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Parshat Lech-Lecha: We Must Make the Best of a Sometimes Dark World
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
After the Torah chapters that describe stages of early humanity, we come to Abraham (Avram) and the beginning of the monotheism we recognize. God tells Avram to leave Mesopotamia, his land and his birthplace to go somewhere where he will become a great nation and will be blessed. And through him, humanity will be blessed.
But no sooner does he arrive in the Land of Canaan, that things go wrong. The land he was told would be fertile is stricken with a famine. He has to leave and go down to Egypt together with his nephew, Lot. There his wife Sarai is taken into Pharaoh’s palace on the assumption that she is Avram’s sister, not his wife. Initially, this works to Avram’s advantage. But when he discovers the truth, Pharaoh is furious and they are driven out of Egypt. In one way, Avram benefits because under Pharaoh, he succeeds in amassing wealth, livestock, and slaves.
Avram arrives back in the land of Canaan. But tension between him and his nephew lead them to separate. Lot’s choice of the Jordan Valley gets him involved with the corrupt men of Sodom and Gomorrah. A war between rival kings drags Avram into it, to save his nephew. Then Avram faces a personal complication because Sarai, his wife, can’t conceive. She offers her maid servant Hagar as a surrogate but then there are tensions between them. God intervenes to reassure Avram that despite all his difficulties, he will succeed and overcome them.
Through all these difficulties, Avram remains strongly convinced that he’s being guided by a superior power in which he has enormous faith. But faith is something abstract and can be just a theological concept. It is how one lives that matters.
As it says this week, “He ‘believed’ in God, who valued his righteousness” (Bereishit Chapter 15 verse 6). The text is obscure. Normally translated as “He believed in God” — it can rather be understood to mean, “He trusted in God.” But then the text adds, “and God valued (or appreciated) it.” Because the word Tsedakah implied an ethical commitment to correct behavior.
The Torah is telling us that when things go wrong, the best way to cope is to think and act positively and hope for better things. This does not mean we should respond passively and wait — although sometimes we may have no option. Perhaps we may need to change something in ourselves or our decisions. Some people when faced with a challenge give up. Others persevere.
The Torah text keeps on stressing the failures of human relationship and the challenges of alien societies. It may sound as if God values suffering, and we should welcome pain, but this is not a traditional Jewish thought. It goes against our tradition. We are certainly not masochists. But the models the Bible gives us are of people triumphing over adversity.
The reality of life is that nothing is perfect, and we all have to go through difficult periods as well as good ones. Nowhere is this more obvious than the world in which we are in today. We assumed we were blessed, and God was on our side, and everything would go well and smoothly — only to discover that in terms of society, we find ourselves challenged and subjected to abuse. It is almost as if this is the nature of being Jewish, and something we have to embrace instead of trying to escape .
Life is not easy. Many years after the Torah was written, the schools of Hillel and Shammai debated whether it was better to be born or not. After years of arguing, they concluded democratically it would indeed have been better not to have been born, given that life is so tough. But they agreed that since we are here in this imperfect world, the best thing is to get on and make the best of it. That was the message then, and so it applies today. That’s what being Jewish means. It is sometimes painful, and yet think of the wonderful gifts it bestows.
The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.
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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
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