Lech Lecha: Relationships

Where is Gd when we are in need ?

Gd speaks to Avram four times in Lech Lecha.  Gd tells Avram to go to Canaan. Avram obeys and goes. Gd appears to Abram and tells him that his offspring will inherit the land. Then there is a famine. Avram and his party - wife Sarai and nephew Lot - will quickly be impoverished and possibly starve. What a deal! Avram's imaginary offspring will inherit a drought prone land;  a place that occasionally cannot support life.  Gd offers no advice.  Avram must handle the  situation that his migration has generated. 

On his own, Abram decides to go to Egypt. It is not clear that there was another another choice. Going back to Haran is not mentioned as an option. Egypt, fed by the fertility of the Nile, with an authoritarian regime that eased commercial transactions, was to be the source of food. Avram recognized the problem. The Egyptians respected marriage.  They would not take another man's wife. They would simply eliminate the other man. Sarai was very attractive. Avram instructed her to mislead the Egyptians about their marital status

אִמְרִי־נָ֖א אֲחֹ֣תִי אָ֑תְּ לְמַ֙עַן֙ יִֽיטַב־לִ֣י בַעֲבוּרֵ֔ךְ וְחָיְתָ֥ה נַפְשִׁ֖י בִּגְלָלֵֽךְ׃

Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you.” 

Avram assumes a debt to Sarai.  He will now owe her his life. 

Was this plan indirectly dictated by Gd? Did Avram have a better alternative?  We cannot know.  This is how the events are related. A tradition of women making the greatest sacrifices for the survival of their clan starts. The characters in the story confer an an approval on the process. 

Why didn't Gd provide a better solution? It would have ruined the story.  More importantly, we can now derive that Gd does not work that way. You cannot expect a Divine solution to a problem.  Gd can give instructions: Go to Canaan, obey the precepts.  Gd can intervene: a plague on the Egyptians to foil their intentions, an unlikely  victory in war against powerful armies - but the interventions are not announced, the best alternative is not  usually revealed.  Gd appears after the fact or hundreds of years before. The immediate and local decision is left to the actor. 

Avram's rescue of Lot appears to be an unguided decision. Lot, captured by the united Emperor's of Persia and Babylon, had joined forces with the five city-states of evil, led by Sodom. Avram had to  act as an ally of Sodom, rescuing its people and treasure from the armies that overwhelmed them.  Once again the text deals with a dilemma: Is  an alliance with evil justified to rescue kin? 

[After the fact, Avram rejects any payment or aid from the king of Sodom in the name of Gd.  [Gd, J, who has just acquired the title of the Most High Power]. This new title signals a wider acceptance of a singular power that created the world.  It adds to the credibility of the promise. ]

It is only "after these things"  אַחַ֣ר ׀ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֗לֶּה  that Gd speaks to Avram in a dream, promising that he will have infinite offspring and revealing that they will be immigrant slaves for 400 years before arriving in the  Promised Land ( subject to occasional famine). This is a very long term plan, almost abstract. Are we being taught to look far into the future?  

Hagar's flight from angry Sarai seems an exception. Here we have some Divine intervention.  In that story,  Hagar, carrying Avram's child,  abandons the clan because  she is rejected. Sarai is angered by the degradation she feels from Avram and Hagar, demonstrating her infertility. Avram, indebted to Sarai for his life, tells her  to do as she wishes with her servant  Hagar. It is too much for Hagar, so she leaves. Here, heaven intervenes. An angel ( later referred to as Gd [J, no less]) confronts  Hagar and questions her actions.  The angel instructs Hagar to return... because the ultimate outcome will be fortunate. She refers to the experience as roi, seeing, and the well (perhaps the well  she and Abraham  expected  to find when she fled, once more, with her son Ishmael)  was named Lechai Roi: I am seen by  the one who is Life.  Hagar has a more intimate relationship with heaven, but she is not as close as Avram  to Gd. 

As the parsha ends, Avram is instructed to prove his allegiance by cutting off a piece of his body. This becomes a test for all generations, and the reward for passing the test remains vague.  That is the nature of our relationship with Gd.  Somehow it works.