind over the ages. Just because a person can’t see how, or worse, doesn’t want to see how, does not mean that G–D isn’t pulling all the strings.

At the end of the day, this is what made Avraham who he was. This is what separated him from the rest of the world around him. While the rest of his world was only interested in coping with the reality in which they found themselves, and looking for ways to use it to their material benefit, Avraham was only interested in truth, the truth, G–D’s truth. 

THE MOTHER SUDDENLY realized that she might have undercooked. She worried that she had more guests than food, and to avoid an embarrassing situation she told her children, “When I offer the chicken, say you’re already full and you don’t want any, okay?” The children happily agreed because normally, they could not get out of having the main course. They did as they were told and has hoped there was just enough food for the guests. Everyone was happy except, that is, when the mother came out with the dessert and said, “Anyone who did not have chicken can’t have dessert!”

It is called making aliyah—ascending. Israel may not be the highest land geographically, but it is spiritually, so no matter which land you come from, it is always called making aliyah. Someone wanted to say that that just as receiving an aliyah on Torah reading days is by invitation only, likewise you have to be invited by Heaven to make aliyah to Eretz Yisroel. This is what G–D did when He told Avraham, “Lech-Lecha…”

There are still many people who do not mind not being “invited” to Eretz Yisroel. For many, the reasons for not going are really just excuses because, quite frankly, they don’t want to go. Even burdens that keep them pinned down in the Diaspora are acceptable because they consider it to be a bigger burden to make aliyah. Whatever merit there might be for living there, they believe, can be offset by the merit of what they are doing while living in the Diaspora. 

Until it comes time for “dessert.” That’s when G–D will reveal to all of us, those who made aliyah and those who did not, the benefit of having done so before Moshiach comes. That’s when G–D will say, “Anyone who did not make aliyah (or at least consider it) before Moshiach came can’t have ‘dessert’,” meaning all of the benefits that will follow after the “main course,” history as we know it now, will finally end. 

Because as the Gemora says, G–D works measure for measure (Sanhedrin 90a). You get what you pay for with Torah, mitzvos, and above all, mesiras Nefesh—self-sacrifice. That’s why right after G–D tells Avraham to make aliyah, He also promises him children, fame, and money. These are things, Rashi explains, that traveling can deny a person. The same will be true for those who made aliyah while it was still a choice, and those who did not. 

Thus the Midrash says that after Moshiach comes and rights the world, all remaining Diaspora Jews will willingly come to Eretz Yisroel and be astounded by the level of the Jews already living there. They won’t just say, “Oh well, we’ll just have to do with less, a small price to pay for having been able to live in the Diaspora until the end.” They will instead bitterly complain to Moshiach about the inequality. It will be too little to late. 

Skeptical? They’re only midrashim? 

A little skepticism is a good thing, they say. Too much can kill you. And then there is what you might call uninformed skepticism, the kind that rises from not knowing enough and thinking that you do. It is amazing how quickly a few facts can make believers out of skeptics, and turn lives completely around. 

For example, it says in this week’s parsha: 

(continued)