The Baal Shem Tov, the almost mythological – but actually historic – founder of the Hasidic movement in 18th century Ukraine owned magical horses.
Story after story speaks of his exploits and adventures. He would climb into his carriage, his driver, Alexi, would say to him, “rabbi, where to today?” and the Baal Shem Tov would respond, “let the horses go where they will.” And, indeed, so it was, wherever the Baal Shem Tov’s carriage brought him, he would find someone in need of assistance, a poor Jew facing hunger or homelessness, someone in despair in need of spiritual encouragement, a community facing persecution that the Baal Shem Tov could avert.
These sorts of miraculous rabbi stories are the fixture of Hasidic lore, appreciated not only by adults but by children as well. Today there are surely PJ Library books about the Baal Shem Tov’s magical horses and carriage. But my teacher, Rabbi David Ebner z’l, shared with us his adult recognition that there was an element to these stories that defied comprehension. Why did the Baal Shem Tov employ Alexi to drive his carriage if the magical horses always knew where to go? Nobody, I promise, is going to hire a chauffeur for their self-driving car.
And how obtuse is Alexi in these stories! Why doesn’t he ever say, “good morning rabbi, I suppose today you just want me to let the horses go where they will just like every day?”
Rabbi Ebner realized that the point of the story is not that the Baal Shem Tov had special horses. He had ordinary horses, no wiser than any others. The entire point of the story was Alexi’s question and the Baal Shem Tov’s consistent answer:
It doesn’t matter where the horses take me. Wherever I end up, I will find someone who needs my assistance. Wherever I go, the reality that I confront there, should elicit within me the response to say what I need to say, and to do what I need to do to serve God by meeting the needs of God’s creation.
At the most significant turning point in Jewish history, Avraham and Sarah follow a Divine command to get up and follow God to a land that God will show them. But they pack up and leave without ever being told where to go:
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר ה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃
וַיֵּ֣לֶךְ אַבְרָ֗ם כַּאֲשֶׁ֨ר דִּבֶּ֤ר אֵלָיו֙ ה
וַיֵּצְא֗וּ לָלֶ֙כֶת֙ אַ֣רְצָה כְּנַ֔עַן וַיָּבֹ֖אוּ אַ֥רְצָה כְּנָֽעַן׃
The LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
Abram went forth as the LORD had commanded him…
…and they set out for the land of Canaan and they arrived in the land of Canaan.
Only later is Avraham told that his descendents – at the time he had no children – would one day inherit the land of Canaan – at the time, the Torah reminds us, the Canaanites were secure in their possession of the land.
Avraham went to Eretz Canaan because his father had been journeying there for reasons the Torah never reveals. Avraham understood that it did not matter where he went – if it mattered, God would have told him where to go – anywhere Avraham would have walked was a suitable place to spread the message of God’s concern for Creation and our concomitant human responsibility to care for all of God’s creation. In Rabbi Ebner’s words:
“Avraham was the first man who chose to wonder, and in wonder to meet God. In finding God, he was also the first man who chose to wander, and in wandering to find man.”
The implications for us are geographic and they are temporal. It doesn’t matter if we find ourselves in Jerusalem or New York or in an out of the way bucolic corner of the District. There are people who are in need of the support that we can offer and wherever someone in need meets someone who can provide what they are lacking is the center of the universe.
And it does not matter if the pivotal moments of Jewish history seem to be in the past, or perhaps some way off in the distant future where circumstances will be dramatically different. Each of us, in every era, in every year, and in every moment, has some task we can accomplish in service of God and in service of other people.
Avraham and Sarah also subjected their faith to rational scrutiny. After God’s repeated promises of blessing, Avraham confronts God with a plea which takes the form of a logical contradiction:
הֵ֣ן לִ֔י לֹ֥א נָתַ֖תָּה זָ֑רַע וְהִנֵּ֥ה בֶן־בֵּיתִ֖י יוֹרֵ֥שׁ אֹתִֽי
“Since You have granted me no offspring, my steward will be my heir.”
Avraham was not expressing doubt when he pointed out a gap between his current childless state and God’s repeated promises concerning Avraham’s descendents. Trusting God does not entail abandoning our rational faculties. On the contrary, Avraham turns his rational observation into a sort of protest prayer.
Rav Menachem Froman z’l, the Israeli mystic, rabbi, and peace activist, frequently quoted a passage from the Hebrew poet Bialik to make a similar point: “I shall go into the field and hear what God has said from the sheaves.” Bialik encouraged his readers to move beyond the warm, cozy, but sometimes stultifying, atmosphere of the beit midrash to encounter the Divine in nature itself. If we understand the created universe to be “God’s first book” then we must study it and encounter it and hear its message no less than the Torah, which is “God’s second book.”
For Rav Froman, the reality that confronts us, if we open ourselves to experiencing it with full honesty, is itself a source of Divine guidance. This is what Avraham and Sarah do in Parashat Lekh Lekha when they recognize that their relationship with God can be developed by following God to any land, because every place where they could journey becomes retroactively and axiomatically, “a land that I will show you.” And Avraham’s insistence that he subject his relationship to God to rational scrutiny and to note the discrepancy between God’s promises and his childlessness, is also a form of “listening to hear what God has said from the sheaves.”
In his final months, as Rav Froman faced a grim cancer prognosis, he went about the business of preparing for his own death, even as he maintained faith in God’s capacity to bring about a miraculous cure. Rav Froman did not allow his faith in God’s capacity to heal anyone at any time from any illness to cloud his rational understanding that his doctor’s dire predictions were most likely to occur. His prognosis was “what God has said from the sheaves.”
And for Rav Froman, this was true as well in the realm of politics. Rav Froman repeatedly explained that “unlike our ideological prior assumptions the Holy Blessed One placed us in a land that has Arabs. This is reality. This is what Hashem says to us to ‘know from the sheaves.’”
To Rav Froman, this meant an insistence that God had brought the Jewish people back to an inhabited Eretz Yisrael in modern times so that we could find a way to live there, and to thrive there, in peace with our neighbors. Obviously that is not easy. But even as successfully bringing that vision to fruition remained elusive for his lifetime, he insisted that we are not free to ignore the task that is before us. After all, the Torah itself does not jump from Lekh Lekha to “and they lived happily ever after.”
On the level of the personal and familial, and on the level of the communal and national, there are important lessons from Parashat Lekh Lekha:
Wherever we go, a Jew is following God’s guidance, seeking a relationship with God through the work that can be done wherever we find ourselves. The horses always take us where we need to be. Wherever we find someone who needs us becomes the center of the universe. But accomplishing the task that only we can accomplish where we find ourselves requires understanding where we find ourselves. We cannot succumb to magical thinking. True faith entails listening to the message from God that is encoded in the reality that surrounds us which can only be discerned through fearless rational scrutiny.
Without denying challenging or even tragic realities, we can insist that there is some opportunity to do good that we can week out. Success is never guaranteed. Some interventions fail even with the most noble intentions. Magic horses will not carry us to easy solutions. But we can remind one another that there is always a challenge that is worth undertaking. And when we put one foot behind another to take on those noble challenges, we are walking with God.
Sometimes a life in relationship with God brings respect from our neighbors, as Avraham and Sarah experienced at some stages of their lives. Sometimes it brings honor and support from kings and princes, as Avraham and Sarah attained at some stages of their lives. And sometimes it means standing in opposition, seemingly, to all humanity, as Avraham and Sarah found themselves at some stages of their lives, asserting their faith in God and their love of humanity, and dedicated to passing on those commitments to their descendents and to us.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 