Genesis Cycle 6 Lech Lechah

Lech Lechah

Lech Lechah is about dichotomies. It’s about keeping it together in mind even if things are splitting up in reality. Not easy. It’s about living our lives in a way that can honor and create separations for the purpose of wholeness.

What a strange thought. So often a separation or a split whether it’s between our present and our past, our high school and our college, our job and our retirement, our parents, ourselves, our life and death, one decision to the next…  seems like the final word, the final reality, the end-game.  Bands split up. Lovers split up. Countries split up. Best friends split up. Whatever the circumstances, we live a life hounded by millions of possible separations from the split ends in our hair to the wood we split for fire.

Here’s the message of Lech Lechah though: Any separation is only temporary. It is holy work to see it as such. In fact, it is our responsibility to behave as such. It is our responsibility not only to purify the pieces of ourselves so that they can join with greater harmony but to see the process…the separation  and the wholeness… as one.

 

Separations are not a curse therefore but a blessing if (and only if) they are seen as process. If this seems a bit abstract and obtuse then think of it this way: Separations will happen. Schisms and dichotomies are a part of life. We just need to do them right.

How do we do them right? That’s the question.

This reminds me of something a student said to me this evening while I was correcting essays. I had given a prompt that I was bemoaning. I had asked the students to write about something that had brought them gratitude or…I like to give choices…something that had repelled them. Of course every essay I was reading had more and more grotesque imagery. One sentence particularly bothered me. It was about cleaning up solidified grease at McDonalds.  This is what the student said: There isn’t any solidified grease if you’re doing it right. 

What does this have to do with Lech Lechah? Well, the way we can know if we’re doing it right is if we end up cleaning the solidified grease of our dramatic end-all separations, if we end up cleaning up the solidified grease of our past jobs, of our move from place to place or of our divorce. Yes, if there’s solidified grease in our hearts when we stare at it, something has not gone right. If there’s solidified grease when we fight a war (when isn’t there?) then maybe we shouldn’t have been fighting it at all. 

And here’s a guarantee: A mess will happen if we don’t clean the parts carefully and plan the way. Solidified grease will be in our conversations and in our hands. We will become completely mesmerized by it or blind from it.  Just look at the present government shut down. Look at the state of Judaism today. There are so many splits in our religion there’s grease everywhere. 

What then do we do? How, as my student inferred, do we do it “right”?

  

Let’s look at Abraham. When we leave our home for another we continually purify. We bless each other. We bless the road we are on. We remember and define where we came from. We admit the separation of soul from body and singe the edges of each if we must so that they can fit cleanly. Even if  in a dream. We honor the separation and know that it is temporary, that all separation has a purpose, that it isn’t an end in itself. We take on the holiness of active separation for the sake of joining.  We even separate ourselves from the solidified grease with consciousness and direct focus. This is how to do it right, to act on pieces by being aware of the whole. This is the covenant.

In the end, any feeling of permanency in separation will land us in a metaphoric McDonalds behind the counter with a much bigger mess than we can imagine.