Lech Lecha: Navigating Grief
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Lech Lecha: Walking Through the Fragments
At the start of the war, there was a meme flying around that read:
“Looking for a grief therapist. Asking for six million people.”
Dark humour that was painfully true. For three years now, we have all been grieving. Some for people they loved. Others for homes left behind or destroyed, communities fractured, relationships changed. And most of us for a certainty about our world that was shattered. Grief can manifest itself in many forms – arising not only from the tangible loss of a person or a thing, but also from the loss of our expectations of what was meant to be.
I've been thinking about the contours of grief, the way it moves and changes, forming itself around us in undefined ways. And it keeps meeting me in unexpected places, particularly in the way I read biblical narratives. The Torah does not change, but we do and the ancient text suddenly says something we had never heard before. For years, I read Lech Lecha in a distinctly theological way. Suddenly, I found myself hearing a different melody.
At the end of last week’s Parsha we meet Avraham’s father Terach who has experienced profound loss. His son Haran dies על פני תרח אביו — literally, "before the face of his father." His daughter-in-law Sarai is unable to have children. And then, unexpectedly, Terach leaves Ur Kasdim and journey’s to the land of Canaan. There is something deeply human about this response to grief. When our world becomes unbearable, we want to change something: The house, the job, the scenery. But changing circumstances will not necessarily change us because wherever we go, the same self remains.
Terach never reaches Canaan. He arrives at Charan settling and eventually dying there. There is something haunting about the echo between the name of the place, Charan, and the name of the son he lost, Haran. He has physically left the place of his grief, yet tragically he remains trapped within it. And so, despite having set out on a journey, he never truly moves beyond the place of his loss.
His son Avraham has experienced the same losses. Haran’s death, Sarai’s barrenness. He too is grieving what was and what may never be. But his journey begins differently.
“Leave your land, your birthplace and your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.”
Unlike his father’s journey, there is no clearly marked destination. Avraham must leave an old story without knowing the new one. Terach journeys to a place; Avraham journeys towards himself. Lech Lecha — go towards yourself.
There is a famous Midrash in which Avraham smashes his father’s idols. We usually read it as the birth of monotheism. But perhaps Avraham is also teaching his father a profound psychological truth: just as God cannot be confined to a fixed image, neither can human beings, created b’tzelem Elokim. We are not only who we have been, but who we might yet become. Grief shatters our assumptions about the world, our expectations of life, even our image of ourselves. I thought I was this person. I thought my future would follow this path. Our instinct is to gather the fragments and reconstruct the life we knew. But Avraham offers another possibility: Walk through the fragments. Meet the grief, integrate it, and open ourselves to a different, perhaps less ideal, but potentially more meaningful future.
When someone dies, we perform קריעה — keriah. We tear our clothes representing our present experience of rupture – the sense that our current life cannot be stitched back together.
But there is another Hebrew word that sounds almost identical:
קריאה — kri'ah. A calling.
Avraham’s journey might teach us that the (rupture) קריעה, can open us up to the (calling) קריאה.
To be clear. I'm not advocating silver linings, or ‘blessings in disguise’, or even redemptive suffering. I don't believe these ideas necessarily produce human or spiritual flourishing. But when life has been torn open, we retain a choice about how we respond. And that choice shapes how we process adversity.
To arrive somewhere new, I may have to relinquish the need to know exactly where I am going. To build the next version of my life, I may have to let go of the fixed image of who I thought I was supposed to be. That is the journey of Lech Lecha. Not simply to go somewhere else, but to go towards the self you have not yet become.
For three years, many of us have longed to return to the lives we had before October 7. Perhaps part of grieving is recognising that we cannot. But that doesn't mean there is no future. Avraham walks without knowing his destination because his future is not yet fixed. And neither is he.
And neither are we.
Somewhere within the קריעה, there can still be a קריאה. Not a call to return to who we were, but the journey of discovering who, from here, we might still become.
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