Tziporah Gottlieb – Lech Lecha

Dear friends,

Imagine walking down the street minding your own business. Suddenly a complete stranger approaches you. He looks like a completely typical fellow, whose face you forget before you finish looking at him. He asks you, “Can you give me directions?” “Sure,” you reply. “Where do you want to go?”  He answers, “I don’t know.”

Could you help him? Could anyone?

Do you really know where you want to end up?

Figuring out where you want to head isn’t always easy. For some of us, false starts are a way of life. Hashem forced Avraham to ask the Big Question. In this week’s Parshah, Lech Lecha, Hashem told Avraham, “Go to you”, “Go for your benefit”, which is, as Rashi points out, what was being conveyed. You can ask yourself why Abraham had to be sold into going where Hashem wants him.

The simple answer is that leaving Ur Kasdim and Charan meant leaving success by any definition behind him. He had developed a religious system that brought belief in one G-d to the masses. He had literally tens of thousands of followers. It would be only human to be reluctant to abandon everything he had spent his life building. He had every reason to think that he knew where he was going. Hashem told him that he was wrong, that he has to rejoin the army of seekers. If you were told to move on when you were fulfilled would you be able to do it? Maybe or maybe not.

This past Shabbos we were in Kiryat Sefer. The occasion was the sheva brachot of my granddaughter Esti, my daughter Devora’s “little girl”. At one point the upstairs neighbor came down. He apologized for his wife and himself not attending the wedding that had taken place on Thursday. They had the best possible “excuse”. Their own child was getting married that night. The mother was my student in Neve. She had carved out a niche for herself in the performing arts, and at some point, she had to ask herself, “Where am I heading?” It was clear that the place she was seeking wasn’t the opera. She found herself asking, “Where does Hashem want me to be?” and reached her conclusions.

Avraham was not you or me. He had long before defined success as being who Hashem wanted him to be, and doing whatever that meant. This is why the Alsheich takes the words lech lecha literally. Hashem was telling Avraham that by traveling this road, he would discover himself.

The words self-discovery can be a bit pompous. Imagine telling a five-year-old that you are trying to find yourself. He would tell you that you are right there. The truth is that he would be right. The trouble with this sort of reductionist simplicity is that you are far more than your body, and figuring out who the rest of you is, and where you are headed can leave you with a labyrinth of possibilities. You can end up like the man in the street who wants directions but doesn’t know where he wants to go.

Many aspects of you claim the title “ME”. Your body is definitely yours; if I spill tea on your lap, it hurts you, not me nor anyone else. The body alone has no real goals. It cannot provide you with direction. Your mind and your emotions (which are the “children” of the thoughts that feed them) give your body direction. They can potentially connect you to your higher self, the part of you that is unique, eternal, and transcendent. When Avraham was told, “Go to you” that is where Hashem was telling him to go – to his soul’s root, to ultimate self-discovery.

If you don’t happen to be a navi, how do you find yourself? One of the great contemporary thinkers was Rav Shlomo Wolbe zt”l. He was a genuine master of mussar and conducted vaadim (mussar meetings) over many decades. Many of these vaadim were later published in a book called Alei Shor. When he addressed this question, he began by quoting the Vila Gaon. 

The Gaon wrote, “In earlier times the way that you could determine what your path in life is, the path that will express who you are, was consulting your local Navi. There was a time when prophecy was so common that there were literally hundreds of neviim to choose from. They had “yeshivas” for aspiring young prophets who were called “bnei neviim”. 

Imagine telling your friend that your son is studying at Zechariah’s beis midrash! The neviim could look into your inner reality and relate to your soul root, and using these insights direct you on the path that you should take to give your life purpose. When that era ended there were still people who could try to find their deepest level of identity through their own efforts. 

This gave them access to what the Gra calls the “spark of Ruach Hakodesh” that every Jew has (whether she is aware of it or not). The problem that arose is that you can be wrong. You can misjudge your aspirations and deceive yourself into thinking that your ego or subconscious desires are the inner voice of your soul. 

For that reason, he says, the way to figure yourself out is by letting your deeds change you. The positive and negative mitzvot give you self-expression (through doing) and the ability to learn to say no to your baser self (through choosing to say no – which is how the negative mitzvos make it possible to become genuinely human – animals can’t say no to their instincts. You can). Your personality, background, physical capacities, intellect, the era in which you were born, and your environment, all make you unique. The worst mistake, he says, is forgetting that there never was or will be someone who can do your job.

 

Notice when doing what’s right feels good, and let that pleasure lead you to yourself.

Love,

Tziporah