Sermons & Taste of Torah

By Rabbi Rebecca Schatz

6 weeks after October 7th, I went to Israel. I traveled against the wishes of my family, some friends, and probably congregants who wanted me to stay close to home. I went for many reasons including showing solidarity, pride in a moment of global fear, and witnessing. Ultimately, I went for me. I went on the journey because I needed to go. I needed to see and hear and feel in first-person rather than through stories and news outlets and Instagram reels, second and third-person. 

We read the words of lekh lekha as Avram being told to go on a journey. But the Torah has an economy of language and therefore chooses words wisely. “Lekh” – meaning “go,” “lekha” – meaning, “for yourself.” This was a journey that God sent Avram on, but Avram went because he needed to go. To go for himself.

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃ 

God said to Avram, go for yourself from your land, from the place you were born and from your parent’s home to the land that I will show you. 

So, I have to imagine that not only was Avram ready to go, but he knew he had to venture away from those circles to find himself. The land that God would show him would be a place where, as God says, Avram would be blessing. Not “a blessing,” but “blessing.” Avram would be brakha by venturing to a new place. Bringing blessing. Showing others how to see blessings around them, etc.

We all know the experience of leaving something or somewhere that feels stale and has lost excitement. However, that does not mean that it is not hard to leave, nor does it mean that the change is not scary. God reassures Avram that his job is to bring, and be, blessing so that this new change had a goal, a reason, and a mission. Avram is not just leaving because it is time but because God sees potential in his ability to bring blessing to a new world experiencing Avram as a new entity. 

“The Torah, A Women’s Commentary,” shares that “Parashat Lekh Lekha begins with a transformation in identity and status through a physical, geographical passage.” Avram starts to transform into the Avraham that we know through this first step of going away from his origins. He is getting up, leaving, and therefore becoming a new person for himself and to others in the process. 

Going to Israel after October 7 changed me. I felt a magnetic pull to be somewhere that was uncertain, at that moment, in terms of safety and experience and yet, I went. I went to stand on blood-stained ground, to listen to shattering stories of destruction and heroic moments of bravery. I went to alter my own connection and story to a homeland I love and care about and worry about through all her beauty and her challenges. I went to be present. Ready to change, ready to bring blessing, and be blessing, and trepidatious to come home and know I would feel far away. From a Talmudic story on this verse from Genesis, we learn the popular Hebrew phrase, “meshaneh makom, meshaneh mazal” meaning, changing your place changes your luck. Maybe you will try sitting somewhere new this Shabbat. Maybe you will go on a trip because work has been tough and you need a break. Maybe you and your partner will find time to connect because the chaos of life has made your relationship seem mundane. Whatever you might do to “go for yourself,” go! Do it! Get out of the skin you are so used to being in and try something new to change up your routine, your style, your life and maybe even your luck. Lekh Lekha – go for yourself to be blessing somewhere that needs you! 

By Rabbi Adam Kligfeld

I have been candid in the past that even before I switched to a plant-based diet (which mostly insulates me from specific kashrut– and hekhsher-based deliberations), I struggled with what modern kashrut had become: A search for labels, rather than for sanctity. A fealty to certain Orthodox rabbinical authorities, rather than to God. And far too much wickedness (perpetrated upon animals and upon vulnerable human beings within the sphere of industrialized food) done in the apparent name of sanctity. It smacked of true perversion and inversion. To take something so lofty–the Torah’s elevation of eating to sacred act–and to sully it with the corruption, suffering and dishonesty that suffuse so much of modern kashrut seemed to be particularly sad. 

I once had a member in my former congregation pose this question to me: If an intentional Jew had to choose between eating meat that was not slaughtered under rabbinic supervision, but which which was slaughtered utterly humanely and painlessly in an environment that treated all workers and animals ethically…and between eating meat that came with a rabbinic stamp but clearly from a factory/slaughterhouse that treated both its animals and workers cruelly…which would be the better Jewish choice? I had no good answer. I felt pained by the realism of the question. 

This topic comes to mind as I study a beautiful Hasidic commentary on one of the opening lines of Parshat Noah. As rationale for God’s bringing the flood, the Torah describes the brokenness of God’s new world. ותשחת הארץ לפני האלקים/Vatishahet ha’aretz lifnei ha’elohim. Literally, “The earth had gone to ruin before God.” The plain meaning is that the early generations of humanity, according to the Torah, were filled with violence, lawlessness, bloodshed and all things ruinous. But Rabbi Israel Joshua Trunk (Kotno, Poland, 19th C) reads the “lifnei ha’elokim/before God” in a particularly homiletic way. (And, I will admit, in an anachronistic way! As surely the Torah does not actually imagine that the generations before Avraham, between Adam and Noah “knew” or “feared” God.) He says that the Torah’s words hint that the particular ugliness of that generation (and, by inference, any generation) is that all the ruin was one את פני האלקים/et p’nei ha’Elohim, “towards/with the face of God.” The ruin was בשם אלקים/b’shem elohim. “In the name of God.” The ugliness and sinfulness was done in God’s name, and in the name of (and thus with the intention to be “covered” by) all that ought to have been holy.

From the very beginning, Rabbi Trunk is teaching, even before Avraham and Moshe and Sinai and revelation and the development of Jewish law, the Torah was expressing a deep repugnance towards vileness done in the name of holiness. Later sources would call such behavior טובל ושרץ בידו/tovel v’sheretz b’yado. Immersing in the cleansing waters of the mikvah while grasping something that definitionally renders one impure and dirty.

We see it all the time. Those punctilious in their prayer, while spewing ugly speech after they finish their personal amidah. Pious Jews who follow every rule that guards the sanctity of Shabbat, and then conduct their business practices in violation of innumerable Jewish laws and restrictions aimed at guarding the sanctity of society. And, yes, actors in the kashrut industry that find a way to slap a label on a piece of steak, suggesting it is truly kosher, all while the actions done to animals and humans to produce said steak are anything but kosher, anything but fit.

In the Torah, God responds to this inversion with destruction. Time to start again. May we, in our generation, awaken to the ways we contribute to this phenomenon, and live our Jewish lives in a way that models the marriage of ritual and ethics. So that all that we do “before God” is worthy.