Lech Lecha – Once Upon a Week

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Yehuda Bachana.

God commands Abraham to leave everything and go! And so 75-year-old Abraham obeys God right away, and two verses later it is written:

Abraham goes out and follows the commandment of God. The first step that Abraham takes in the “Lech Lecha” portion is one of the most important and meaningful steps in human history.

It was the first step of mankind in reconnection with God. The Torah tells us how Abraham was chosen, and how through him, in a miraculous way, God created a nation that is supposed to spread the Word of the Living God in the world; to spread knowledge about God, and to teach morality, virtue, love, grace, charity, mercy, justice, and so on.

God orders Abraham:

At the beginning of the Torah portion, immediately after the famous call of God, comes the promise:

If we are looking for what Abraham’s descendants gave to mankind, we can find a lot. We won several Nobel prices, invented many things, including Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. There is no doubt that the descendants of Abraham had, and still have, many gifts that benefit humanity.

But the most important gift of all, is the faith of Abraham, that the knowledge of God was spread through the world. That is why, as believers, we see the fulfillment of that prophecy in Yeshua.

He was born a Jew from Israel, and because of Him, the message of hope, salvation, security, and knowledge of God reached even the far corners of the earth. It is because of Yeshua that our world knows about the God of Abraham.

“In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” was fulfilled in Yeshua the Messiah. He came to save the world, to bless the world and to give it hope, faith, and redemption. Yeshua is the seed of Abraham!

The New Testament opens with the following words:

The issue of being chosen is mentioned in the New Testament several times, in Romans, Ephesians and other places.

As we read in our Haftara, from Isaiah 40-41, we understand that God chose the nation of Israel, the seed of Abraham. As Abraham was first to follow God:

Only through the power of love, could Abraham withstand his trials. Only through the power of love, could 75-year-old Abraham get up and walk away from everything familiar, from everything safe, and follow God into the unknown.

In the same manner of love, Yeshua’s disciples left everything to follow Him:

And today, Yeshua invites us to follow him, to walk in the light, as Yeshua declares:

As believers we chose to follow Yeshua, in love. And where is He leading us? Towards a connection with God, with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

God chose Abraham, God chose the seed of Abraham. God did not choose the nation of Israel because they are the strongest, the smartest, or the most successful people. No, He chose this nation because He had sworn to our fathers, because He made a promise of love to Abraham, and He is faithful to this promise.

That’s what written in Deuteronomy 7:

And the reason, why they were chosen, is given in the following passage:

We, Jews of the land of Israel, are standing here today as the living proof that there is a God in Heaven. We are the real, physical proof that He exists and His words and prophesies are true. We are the real, physical proof of God’s faithfulness to His promises.

Previous generations could only dream of the reality we live in today. Some didn’t even dare to dream about it, as it seemed too far-fetched to think that one day we will return back and resettle the Promised Land – the Land of Israel.

God miraculously brought us back from the four corners of the earth, as He had spoken through Moses and all the prophets. As God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah, that as long as the sun, the moon and the stars of heaven exist, so will the seed of Israel exist before God, forever.

Here, we have to give proper thanks to the Christian Zionist vision, that existed long before Herzl, the visionary of state. Without the help and support of Christian Zionists, we would probably still ride donkeys here in Israel.

Before the state of Israel came to be, Christian Zionists invested in the infrastructure of the Land. They build here schools and hospitals.

Until this very day, many of our public institutions, schools, hospitals, university campuses, museums, parks, research facilities, and charities are funded by Christian Zionists. Their love for our country is based on our common connection to the Word of God.

The state of Israel, and also us as Netivyah, owe a lot to the Christian Zionists. The fruit of their hands was and still is a blessing!

Let’s get back to our Torah portion. Last week, at the very end of the previous portion, we’ve heard the name Abraham, or “Abram”, for the first time. This week we continue to learn about the greatest believer of all, the role model of faith: Abraham.

When the New Testament authors are looking for an example of faith that is true, active, and alive, they use Abraham as such an example. He is the eternal prototype of the man of faith. That’s why Abraham is mentioned in the New Testament so many times.

When we think of Abraham, the image imprinted on our minds is of a superman or an unreachable figure, a legend. But when the Torah describes its heroes, it doesn’t portray them in absolute colors of black and white.

Was Abraham a perfect figure? Or did he even face some difficulties? Maybe even Abraham dealt with doubts and questions? And, God forbid, perhaps he had doubts of faith.

Did Abraham laugh as well? Did Abraham want to give up hope for a son from Sarah, willing to see the son of promise as Ishmael? Did Abraham go down to Egypt and fear that he could be killed there? Did he not believe that God would protect him?

The word of God teaches us that life is a process of growth and learning, and even the best and the greatest are sometimes wrong. And even the wicked have positive qualities.

This idea is hard to comprehend, because we are taught from childhood that there is a hero, who is good, and there is a villain, who is bad. We learned it as children from the Bible stories, from children’s Disney movies, Comics and so on…

There is good and there is evil. This is nice, but it is not real, not true.

As children we learn to distinguish between what is allowed and forbidden, between good and bad. But when we grow up, we begin to understand, that some decisions are hard, and at times you can only choose the lesser of two evils.

Today, tomorrow, next week, and for the rest of our lives, there will be hard choices and complicated decisions to make. To leave for Egypt or stay in the Land and deal with hunger? To tell that Sarah is my wife and risk our wellbeing, or to play safe?

To have pity on Ishmael, the son of a slave, and risk a bad influence or perhaps even harm to Isaac, the son whom God destined as the son of promise? Or to send Ishmael and Hagar away from home to die in the desert?

It is important to understand that not only are the decisions difficult, but people are also complicated creatures. The Bible does not paint its heroes black and white, but rather in different shades of gray.

Noah, the only person in the Bible who is called “righteous”, got so drunk that “he couldn’t tell up from down”, as they say. Moses, Aaron, and Miriam are all punished for their sins, and so is King David, the symbol of the Messianic King. And his son, Solomon, the wisest man on earth. They all sinned.

We need to understand that the Bible is true, and the people it tells us about are real people who lived and acted. The Bible doesn’t try to make them into saints or superheroes.

And on the opposite side, we have antiheroes, like Esau, who are not completely evil, as he respects and loves his father, whom he does not want to hurt. Afterwards, when he met Jacob, he hugged him and he cried, he loved and forgave his brother.

God doesn’t ask us to be perfect, he asks us to seek Him, to serve Him, to seek and long for His Kingdom. To try and do what’s good and right in His eyes.

However, through the Bible, He wants us to understand, that on the way to His Kingdom, we are most likely going to make mistakes. Like all other humans.

As believers we understand that the World of God allows us to acknowledge our mistake. Yeshua allows us to repent, to re-examine our lives and our decisions, and then march towards the change.

This what our life is about, our life alongside Yeshua.

Shabbat Shalom.