Go Find Yourself

Lech Lecha — the passage we’ve just read — begins with God telling Avram to leave his land, his family, his identity, and go to a place that God will show him. Leaving behind all that is familiar, taking only his wife, his nephew, and some “souls” he gathered along the way, Avram walks without looking back — and begins again.

It will not be easy. He will make many mistakes. But by leaving behind everything that gives him comfort and security, he opens himself to a great change — one that will make him worthy to be remembered as a patriarch until today. Sarai, his wife, changes with him — through suffering, through challenge, through her own mistakes. By the end of this parashah, though their journey is far from over, they will be renamed Avraham and Sarah. A new era will begin through their transformation.

Dr Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, the British Torah scholar, teaches that when God calls Abram to “Lech Lecha”, it isn’t a punishment or an exile — it’s an invitation. For the first time in the Torah, leaving home isn’t a loss, but a beginning. Abram is asked to step away from everything that has shaped him — his birthplace, his father’s house. He’s called to let go of what’s familiar, to walk into uncertainty, into a journey with no clear destination except this: “to the land that I will show you.”

Thinking about all our own ancestors who once stepped away — who left everything that shaped them and began again — I thought of my paternal grandfather. He left Italy with his brothers, the souls he gathered, to look for a better life across the ocean. He wasn’t Jewish. He wasn’t running from danger. He wasn’t expelled. Times were simply hard, and he decided to move on. He knew what he was leaving. He even knew where he was heading. But he could never have imagined what his journey would become.

Zornberg says that what makes that moment of leaving so sacred is precisely its uncertainty. Abram’s journey isn’t about geography — it’s about transformation. He’s moving from one way of being to another. And that movement, that travelling, comes with pain. To go forth, to change, always means to go through something. Abram and Sarai embody that. They are uprooted, childless, wandering without a home or a future they can name. They live with akarut — barrenness — not only the absence of children, but the feeling of being cut off from the sources of life.

My grandfather left and never again saw his parents, his homeland, or even some of his brothers, as they all scattered across the vast Brazilian territory — twelve brothers beginning again with no money, but with courage and strength. My grandfather’s life changed completely. He fell in love with a native Brazilian woman, the daughter of a shaman — whom he kidnapped from her village, married, and with whom he had many children. (Like Avram, he too had… a problem with consent — those who were in my parashat hashavua class will understand!)

To leave one’s place, says Zornberg, is to seek to become other. The Hebrew word makom means “place”, “existence”, and it is also one of the names of God. When Abram changes his place, he changes his being — and so does Sarai. When God gives them new names, it is as if God says, “You are no longer who you were. Step outside, and I will create you anew.” That’s what Lech Lecha really asks of us — to let go of the stories that no longer fit, to step out of the forms that have stopped giving us life, and to allow ourselves to be changed.

I think my grandparents were happy in their way. Both of them were changed by one another, and by their own lech lecha. They changed one another through their unique story. One of their children, my father, met a small, energetic, and clever Jewish girl — and married her. From that unlikely union came the first Brazilian rabbi to be ordained at Leo Baeck College — me — and also my brother.

The sages describe this kind of change as akira — an uprooting. It’s not easy. To move to a new place is to tear something apart — the old patterns, the old certainties. But it’s also to make space for blessing, for rebirth, for new light to fall on us “with a difference.” God blesses them — Abram, Sarai, and my grandparents. The blessing doesn’t erase their pain; it transforms it.

Abram and Sarai are the first ancestors of the Jewish people. My grandfather, a Christian boy from Italy who married a native Brazilian, became the grandfather of a rabbi. He could never have guessed that this would be his legacy. Sadly, he didn’t live to see it.

Likewise, when we hear God’s words to Abram, we can hear them as words to ourselves. Sometimes we have to leave — not because we know where we’re going, but because staying would mean refusing to grow. We have to take that first step before the way is revealed. And maybe, like Abram — and like my grandfather — we don’t yet know what we’re becoming. Only that something in us is ready.

Change doesn’t always begin with clarity; it begins with courage. To go forth, to step into the unknown, is to trust that we can be created anew — that our own leaving might be the beginning of a deeper coming home.

May we have the courage to leave, to go to ourselves, and to fulfil all the possibilities that our lives present to us. May we be blessed whenever we leave, wherever we go — now and forever.