Lech Lecha: acquiring the Heritage

Lech Lecha: acquiring the Heritage

I a reading  The Evolution of Beauty, a book about the role of arbitrary mate selection in the development of species.  In my mind, this is very much like the origin of tribes and nations. A group decides to limit mate selection to its own kind.

 In this book, I was introduced to the word "lek", how a person unfamiliar with Hebrew would pronounce the first word of this weeks parsha.  A lek is a collection of male birds competing for mates in a given territory.  It is competing over a territory that will become a heritage.  Our parsha is about establishing the Abrahamic homestead.

Gd tells Abraham to leave his birthplace.  Terach, Abraham's father had already left  the old country, Ur Casdim, and moved toward Canaan, but Terach did not quite make it, he only got to Haran.  Abraham was to complete the journey to Canaan.  

When Abraham gets to Canaan, he does not have a place to settle because the Cannanites are still in the land.  The original inhabitants of the land are still there,  and Abraham does not consider displacing them.  He camps between settlements, in the mountains east of Beth El.

When Abraham returns from Egypt, there is a world war.  The four kings of the Northeast,  the armies of the land that Terach and Abraham left, attack the decadent nations of Sodom and the five towns.  The land of Canaan has now been conquered by invasion, the population plundered and decimated and displaced.  The old claims to the land are now considerably weakened.  Abraham  and his allies overpower the invaders and now Abraham has a claim to the land.  But after the battle, Abraham does not stake the claim he pays a 10% tax to Malchizedek, confirming the prior claim to the land. 

It is possible that the war of  the four Northeastern ( Babylonian/Persian)  kings explains part if the reason that Terach/Abraham family left that region.  The text says that these kings enslaved the people for 12 years.  Perhaps the migration was to escape the servitude.  Perhaps they wanted to disassociate themselves from the aggression . 

When does an immigrant have the right to settle in the new land?  What constitutes a rightful deed? Where  can a people rightfully set up their lek? 

The story of the Promised Land has prevented the full integration of Jews into the lands of their sojourns.  Perhaps the details of the story will help us fulfill our part of the Promise in the land. 

Bereshith: Desperately Lost

Bereshith: Desperately Lost

This year I was struck by the verse: 

הֵן֩ גֵּרַ֨שְׁתָּ אֹתִ֜י הַיּ֗וֹם מֵעַל֙ פְּנֵ֣י הָֽאֲדָמָ֔ה וּמִפָּנֶ֖יךָ אֶסָּתֵ֑ר וְהָיִ֜יתִי נָ֤ע וָנָד֙ בָּאָ֔רֶץ וְהָיָ֥ה כָל־מֹצְאִ֖י יַֽהַרְגֵֽנִי׃

Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must hide from Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth—anyone who meets me may kill me!”

It describes the panic that Cain felt  after he was charged with the murder of  his brother.   It also struck me as what my father must have felt when he escaped form the Treblinka death camp.  I notice that the word Esther, my mother's name, is in the the verse.  It means hide.  It was my mother , Esther, who arranged for a hiding place for my father  when he was running and "anyone he met could kill him."  The verse is amazing .  One could even say that the troubles, the persecution, the need to hide, were the result of banishments: disenfranchisement from Poland, and, more remotely, exile from the Promised land, long ago. 

But how does this situation work with Divine justice?  Cain had killed his brother.  His exile was standard punishment for unpremeditated murder.  Since there was no precedent, he did not know what would happen when he struck the lethal blow. But Cain had done something in his rage that deserved punishment.   What had my father, and all those who escaped with him, done? 

Part of the reason for the  exile was that the blood of  Hevel cried out from the ground.  How much blood was crying out when my father was running?  But what could he have done? Was the only acceptable solution to die with his brothers and sisters? 

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When blood cries from the earth, no one is safe, anyone who meets you might kill you, it is a danger of exile.  Finding the right shelter is the Divine  intervention

Vzoth Habracha: the precipice

 At the end of Torah, at the end of the year, we read about the end of Moshe's life.  The emphasis  is on the failure to come to the completion, the blocked  entry into the promised Land.  The man who invented liberation, wrote the first constitution, brought the message of heaven to earth -  was disappointed that he could not visit the future site of the wailing wall.

The prospect, nay the certainty, that there will be an end to accomplishment is a universal human pain, regardless of previous accomplishments.  I  need to be told that even Moshe suffered this sadness.  It helps me arrange how I feel about my life and my future.

I still believe that I have much more to accomplish in this  life.  I am sure that all the good I can do in the world will happen, whether it is through me or through someone else.  It is a case of homotopy.

My path to the goal is not the only one. 

I read Vladimir Voevodsky's obituary . That is where I heard about homotopy.  He had moved on from these concepts to devising methods for computers to check  the truth of mathematical proofs.  He was approaching a new level of understanding  truth.   He was also denied entry into his promise. 

That is the way of the world.  

So we begin, again