LIFE IS A JOURNEY
(originally written: November, 2005;
updated: November, 2011)
Birth is a beginning and death a destination.
And life is a journey:
from childhood to maturity and youth to age;
from innocence to awareness and ignorance to knowing...
(Alvin Fine)
Arami oveid avi. “My forefather was a wandering Aramean.” (Deuteronomy 26:5) First and foremost, Abraham was a wanderer. His primary directive, Lech Lecha, impelled him throughout his life. Lech lecha mei’artzecha umimoladetcha umibeit avicha el ha’aretz asher areka. “Go forth from your native land, and from the place of your birth, and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1) Abraham knew what he was leaving behind, but did he know where was he going? As Biblical scholar Aviva Zornberg notes, the indeterminacy of the journey is the most striking aspect of the command, and it has engendered numerous interpretations. According to Rashi, Abraham’s not knowing served to increase his longing for the Promised Land through anticipation and delayed gratification. According to Radak, it signified the difficulty of the first of his ten trials and the most difficult of them all—to leave behind familiar territory for an unknown destination. What if Canaan was not specified in Lech Lecha precisely because it was not the final resting place? After all, according to the Genesis narrative, Abraham left Canaan almost as soon as he arrived and continued on to Egypt. Even within the Land, he was constantly on the move, back and forth among Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Be’er Sheva. “The imperative of transformation is the driving force of Lekh Lecha,” states Zornberg. (Zornberg, p. 78) Self-transformation requires movement. The spiritual seeker never reaches the end of the road. As soon as one stops progressing, one stagnates and dies.
My significant Lech Lecha moment came when I took the plunge and decided to become a Rabbi. Although the final moment of decision came overnight, all my life I had been preparing for it. As William James describes in Varieties of Religious Experience, “what lies behind such experiences [of instantaneous conversion] is a long incubation period, in which subconscious elements prepare themselves for a flowering, which is as much of a process as an event.” (Zornberg, p. 80) Like Abraham, whose father first brought him part way toward Canaan, my family upbringing first instilled in me my love of Judaism. (When I was still a child, my parents and grandparents already predicted I was going to be a Rabbi.) However, as I matured and began to think for myself, the Jewish community I knew no longer seemed to have a place for me. I resonate deeply with the Midrashic accounts of Abraham’s early years as he became increasingly disillusioned with the society around him. I too felt misunderstood and alienated, and I brooded over my existence.
Viktor Frankl writes that the fundamental human urge is not so much the pursuit of happiness, but the pursuit of meaning. Furthermore, the fundamental human fear is not death, but having lived a life devoid of purpose. “Abraham is the archetypal man in quest of meaning, the experience of meaning.” (Zornberg, p. 85) Wandering aimlessly from place to place is a crucial phase in the journey. The traveler comes upon the blazing castle and he searches desperately for a way in. His existential crisis necessarily precedes his epiphany.
Sometimes friends or acquaintances would ask me why I wanted to be a Rabbi. In response, I could enumerate various talents and interests—“I’m an experienced teacher” or “I enjoy leading services”—but the bottom line is that I was responding to a calling from deep within me. It was chiba, the passionate yearning for God. As the Maharal suggests concerning Abraham, unenlightenment generates distress, distress generates longing, and longing generates love. (Zornberg, p. 89) When one falls in love, one doesn’t ask why. I am struck by the coincidence of encountering my life partner and embarking on my life’s vocation around forty, corresponding to the age of Moses when God spoke to him out of the burning bush.
We are all fellow travelers. At every age, we are on the move. At every age, life presents us with challenges and opportunities—the man here dealing with the infirmities of old age every bit as much as the boy, Sean, there, on the cusp of his Bar Mitzvah. We may think we know where we will end up, but we are wrong. Even when we reach one milestone, we are on to the next. Where can we turn for guidance? Where do we listen for our own message of Lech Lecha? According to Midrash, the bush where God spoke to Moses is the human heart. Both burn, and are not consumed. As long as it continues to beat, the heart is a bottomless source of passion and renewal, pressing us with constancy into the unknown. We have only one final resting place.
In his book Who Dies?, Stephen Levine offers two measures of a person’s worth. The Western mind views life as a line that extends from point A to point B—we are born, we pass certain milestones along the way, and then we die. In contrast, the Native American views a fulfilled life as a circle. The circle itself may expand as we progress through life, but at any given moment it is boundless and complete. Therefore, the Native American wakes up in the morning and says: “today is a good day to die”—not with morbidity, but with the serenity that comes from knowing that there is nothing more that he needs to accomplish in order to be whole. For Abraham, the promise of immortality immediately follows the Lech Lecha command: va’avarechecha va’agadlah shemecha. “I will bless you, and I will make your name great.” (Genesis 12:2) Abraham’s eternal greatness lies in his ability and willingness to keep responding hineini, “here I am,” to the call of God and the call of his own inner urgings. In this, he endures as a model for us all.
...Birth is a beginning and death a destination
But life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage—
to life everlasting.
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