Lech Lecha D'var Torah: Delivered by Sandy Johnston, November 1st
- neharshalom
- Nov 20, 2025
- 10 min read
Updated: Nov 24, 2025
Shabbat shalom! It’s my pleasure to have a different role in the service today than usual–instead of reading Torah, I have the pleasure of teaching some! I want to remind you that, like I and the many other folks who are giving divrei Torah during R. Leora’s leave, you too can–and please do–also do things that you’re not used to, because your community needs it!
So, Parshat Lech Lecha. I apparently have a thing for this parsha. I actually didn’t remember when I signed up for this particular week, but the last time I gave a dvar Torah here at Nehar Shalom was also for this parsha, four years ago, when we were davening outside. Some of you may remember playing a game where I asked about where you grew up in the context of talking about questions about belonging in place and being “from” somewhere. Probably to no one’s surprise, I want to spend some time today talking about similar themes–because I really do think it’s a big part of what this parsha is about.
A teacher, mentor, and family friend of mine, professor Ben Sommer, who teaches Bible at JTS, likes to say that it’s remarkable, and unusual or even unparalleled, that our Jewish religious/national/whatever origin story emphasizes being from somewhere else. Devarim (26:5) tells us that the ceremony of the dedication of one’s first fruits to the Temple must start with the declaration that
אֲרַמִּי֙ אֹבֵ֣ד אָבִ֔י וַיֵּ֣רֶד מִצְרַ֔יְמָה וַיָּ֥גר שָׁ֖ם בִּמְתֵ֣י מְעָ֑ט וַֽיְהִי־שָׁ֕ם לְג֥וֹי גָּד֖וֹל עָצ֥וּם וָרָֽב׃,
“My father was a fugitive, or wandering, Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation.” The rabbinic sage Rav said that the story told at the Passover seder–perhaps our most core practice of explaining where our identity comes from–should start not from the Exodus, but from the pre-Avram generations that lived in ever ha’nahar, across the river, that is, Mesopotamia. In a world where revanchist claims to land are, uh, common, it is what we might call a bold move.
In the spirit of exploration of this topic and of intellectual honesty, though, I have to note that Professor Sommer is not quite right that this is a unique story. And yes, I’ll be sending him an email with some notes on this. Hopefully he appreciates it as much as my last gift to him, a plush cuneiform tablet. As some of you know, Gabriella and I went to Mexico City in February to visit my brother and sister in law, who were traveling in Latin America for the year after their wedding (they are now settled in the distant across-the-river land of Somerville). I was thrilled to spend half a day (my dad, the historian, spent the entire day) at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the national museum of archaeology and anthropology, which has detailed and amazing exhibits about all of the cultures of Mexico, up to and through the colonial era. The exhibit on the people most conventionally called the Aztecs–what we should call them is a complicated question, not unlike our own–notes that they had arrived in Mexico’s Central Valley as a migratory people, and proudly told their story as part of their core myths and narrative. Aha! We’re not alone!
And this is the place where it starts (technically, a few verses at the end of last week’s parsha matter too). This is the parsha of journeying, arrival, and ethno-religious origins. The essence of this parsha is a series of vignettes of Avram/Avraham’s life, structured around his life transitions from Mesopotamia to Canaan to Egypt and back to Canaan, following God’s promise of a land for his descendants. I want to take a look at a few of these vignettes and talk about how they speak to themes of human movement, arrival, and growth–through the voices of the writers and compilers of the texts, the characters themselves, the meforshim who comment on the text, and through our own voices, as we think about these questions.
Let’s start at the very beginning. Reading from Gen. 12:1:
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר ה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃
God said to Avram: “get going from your land, and from your birthplace, and from the house of your father, to the land that I will show you.” That’s my translation, because the JPS translation that the Eitz Chayyim chumash uses collapses the rather important fact that God frames the place that God is telling Avram to leave in three different ways into two. As is their wont, rabbinic commentators such as Ibn Ezra and Ramban hotly debate the implications of this precise and arguably repetitive use of language. What is “אַרְצְךָ֥” (your land)? What is “מּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖” (your birthplace, or native land)? What is “בֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ,” your father’s house? They note that Avram’s journey has multiple stages, from Ur Kasdim to Haran and on to Canaan. In essence, they are asking where is Avram actually “from”? What are the relevant parts of his identity? What can he keep, what must he discard? And how were those aspects of identity shaped by his time in each of the various places he has lived? To apply a framework that might not have made much sense to meforshim who lived almost 1000 years ago–given how Avram travels and rarely stops moving throughout his life, can he claim that he and his people, the little nascent tribe he brings out of Haran and continues to build in Canaan, are indigenous to anywhere? And if not, what does it say about the concept of indigeneity, of being from somewhere, that there are people to whom it probably doesn’t apply?
I considered using the word “itinerant” to describe Avram’s life, as I believe I did four years ago, and as I often describe my own life. But I’m not confident that’s the right frame. A while back, my Aunt Karen, who as some of you know is a Unitarian Universalist minister, recommended that I subscribe to the Substack written by her ministerial colleague Jordinn Nelson Long. A piece that she posted in September popped out to me as being relevant to this conversation. I’ll quote from that piece:
Over this past year I’ve been in seven countries, seven provinces, and more states than I’m willing to count. My travel schedule is far from the busiest- I know several people who for various professional and personal reasons are constantly on the road, living itinerantly. But I, myself, am not itinerant- that word doesn’t fit my attachments or my relationships or my hopes.
I am, instead, a place-rooted sort of person.
I hope to shed light, in fact, on what place-rooted ways of seeing and valuing community and connections might look like.
And yet one deep and vulnerable truth of my life is summed up in two words, which are “I left.”
I sit ambivalently with that sentence.
Avram is, indeed, the one who left. To some extent, we all are. Very few of us have stayed static in one place, one community, even one tradition, our whole lives. Are we itinerant? Are we placed-based, perhaps serially so? Are these the same thing, or different? What does all of this mean for us–and for how people perceive us?
It’s to that last question that I want to turn next. As you know, the question of people arriving in other places is a fraught one across the country and indeed the world right now. From xenophobia about immigration, to concerns about gentrification that frequently become personified in vilification of newcomers, to questions of national identity, it’s very easy for people to fall into a perception that other people arriving on their doorstep is a bad thing, a burden to be born rather than an opportunity or even the blessing that God promises Avram he will be to other people.
So it’s no surprise, then, that when we turn to the parsha we see people trying to exploit Avram’s status as a newcomer. Now, Avram is clearly not vulnerable in the same way that, say, asylum seekers from war-torn countries are; he has brought with him considerable material wealth and apparently a large household. But when he goes down to Egypt to avoid a famine in Canaan–presumably a journey which his material wealth allows him the privilege to make–what he fears the Egyptians will see is exactly what they do see: an opportunity to extract benefits from the new person in town. In this case, the “benefit” to be extracted is his attractive young wife, Sarai. It’s left up to God to prevent a fatal misunderstanding and knock the Egyptians back from their extractive tendencies. Now, the ways that we see extraction of benefits from newcomers in our societal and public policy landscape vary from the clearly immoral–exploitation of undocumented folks’ labor given their lack of power to fight back–to the questionable but perhaps defensible in some circumstances–the placement of the primary burden of fixing our housing crisis on new people and things through extractive fees rather than on society as whole, even when the responsibility for the crisis is societal and goes back decades. But what they hold in common is the idea of newcomer not as something or someone to be dealt with on its own, human terms and integrated into society but as a material ready for exploitation for the benefit of those already here. It’s a reaction that struggles to see positive-sum, mutually beneficial outcomes and always tends to retreat back to a zero-sum view of the world–and of people.
Indeed, in this parsha we see Avram himself adopt such a zero-sum mindset. Perhaps still scarred by the fact that the Egyptians thoroughly fulfilled his cynical expectations, after returning from Egypt Avram discovers that his and Lot’s flocks seemingly cannot occupy the same ground–the resources of the area are insufficient to support all of them. They agree to go in different directions and occupy different places. Ecologists might say that the carrying capacity of the arid Negev is insufficient to support both herds. But here’s the thing: much like the much-ballyhoeed but ultimately mostly fallacious–or at least not inherently true–“tragedy of the commons,” carrying capacity doesn’t have to be zero-sum. Truth be told, the Negev isn’t exactly the best place to have significant density of sheep and goats. But ancient cultures living in arid areas, perhaps most famously in Iran and Afghanistan, were quite expert at inventing ways to cultivate intensive agriculture even in very dry areas. It’s not that Avram and Lot could necessarily have made dense pastoralism in the Negev work–it’s that they didn’t even try. And indeed, a close read of the text, especially ch. 13 v. 7, implies that human factors like the shepherds not getting along played as much of a role in the split as ecological ones. And so, Lot winds up living near and in Sodom and Gomorrah–characterized in rabbinic literature by their tendency toward zero-sum thinking–which we know ends really well for everyone. The split precipitated by simplistic calculations about capacity and zero-sum thinking ends spectacularly poorly. It’s a lesson we’d do well to remember in an era, and frankly in a neighborhood, where the discredited ideas of 1970s paranoia like The Population Bomb, a philosophy that some very online folks have neatly summarized as “humanity is the virus,” still hold significant sway.
There’s more here–a lot more–but I’ve been going on long enough. If we’ve got time, I’d open the floor to conversation. But first, I’m going to leave you with some parting thoughts. Let’s go back to our example of the Aztecs that I started with. Their narrative of arrival and growth in Mexico’s Central Valley harmonizes a history that was, like all history, probably considerably less neat than the stories claim. I’m far from an expert, but the gist is that the Aztecs envisioned a probably-mythical past place of origin called Aztlán, located somewhere in the north of Mexico or even the Southwest United States. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, is most closely related to the languages of indigenous peoples of the American Southwest, such as the Utes, Paiute, and Hopi. Fascinatingly, in the 1960s the concept of Aztlán was adopted and romanticized by Chicano nationalism, the identity movement of people of mixed indigenous and Spanish descent living on both sides of the US-Mexico border. But, as the historian and writer David Bowles, a queer and Mexican-American writer and historian who teaches at the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley, points out (and I am indebted to my friend Jonathan Katz-Ouziel for pointing me to his work), if we are to locate the origin of the Aztecs/Mexica in the southwest US, linguistic and archaeological evidence–and even a close read of their own texts and stories–indicates that we have to go back 5,500 years. Their migration to the Central Valley and Tenochtitlan happened across many, many generations, and for the past 3,000 years if we must locate a “homeland” for them it would be within the borders of modern-day Mexico. As a result, the claim that the SW US is Aztlán would in many ways complicate if not outright override the claims and rights of the more recent indigenous peoples of the area. For Bowles, this points to create a coalition of all of these people to assert their rights. For me, it draws me back to the discussion among Ibn Ezra, Ramban and others about the essential inappropriateness of affixing indigeneity to many people and groups.
So what do we take away? I’ve hinted throughout that I prefer an approach that sees the inherent image of God in each person and people, regardless of where they’re from or how they’ve moved through the world. We can draw again on our look at Aztec history: first they were poorly defined, vulnerable newcomers; then they were triumphant, imperialistic, and brutal (though their brutality may have been exaggerated by colonial narratives, it’s probably not an accident their allies turned on them when the conquistadors showed up), then an exploited people suffering under colonialism; and now, among other things, a potent symbol of heritage in a country and continent still trying to figure out what it thinks of itself. You, uh, may detect some parallels with Jewish history there. But here’s the thing: peoples’ status isn’t set in stone or permanent; it’s contextual. We should strive to treat people as other people, nothing more, nothing less. We should look to opportunities to build positive-sum futures rather than limiting ourselves in our visions of what could be to zero-sum thinking. Then we’ll be able to have a better chance of fulfilling the promise God makes to Avram, וְנִבְרְכ֣וּ בְךָ֔ כֹּ֖ל מִשְׁפְּחֹ֥ת הָאֲדָמָֽה׃ , “and all the families of the earth will be blessed by/through you.”
Shabbat Shalom!
Sources
Sources on Aztec/Mexica origin narratives