From the Rebbetzin's Shabbat Table - Parashat Lech Lecha

Chapter 1: What Happened on Thursday

It was Thursday about 1. I was heading back to Bnos Avigail to finish up some work in my office. I was holding a small plate of tuna egg salad mix in my right hand. I tripped on the fake grass, sending the plate flying. A few girls helped me to my feet (strengthening my resolve to diet…). I knew something was wrong, and getting “wronger” by the minute. By the time I got to 16 Kablan, just a few houses away from 29, I called my dear friend Michal to drive me home.

Chapter 2: New Vocab 

Urgent care, then Shaarei Tzeded, and a new vocabulary. Instead of osteoporosis, which was the official reason for my previous broken bones, which some of you remember, the newest villain is osteoarthritis, which is one of the ways your body tells you that you are Getting Older. You may wonder why I feel a need to tell you any of this. It’s part of a bigger picture in which we trace back the history of illness, suffering, and death.

Stay Tuned for Chapter 3: Me and Avraham Staying Young

The contemporary idealization of youthful appearance didn’t appeal to Avraham. The Gemara tells us that when people came to speak to him, they ended up speaking to Yitzchak since they looked almost identical. Avraham pleaded with Hashem, and Looking Old came into existence. Maharal explains that as you age, the depth of thought grows, while your physical strength diminishes. This has to do both with your external reality and, ideally, on a deeper level, with your identity. Avraham brought an entirely new brand of intellectual depth into the world by seeking Hashem in every dimension of reality. His years were his teachers. He learned the falsehood of idol worship by watching it happen. He saw what endeavoring to replace Hashem with human creativity and ambition led when he saw the Tower of Bavel. Each day opened new doors.

He was unique in the way he aged. Before Avraham, people grew old biologically. Some of them lived incredibly long lives, but all they had to show for it was what would be today a new number on their teudat zehut. There was no real inner growth or change. To Avraham, being mistaken for Yitzchak would be a denial of all he developed and achieved in the 100 years until Yitzchak was born. The changes that Avraham made didn’t only affect him. They changed the way all future human beings see the world. To one degree or another, if you were to survey every person in Yerushalayim, for instance, and ask, “Is your life different than it would have been if Avraham never lived?”, the only honest answer they can give is, “Yes.” This would be true if they are Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, or have come in contact with people who see the world as having one Creator.

An interesting halachah is derived from the way a convert and an elder are both meant to be honored. The fact is that Avraham was the first real convert – the first one who moved beyond seeing only the physical or only the spiritual aspects of life, but not the absolute unity between them which is constantly re-created by Hashem. This is also why, when the siddur was composed, and a blessing in which we ask Hashem to have compassion on the righteous (who we all desperately need both for their example and their merit) was included, the Men of the Great Assembly put the request for this blessing to touch the lives of the elders and the converts together.

Chapter 3: What If You Are Not Exactly Like Avraham?

There is a way in which aging confronts us with one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: Who are we when we can no longer define ourselves primarily through what we do? For much of life, our identity is sustained by activity, achievement, responsibility, and the sense that we are moving toward something still to be accomplished. When you ask people, “Who are you?”, the answer is often a job or profession. You may be a parent raising children, professionals building careers, people pursuing ambitions, solving problems, making plans. Even our disappointments are often organized around the future: what we will yet repair, attain, or become. Aging gradually alters the way you see things. You can bring Hashem and His providence into the picture. It isn’t only about you. The body becomes less compliant; some possibilities close; the world we helped build continues, without requiring your participation. What once seemed central may become peripheral, and the assumption that our significance rests on our capacity to act is quietly challenged. This doesn’t have to equal diminishment for you any more than it did for Avraham.

A non-Jewish thinker, Erik Erikson, identified the central psychological task of later life as the struggle between integrity and despair. Integrity, in his understanding, involves more than satisfaction with one's achievements. It requires the capacity to look at one's life as a whole – to acknowledge its failures, its compromises, its irretrievable losses and unrealized possibilities – and nevertheless recognize it as a life of meaning. If you relate to life the way people did before Avraham, years do not necessarily produce wisdom; they can produce bitterness just as readily. The question is what you have allowed our years to teach you. You can choose to become less preoccupied with being consequential and more attentive to what is intrinsically valuable. Time itself acquires a different texture. The future is no longer an indefinitely expanding territory in which everything important can be postponed until you have finished your more urgent tasks. Ordinary moments can therefore acquire a density they did not previously possess: a conversation, a familiar landscape, the presence of someone we love, the unexpected pleasure of an afternoon. This is not necessarily because these things have changed, but because our relationship to them has.

This is far more relevant when you see Hashem in your past, in your present and in your future. None of this makes aging inherently beautiful. Illness, dependence, bereavement, and the contraction of one's world can be genuinely painful; it doesn’t help to go into denial. When you let your life teach you about Hashem’s presence, it offers, new options: the possibility of a different relationship with contribution, of continuing to give without needing to prove our worth through giving, and of accepting help without experiencing dependence as a negation of dignity.

Chapter 4: What If You Are Still Young? Should You Skip the Letter?

There can be a great dividend – a deepening of understanding – seeing that you have a self whose significance may become more, rather than less, and being willing to see that “self” in other people just as easily as you see it in yourself. The part of you that is like Avraham can discover what that life has been making of us all along.

Lech Lecha literally means, “Go to you.” This is what Hashem told Avraham the first time He spoke to him. It’s in the Torah, which means that it is what Hashem is also telling you.

Love
Tziporah