22 Oct Dvar Torah with Rabbi Josh | Parshat Lech Lecha
ב״ה
This Must Be the Place
Parshat Lech Lecha: Avraham, the Famine, and the Test Within the Test
Parshat Lech Lecha opens with one of the most famous commands in the Torah: “Lech lecha…” – go from your land, your birthplace and your father’s house, to the land that I will show you. Avram is asked to leave everything familiar and walk, quite literally, into the unknown. And he goes. No questions, no negotiation. “Vayelech Avram ka’asher diber eilav Hashem,” Avram went just as Hashem spoke to him.
He arrives in Canaan, and the reward seems to come right away. At Shechem, Hashem appears to him and promises, “To your offspring I will give this land.” Avram builds an altar and calls out in the name of Hashem. It would seem he has passed his test. And then, just a few pesukim later, “there was a famine in the land” (12:10).
Imagine how that must have felt. I left everything. I did exactly what You asked. You brought me here, for this? The land he was promised can’t even feed him. Avram goes down to Mitzrayim, where things get worse still. He fears for his life; Sarai is taken to Pharaoh’s palace, and only Hashem’s intervention in Pharaoh’s household gets them out. Rashi tells us what was going on. The famine came “lenasoto“, to test him, to see whether he would question Hashem’s ways. The first test wasn’t over. There was a test within the test.
Did Avram Pass? The Ramban famously takes a harsh view. He writes that Avram sinned by leaving the land out of fear of the famine. He should have trusted that Hashem, who brought him there, would sustain him there. On this reading, true faith would have meant staying put and waiting for a miracle. The Torah itself, however, doesn’t criticize Avram. Read on its own terms, the pshat paints a different picture of a man who does what any responsible person would do in a famine (he goes where there is food), while never letting go of the relationship that brought him there in the first place.
Look at what happens when he leaves Mitzrayim. The Torah doesn’t tell us the famine has ended. Yet Avram doesn’t look for somewhere else to settle. He goes straight back, and he returns to the very place where his tent had first stood, to the altar he had built, and he calls out in Hashem’s name again. He picks the relationship up exactly where he left it. Hashem responds to him again as well. After Avram parts ways with Lot, Hashem speaks to him again, and this time the promise is bigger: “…all the land you can see, to you and your offspring forever” (13:15). The relationship survived the famine and the detour through Egypt, and then it deepened. Even the detour to Mitzrayim was part of the story.
The psychologist Angela Duckworth, in her book Grit, offers a helpful way to understand what Avram did. She describes gritty people as having a hierarchy of goals. At the top is a single, overarching goal that works like a compass. It gives direction and meaning to everything else. Below it are lower-level goals, the specific plans and strategies for getting there. The key insight is that gritty people are stubborn about the top-level goal and flexible about the lower ones. When a particular plan is blocked, they find another route. Grit is about refusing to lose your direction, even if the course changes.
This is Avram exactly. Staying in Canaan through the famine was a lower-level goal, and when reality blocked it, he adjusted. But his top-level goal, his relationship with Hashem, and his commitment to the land Hashem had shown him never moved. That’s why, the moment he could, he walked straight back to his mizbeach. Seen this way, Avram’s test wasn’t whether he could summon a superhuman faith that ignores hunger and waits for a miracle. It was whether he could live inside uncertainty without losing his connection to Hashem. And he passed.
For Us, and For Our Children
Most of us know the feeling of the test within the test. We make a hard choice, take a leap, do the right thing, and we expect that the hard part is behind us. Then comes the famine – the new job that turns out to be harder than expected, the move that brings fresh challenges, the child who struggles just when we thought things were settling down. This is why You brought me here? Avram shows us that faithfulness in those moments means knowing what our compass is, being flexible about the path, and returning, again and again, to the place where we first called out in Hashem’s name. That is also what we hope to teach our children. That’s the grit we want to give our children too. We can’t promise them that every plan will work. We can teach them to tell the difference between the goal and the plan, and to hold on to what matters most, even when the road takes a turn they never expected. And when they find their way back to where they started, to that first mizbeach (altar), they’ll know it the way Avram did. This must be the place.