October 23

English translations of the Hebrew Torah are, by definition, limited in what they can convey. This is true of every translation. Take the opening words of this week’s portion. The Hebrew says lech lecha, usually translated as “Go forth.” It is a perfectly good translation, but it doesn’t quite capture the feeling of the Hebrew — the movement, the urgency, perhaps even the sense of an inner change beginning.

Let me explain.

God doesn’t say, “Look, and you will see where to go.” God doesn’t hand Abram a map, a satellite image, or a nice laminated brochure with a photograph of Canaan on the cover. God says, essentially: Go. You will find out where you are going along the way.

The land will be shown to you — but only after you are already walking.

Sight comes later. First comes the going.

Lech lecha. Say it a few times — lech lecha, lech lecha — and you notice that it has a rhythm to it, almost a heartbeat, a footstep. Two words, nearly rhyming, like feet falling one after another in the sand.

It isn’t a phrase you see. It is a phrase you feel — in your legs, in your breath, in the movement of your body.

The great medieval commentators spend a great deal of time discussing what lecha means: “for yourself,” “for your own benefit,” perhaps “by yourself.” There are many possibilities.

But what strikes me tonight is something simpler: this is a call that asks for movement before it offers a destination.

Which raises the obvious question — the question I imagine Abram himself might have asked, lying awake in Haran the night before he left:

Why?

Why ask me to go before I can see where I am going?

Wouldn’t it be easier — wouldn’t it be more efficient, frankly — to show me the destination first and then let me decide whether the trip is worth taking?

After all, Abram is an old man, and schlepping through the desert isn’t exactly his idea of a weekend in Boca.

I don’t think the Torah is suggesting that God is being cruel. Perhaps it is describing something we recognize from our own lives: that the things that matter most often become clear only after we have begun.

Think about marriage. Raising children. Moving to a new city. Beginning again after a loss. Changing careers. Taking a chance on something we aren’t entirely sure will work.

We rarely know exactly where those roads will lead.

We go.

And sometimes only in the going — sometimes only years later, looking backward — do we begin to understand where we were headed.

That brings me to a woman you probably first encountered in grade school. She lived about 3,500 years after Abram, and her journey has become legendary in its own right.

On February 7, 1837, a sixteen-year-old English girl named Florence Nightingale experienced what she would later call simply “the call.”

A call to what?

To where?

She couldn’t have told you.

What she felt was a persistent sense that something was expected of her — that her life might become something other than the comfortable, ornamental existence available to a wealthy young Victorian woman.

You might imagine that someone who experienced such a call would immediately act on it.

Florence did not.

For eight years — eight years — the feeling remained with her. It seems to have been something she could neither completely dismiss nor fully embrace.

And there were plenty of reasons not to.

Her family had expectations. Society had expectations. Nursing was hardly considered an appropriate profession for a woman of her background. Hospitals themselves were places most respectable people tried to avoid.

So the call remained there, quietly, while life went on around it.

Until eventually she could no longer ignore it.

One of the most revealing things about Florence Nightingale is that she wasn’t simply fearless. She worried about what other people would think. She wondered whether what she wanted was appropriate. She wondered whether she was making a terrible mistake.

At one point she asked a friend:

“Do you think it would be unsuitable and unbecoming for a young Englishwoman to devote herself to works of charity in hospitals? Do you think it would be a dreadful thing?”

It sounds like a question.

But perhaps it was also a request for permission.

And I find that part of her story more interesting than the legend of the fearless Florence Nightingale.

Because perhaps lech lecha doesn’t always begin with certainty.

Sometimes it begins with a question.

Sometimes with an uneasiness.

Sometimes with the feeling that there is something we are supposed to do, or become, or explore — without knowing exactly what that something is.

Her friend eventually answered:

“It would be unusual… but I say to you, go forward. Act up to your inspiration, and you will find there is never anything unbecoming in doing your duty for the good of others. Choose, go on with it, wherever it may lead you.”

Lech lecha.

Go forward.

Wherever it may lead you.

Florence eventually did.

And when she did, her mother wept — not initially from pride, but from something closer to bewilderment. She reportedly said, “We are ducks who have hatched a wild swan.”

It is a wonderful image: a family discovering that the person they thought they knew was becoming someone they had never quite imagined.

Florence went on to the Crimea, to military hospitals where disease was killing soldiers in enormous numbers. Her work helped transform nursing and hospital sanitation and changed the way medicine was practiced.

But what interests me most isn’t the destination.

It is that she couldn’t see it when she first heard the call.

At sixteen, she couldn’t possibly have imagined the hospitals she would eventually transform.

She couldn’t have known what the journey would require of her.

She couldn’t have known how history would remember her.

She only knew that something was calling.

And for a long time, she wasn’t even sure what to do about it.

Perhaps that is one of the more interesting things about lech lecha.

We tend to imagine that the opposite of fear is courage. But sometimes the opposite of fear isn’t courage at all. Sometimes it is simply movement.

We can be afraid and still take a step.

We can be uncertain and still begin.

We can wonder whether we’re making the right decision and still see what happens next.

Florence’s awareness of mortality became part of what moved her. She saw suffering that could have left her overwhelmed. Instead, she eventually allowed it to become a reason to act.

Our tradition has long recognized something similar.

The past is gone. We cannot return to relive our days knowing then what we know now.

The Psalmist writes,    לִמְנֹ֣ות יָ֭מֵינוּ כֵּ֣ן הֹודַ֑ע
וְ֝נָבִ֗א לְבַ֣ב חָכְמָֽה׃

“Teach us to count our days rightly,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

There is something sobering about counting our days.

But there can also be something clarifying about it.

We don’t know how many days there will be.

We don’t know exactly what lies ahead.

And perhaps that is why the Torah doesn’t begin Abram’s journey by showing him the destination.

It begins with two words:

Lech lecha.

Go.

So let’s go back to Haran.

Not to the abstract idea of a calling, but to the actual place.

Abram is seventy-five years old. Sarai is barren, which in their world carries its own quiet grief. They have flocks and servants and possessions and a settled life in Haran.

A life that makes sense and, for most of us that age, a sense of rootedness.  Really, a life that nobody would have called unreasonable.

And then they leave it.

Not because they have seen Canaan laid out before them like a map.

They haven’t.

They leave because a voice tells them to go.

And somewhere along the road, the seeing will come.

The Torah tells us:  וַיֵּ֣לֶךְ אַבְרָ֗ם כַּאֲשֶׁ֨ר דִּבֶּ֤ר אֵלָיו֙ יְהוָ֔ה

“And Abram went, as the Eternal had spoken to him.”

It doesn’t say, “And Abram understood.”

It doesn’t say, “And Abram saw.”

It doesn’t even say, “And Abram was certain.”

It says:

Vayelech Avram.

Abram went.

There is something almost wonderfully spare about that.

He went.

And sometimes that is enough.

The reality is that most of us don’t get to see the whole road before we begin walking it.

We don’t know what a marriage will become when we stand beneath the chuppah.

We don’t know who our children will become when we first hold them.

We don’t know what a new community will feel like when we first walk through its doors.

We don’t know what grief will ask of us when we first encounter it.

We don’t know what a decision will mean ten years from now.

We see a little and we wonder a lot.

And still, with all that unknowing, we have taken steps that take us into a future filled with more unknowing.  These are steps of faith and trust and maybe that’s why lech lecha is such a resonant phrase and, for so may of us, easy to relate to.

It isn’t necessarily a command to be bold.

It isn’t a guarantee that every journey will work out exactly as we hope.

It is something quieter.

A reminder that sometimes the destination becomes visible only after the journey has begun.

Abram couldn’t see Canaan from Haran.

Florence Nightingale couldn’t see Crimea from her bedroom.

And none of us can see the whole road ahead.

Perhaps all we can do is pay attention to the voices that matter, to the questions that won’t quite leave us alone, and to the possibilities that become visible when we are willing to take the next step.

Lech.

Lecha.

One foot.

Then another.

And another.

Not because we know exactly where we will end up.

But because sometimes the road itself is how we come to see.

And perhaps, in the end, that is what Abram discovered.

The call did not come with a map.

It came with a road.

Lech lecha.