Lech Lecha

The Lord said to Avram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

12:1

Terach, Avram’s father, had set out from Ur Kasdim to go to the land of Canaan because people already knew that th is land was conducive to spiritual and intellectual elevation and excellence.

Sforno (15^th Century)

It is easy for a person to leave his home, if he knows where he is going. If Avram had known he was going to Canaan, his father might have been willing to accompany him. He had to go this road alone.

Malbim (19^th Century)

This means, “For your own benefit and for your own good. And there I will make of you a great nation while here you will not merit the privilege of having children.

Rashi (12^th Century)

Avraham could have reasoned that his chances to be effective in converting people to monotheism were greater in his homeland, in an environment where people knew and trusted him. He also could have considered himself as subordinate in his father’s household seeing he lived in a patriarchal society…(but a person) is not qualitatively the same person outside the Holy Land as they are in it.

Moshe Alshich (16^th Century)

Now the power of Avraham lay in the fact that when he spoke to idol worshippers, he could speak their language. After all, he himself was once an idol worshipper. Had he been a servant of the True God from the day of his birth onward, he could never have spoken so effectively and convincingly as to carry away his audiences by the power of his own conviction. Therefore the very fact that he himself had originally been an idol worshipper was instrumental in leading his peers to the One God.

Maggid of Dubno (18^th Century)

The story commences with one individual, and extends gradually to his family, then to a people, and later still to a nation. Yet it is not to be the tale of individuals or a family or a people as such. Rather, it is to be the story of a society in quest of an ideal. Abraham’s call, in short, marks the very beginning of the biblical process…Abraham’s journey to the Promised Land was thus no routine expedition of several hundred miles. Instead, it was the start of an epic voyage in search of spiritual truth, a quest that was to constitute the central theme of all biblical history.

E. A. Speiser (20^th Century)

Contrary to the traditional portrayal of the patriarch Abraham as a sheep-breeding nomad, recent archeological discoveries in Ur of the Chaldees, the city of Abraham came from, give us a completely different picture of the country and the parental home he was commanded to leave. At the beginning of the second millennium BCE, it is now established, Ur was a “powerful, prosperous, colorful and busy capital city.” It was from this center of highly developed civilization that Abraham was to cut himself off in order to establish the new model society in the Land of Promise.

Pinchas Peli (20^th Century)