In this week’s parasha ‘Lech-Lacha’ we read about the father of the Jewish nation: Avraham Avinu.  At the end of the last week’s previous episode, we met Abraham leaving together with his father and brother from their hometown ‘Ur Kasdim’, a Sumerian-Akkadian kingdom located west of the Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia, towards Haran, an economic-political center in Aram-Naharim, northern Mesopotamia, on the Turkish-Syrian border of our days.

In the previous chapter we learned that Saray, Avraham’s wife, is barren and cannot give birth. This issue will accompany Avraham until more than half of his life at the age of one hundred. Will he have a child to carry on his legacy?

In Haran, Abraham received a divine revelation, in which he was commanded: “Go away from your country and your homeland and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” and in addition to this he received the promise of a future blessing:

“I will make you into a great nation.” Abraham and his wife go on a journey and when they arrive at Shechem, today, Nablus, the city located in the center of the land of Canaan, Abraham receives another divine promise: “I will give this land to your descendent.” These two promises, the promise of future descendant and the promise of the land, are at the center of Abraham’s life. Most of Abraham’s stories revolve around these two themes: continuity and the land.

Later, G-d promises Abraham again and this time in extensive detail:

“Raise your eyes and, from the place where you are, look to the north, to the south, to the east, and to the west. For I will give all the land that you see to you and to your offspring forever”

And God continues promise to Avraham: “I will make your offspring as numerous as the dust of the earth: if a man will be able to count the particles of dust in the world, then your offspring, too, will be countable”.

After various tribulations, including the kidnapping of his wife Sarah by Pharaoh, a conflict with Lot, his nephew, and the war against the coalition of five kings, Abraham reaches the level of having covenant with God.

On this occasion, the two promises were repeated, accompanied by visual illustrations: “And here is God’s word to him… and he brought him outside and said: Look at the sky and count the stars, if you can count them. And he said to him: So will your seed be.”

And from the promise of the seed to the promise of the land: “I am the Lord who brought you out of the Ur Kasdim (referring to the first city Avraham lived and to the fire test Avraham has passed through) to give you this land to inherit… to your seed I have given this land”

But this time it turns out that the promise of the land is not immediate. God tells Abraham that his seed will be forced to exile to a land that is not theirs – which later turns out to be Egypt – where they will be enslaved and tortured for four hundred years, and only after they leave Egypt will they return to the land of Canaan.

What is the meaning of this delay? The question can be divided into two: Why should the descendants of Abraham – the one who will later be called the “Children of Israel” – be revealed to Egypt? And why for so long? Many answers were given to the first question. On the other hand, not many answers were given to the second question, because God himself explained it to Abraham:

“And a fourth generation will return here, because the iniquity of the Amorites is not complete until here”

The reason that Abraham’s seed will have to wait hundreds of years to receive the land is because the inhabitants of the land have not yet sinned enough for their expulsion from the land to be justified!

The moral principle reflected here correctly expresses the way of the Torah. It is true that Abraham’s seed was promised to receive the land, but this promise cannot come at the expense of the inhabitants of the land. Only when the inhabitants of the land sin and lose their right to the land, only then will the Israelites enter it. For hundreds of years the Israelites will be forced to wait for the fulfillment of the promise, just so as not to cause injustice to the inhabitants of the land.

What instructive lesson do we have to learn from this episode about ourselves, in today’s settlement in the land of Israel?

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Refael Cohen