Tag Archives: Genesis

Blessing and Inheritance

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The story at the end of the Book of Genesis has an interesting lesson for Jews today.

If Jacob’s sons had remained in Canaan, the biblical pattern likely would have continued unchanged. Land and cattle anchored wealth, security, and continuity, and survival depended on concentration. In such an environment, inheritance narrowed toward a single heir capable of holding territory together through famine and conflict. Until this point, Genesis follows that logic closely, moving from Abraham to Isaac, from Isaac to Jacob, and nearly from Jacob to Joseph.

Canaan seemingly reinforced singular succession.

Egypt reshaped it.

The famine drained land of its defining value and redirected survival toward provision. In Egypt, Goshen mattered because it was allocated rather than owned. Jacob’s family entered as dependents, albeit under the protection of a senior official. With land no longer functioning as the primary store of value relative to neighbors, inheritance lost its organizing role. What carried forward instead was character and capacity.

Jacob recognized the shift and adapted to it. His final blessings did not distribute assets or authority but identity. Leadership, resilience, intensity, cohesion, adaptability—each son was seen for what he could contribute rather than what he would receive. Blessing became formative rather than transactional, oriented toward coexistence rather than accumulation.

This evolution reflected Jacob’s own hard-earned understanding. Early in life, he secured a singular blessing that concentrated destiny in one person and fractured a family in the process. Now, with seventy descendants – coming from different mothers – preparing to live together under pressure, he understood that continuity required a new orientation. Blessings and inheritance had to evolve if brothers were going to coexist in exile. Differentiation replaced rivalry, and identity replaced estate.

That shift allowed a family to become a people. Survival came to depend on shared memory, distinct roles, and collective endurance. The covenant moved through people rather than property, and the biblical story never narrowed again to a single bearer.

Jacob blessing his sons by Adam van Noort (1561–1641)

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish history unfolded within that framework. Without land, Jews carried blessing as portable identity—education, law, ethics, aspiration. Children were blessed for what they might become, not for what they would inherit. That model sustained continuity across dispersion, persecution, and renewal.

History has turned again.

Since 2008, a plurality of world Jewry lives once more in the land of Israel. Concentration has returned. Land, sovereignty, and inheritance are tangible again, not symbolic. The Jewish people find themselves in the inverse position of Parshat Vayechi: no longer learning how to survive without land, but learning how to live with it again after centuries of absence.

Jacob understood that blessings and inheritance had to change in order for brothers to live together in the diaspora. This moment demands a parallel act of wisdom. The task of this generation is to pass on collective and individual inheritances which will hold both realities at once: rootedness in the land of Israel alongside the moral, intellectual, and spiritual capital forged in exile. The next generation must receive blessings that affirm individual potential and an inheritance that binds those differences into a shared future.

That synthesis—blessing and land together—is the challenge of our time.

Goshen and the Myth of Security

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When famine made Canaan (the land of Israel today) unlivable, Jacob’s family went down to Egypt. What began as a temporary refuge became something else entirely. Goshen (Genesis 45:9) was fertile, welcoming, and safe. The Jews prospered there. They built families, livelihoods, and a future. And for a time, it worked.

That is what makes Goshen so instructive. Unlike earlier famine detours in Genesis, this was not a brief excursion. Goshen was a one-way trip. It felt secure enough to settle into—and that comfort lasted generations. Until it didn’t.

Jews talk about it today as they ponder antisemitism’s historic trajectory. It has moved millions of Jews around the world for thousands of years, marking them as the “wandering Jew.” In 1900, most Jews spoke Russian, German, Polish and Arabic. In 2025, they almost all speak Hebrew and English, with French and Spanish covering virtually everyone else.

The land of Israel itself was not without Jewish migration. The land flourished, kingdoms rose, institutions formed. Then came division, exile, and destruction. First the northern tribes disappeared into history. Later Judah followed. The Jews did not just lose modern incarnations of Goshen; they lost their homeland for nearly two thousand years.

Parshat Vayigash is often used as the Torah’s first meditation on long-term diaspora. It offers no illusion that comfort guarantees permanence. Goshen was pleasant until a Pharaoh arose who no longer remembered Joseph. But the Jewish homeland was also strong until it fractured from within and fell to external powers. Neither place offered permanent security.

The lesson is not that exile is doomed or that the Jewish Promised Land is automatically safe. It is that where Jews live is often situational, not absolute. Prosperity can mask vulnerability. Stability can decay quietly. The obligation is vigilance—reading the environment honestly, assessing quality of life soberly, and understanding that history turns even when life feels settled.

Israel’s Security Barrier as seen from Jerusalem, built to stop terrorism during the “Second Intifada”

Goshen teaches that success today is not a promise for tomorrow. But Israel teaches the same. Awareness, not geography, is what determines whether a place remains livable.

Whether by Wisdom or Strength, One North Star

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Joseph and the Maccabees stand at opposite ends of Jewish history, yet they are oriented toward the same destination.

Joseph saved lives through wisdom. He read the moment correctly, understood power as it existed, and worked within it with discipline and restraint. His brilliance was not only in interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams but in translating vision into policy. Grain was stored since hunger was anticipated. Life survived because Joseph learned how to operate inside a dominant civilization without surrendering his inner compass.

The Maccabees faced a different landscape. Jewish practice itself was under assault, the Temple desecrated, identity mocked and criminalized. In that moment, preservation required action of a different kind. Physical courage and sacrifice to restore the possibility of Jewish continuity. Their strength reopened a future that had been closing.

Both paths flow from the same conviction: Jewish life must continue.

That shared conviction matters more than the method used to defend it. Jewish tradition does not freeze history into a single playbook. It records multiple responses to pressure, exile, and threat, each shaped by its circumstances, each measured by whether it protects life and meaning.

This tension feels immediate today. Jews in Western societies sense the ground shifting beneath them. Institutions once assumed to be neutral now tolerate or excuse intimidation. Public expressions of Jewish identity invite scrutiny, hostility, or worse. Families quietly debate whether to double down on civic engagement, legal advocacy, and cultural participation, or whether to seek physical concentration, communal withdrawal, and in some cases departure altogether.

Jews gather at candle lighting ceremony in Carl Schurz Park in New York City, hours after the mass murder of Jews in Sydney Australia (photo: First One Through)

Both instincts draw from deep Jewish memory.

Some respond like Joseph, believing that wisdom, professionalism, and moral clarity can still carve out space within complex societies. Others hear the echo of the Maccabees and sense that when identity becomes negotiable, consolidation and self-defense are no longer optional.

The danger is not that Jews choose different strategies. The danger is losing sight of the common north star and turning strategy into accusation.

Chanukah, read alongside Parshat Miketz, offers a sobering reminder. Joseph’s Egypt eventually transforms from refuge into bondage. The Maccabees’ victory secures a moment of light, not a permanent settlement. Jewish history does not promise stability; it demands attentiveness. Survival in the long-term cannot happen without survival in the present.

Each generation inherits the same responsibility: to read its moment honestly, to choose its tools carefully, and to ensure that the flame continues—whether through wisdom, through strength, or through the careful discipline of knowing when to shift from one to the other.

Joseph, Yusuf and the Stories We Tell

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The story of Joseph is the longest sustained personal narrative in the Bible. It is a life told end-to-end—youth and jealousy, betrayal and exile, moral clarity under pressure, reversal of fortune, and reconciliation. Jews have lived inside this story for millennia and drawn from it lessons about love misdirected, loyalty earned, leadership forged, and fate revealed only in retrospect.

It begins, uncomfortably, at home.

Jacob’s overemphasis on Joseph—his public favoritism, symbolized by the coat of many colors—fractured the family. It was not Joseph’s dreams alone that enraged his brothers, but the hierarchy their father imposed. Love, unevenly expressed, curdled into resentment. That resentment escalated to violence. The brothers nearly killed Joseph, then sold him into slavery, persuading themselves that exile was mercy.

And yet, the terror of the pit became the opening move in a larger design. Joseph’s descent—into slavery, into prison, into obscurity—ultimately saved thousands from starvation, including the very brothers who betrayed him. The Torah insists on an uncomfortable truth: human cruelty can coexist with divine purpose, without being excused by it.

Over time, the transformation that matters most occurs not in Joseph, but in Judah. The brother who once proposed selling Joseph later rises to moral leadership. Faced with the potential loss of Benjamin, Judah offers himself instead. Ultimatelty, kingship does not emerge from brilliance or dreams, but from responsibility and loyalty. Judah learns what Jacob failed to teach early: leadership is love with a wide visual field.

But this is not the only Joseph story in the world.

Yusuf and Zulaykha: A Different Emphasis

In Islamic tradition, Joseph is Yusuf, and his story unfolds with different texture and purpose. The Qur’an (Surah Yusuf) adds layers absent from the biblical text. Where the Bible does not even name Potiphar’s wife, Islamic tradition gives her a name—Zulaykha—and an entire inner life.

Her attraction to Yusuf begins as physical longing, but in later tradition becomes a spiritual ascent. Love itself is refined—from desire for beauty to yearning for the divine. This is not biography alone; it is allegory.

Persian culture preserved these layers visually, through extraordinary manuscript art that does not merely illustrate scripture but interprets it.

One remarkable manuscript—now on display at the Grolier Club from the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary (until December 27, 2025)—shows Joseph cast into a well. The details are arresting. Joseph has lost not only his coat of many colors, but his hat and shoes as well—status stripped away piece by piece. The brothers even drop rocks down on him.

Story of Yusuf and Zulaykha from Mashhad, Iran in 1853 by the Jewish scribe Eliyahu ben Nisan ben Eliyahu Gorgi. Digitized entire manuscript can be viewed here

One figure stands apart in the drawing. At the bottom of the scene, a brother sits almost contemplatively. His hands alone are painted with henna, marking higher status. He smokes a long çubuk (copoq)—a dry-tobacco pipe, not the classic Persian water-based hookah—an unsettling detail as Joseph languishes in a dry well below. The image quietly foreshadows hierarchy, survival, and reversal. Even in betrayal, the future is being seeded. This must be Judah, on the side of the well with his five brothers from mother Leah, who is destined to help Joseph out of the pit and rise to fame himself.

One brother seems to connect at the same level of Joseph – at a low point in this story but will rise to fame later in life: Judah

Other images in the Yusuf cycle go further still in the manuscript. Women cut themselves upon seeing Joseph’s beauty (image 70 from Surah Yusuf 12:31). Zulaykha is said to lose her sight from longing for him (image 128). Beauty becomes dangerous, overwhelming, transformative. The Islamic tradition does not deny desire; it seeks to discipline and redirect it.

Zulaykha losing her sight at the end of the story is one of the versions transmitted through the ages

Two Traditions, One Origin

For Jews, Joseph’s story is about dreams and reversals, exile and return, family rupture and national survival. For Muslims, Yusuf’s story adds a meditation on beauty, temptation, and love’s ascent toward God. The Islamic telling emerged nearly two thousand years after the Jewish forefather lived. It is not wrong; it is different.

What matters for us today is that these differences did not need to fight. The stories coexist without trampling on the other.

The same characters—Jacob, Joseph, the brothers—carried distinct lessons without cancelling one another. No one is frozen forever as a villain. Jacob loved poorly but learned. The brothers failed catastrophically but changed. Judah rose. Sacred storytelling, at its best, refuses to eternalize blame.

That restraint is precisely what feels absent today.

Stories, Power, and the Present

The Holy Land, sacred to both Jews and Muslims, is no longer widely treated as a shared inheritance, but as a zero-sum possession. Hamas openly declares that Jews will be wiped out. Clerics in parts of the Islamic world speak in timelines of Jewish disappearance due to their being “enemies of world peace.” This is not interpretation; it is incitement. It rejects the Joseph model, in which history bends—slowly and painfully—toward survival, accountability, and reconciliation rather than annihilation.

And yet, Islamic civilization itself offers another precedent. Islam historically made room for Jewish continuity—absorbing biblical figures, preserving Jewish prophets, and allowing traditions to dovetail rather than collide. Yusuf did not replace Joseph; he walked alongside him. Zulaykha did not negate Potiphar’s wife; she deepened the moral inquiry. Reverence did not require negation.

That capacity still exists.

If Joseph teaches anything durable, it is that sovereignty, survival, and holiness are not insults to one another. Jews returning to and governing their homeland need not be read as a theological defeat for Islam. They can be understood, instead, as another chapter in a long, shared story—one that does not deny difference, but refuses extermination as destiny.

The question is whether we choose that inheritance again.

Collective Responsibility From Dinah in Shechem to the Hostages in Gaza

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When Shechem raped Dinah in Genesis 34, the Torah condemns not only the man who violated her but the entire city that allowed her to remain captive. Dinah was held openly in Shechem’s home, and no one objected. Not one elder confronted the crime. Not one resident demanded her release. Their silence became their guilt.

This is the Torah’s principle: A society that tolerates the humiliation of the innocent becomes responsible for it.

October 7 Made That Principle Contemporary

The political-terrorist group Hamas did not merely murder and rape on October 7, 2023. They dragged 251 human beings—children, women, men, elderly—into Gaza. For months, those hostages were kept in houses, apartments, tunnels beneath family homes, mosques, and clinics. People fed their captors. People guarded entrances. Crowds celebrated the kidnappings. The captivity was not hidden from the population; it was woven into daily life.

Crowds of Gazans celebrate the taking of captives – alive and dead – on October 7, 2023

And just as in Shechem, no one in Gaza intervened. Not one hostage was smuggled out. Not one family risked itself to free a stranger. Not one community leader demanded their return.

The Torah would not call this ignorance. It would call it complicity.

Dinah’s City and Gaza: A Shared Moral Failure

Shechem’s offense was personal; the city’s offense was communal. The same moral structure applies today: the crime begins with Hamas, but it enlarges to those who shelter, celebrate, or simply accept the captivity of innocents. The vast majority of Gazans supported Hamas’s actions.

Jacob criticized Shimon and Levi for endangering the family, but the Torah never suggests that the men of Shechem were innocent. Their passivity was enough to implicate them. When God protects Jacob’s family afterward, it signals that defending dignity—even forcefully—was morally justified.

The Torah’s Message for Our Generation

The world tries to draw a sharp line between Hamas and “the people of Gaza,” as though collective moral responsibility vanished in modern times, and the celebrated terrorism is not inherently a collective attack on an entire society. Dinah’s story rejects these illusions. It teaches that a society that houses kidnapped people is not neutral, and a population that normalizes and endorses cruelty shares responsibility for it.

Jacob scolded his sons Shimon and Levi for carrying out the revenge attack against Shechem’s people, and said that it would make their family a pariah. That too is repeating today, as many countries condemn and isolate the State of Israel for its actions in Gaza.

Dinah’s captivity was a test of Shechem’s moral fabric, and it failed. The captivity of Israeli hostages – for years – was a test of Gaza’s, and it also failed. The anger over the slaughter of the guilty has also left a deep mark then and today.

The lesson is simple and ancient: When a people accepts atrocity in its midst, the stain becomes communal. But it will not leave leave the actors in the just war untarnished in the days and years ahead.


A Name That Never Changes

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In Parshat Toldot, as the last of the forefathers is birthed and named, we are reminded that Isaac stands out for a quiet but powerful distinction. He is the only one of the forefathers whose name was never changed.

Abram became Abraham.
Jacob became Israel.

But Isaac remains Isaac — Yitzchak — from the moment God speaks his name before he is even conceived. His existence, his identity, and his destiny are declared in advance. Not earned, not negotiated, not revised.

God tells Abraham that Sarah will have a son in her old age (Genesis 17:19), and when he laughs at the impossibility of it, that laughter becomes his name. His very being is rooted in divine certainty: what looks impossible to humans is already written by God. Isaac’s name is fixed because the promise is fixed.

And so it is with the Land of Israel.

Israel is the only nation on earth whose name predates its people’s return, their sovereignty, their wars, their exiles, and their rebirth. The name was carved into Tanach, inscribed into prayer, whispered by exiles across continents, and sustained through millennia when Jews had no army, no state, no power — only a promise. [see more below]

The Romans tried to erase it, renaming Judea as Palestina to sever Jewish memory from Jewish land. Empires rose and fell, borders shifted, conquerors rewrote maps. But the name Israel endured, unchanged — the national parallel to Isaac himself. A people and a land whose identity was not invented but inherited, not imposed but foretold.

Just as Isaac’s name was spoken before his birth, the name “Eretz Yisrael” was spoken long before the modern state emerged. A name older than Rome, older than Islam, older than every foreign flag that temporarily claimed the soil. A name that outlived exile and humiliation, the Crusades and expulsions, pogroms and partitions.

You can conquer a territory.
You can redraw borders.
You can rename provinces.

But you cannot undo a promise.

The modern State of Israel is often framed as a political accident — a product of diplomacy, war, and the ashes of Europe. But its name tells a different truth. Like Isaac, its identity was scripted long before any diplomat voted or any soldier fought. It is not a modern label but an ancient declaration returning to life.

And Isaac’s life – the longest of all of the forefathers at 180 years – was only spent in Eretz Yisrael. While Abraham and Jacob both spent years outside, God told Isaac (Genesis 26:2) to not leave the land, even during famine. His presence, like his name, is fixed forever.

The world can debate policies, borders, governments. But the essence — the name — does not change. Isaac never needed a new one. And neither does Israel.

Young boy praying at the Kotel in the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel (photo: First One Through)

Eretz Yisrael, The Land of Israel

Biblical Origins
The phrase Eretz Yisrael (ארץ ישראל) already appears in Tanakh:
• Shmuel I 13:19 – “No blacksmith could be found in Eretz Yisrael.”
• Melachim II 5:4 – Naaman’s Israelite maid and the cessation of Aramean raids reference Eretz Yisrael.
• Yechezkel 40:2; 47:18 – Ezekiel is shown visions “in the Land of Israel.”
• Divrei HaYamim I 22:2; II 2:16; 34:7 – Solomon’s labor and Josiah’s reforms occur “throughout Eretz Yisrael.”

These uses establish the term over 2,500 years ago, well before the Roman exile.

Early Rabbinic Usage — Mishnah
The term becomes a formal halakhic category in the Mishnah:
• Kelim 1:6 – “Eretz Yisrael is holier than all other lands,” the base level of the Ten Sanctities.

This is 2nd century CE — already treating Eretz Yisrael as a fixed legal reality.

Dead Sea Scroll known as 4QMMT (estimated written in 150BCE) is a halachic letter that refers to “Eretz Yisrael”

Talmudic Centrality
The Talmud Bavli expands the spiritual meaning:
• Ketubot 110b – “Whoever dwells in Eretz Yisrael is as one who has a God; outside it, as one who has none.”
• Ketubot 111a – “Whoever lives in Eretz Yisrael dwells without sin.”

These sugyot codify the land’s religious centrality, not just its geography.

Halakhic Midrash — Sifrei
The Sifrei on Devarim states:
• “Dwelling in Eretz Yisrael is equal to all the commandments.”

An early, sweeping valuation of the Land as a spiritual axis.

Rishonim — Medieval Commentators
• Ramban teaches that mitzvot are fully binding only in Eretz Yisrael, and observed in exile merely to preserve them.
• Rambam (Beit HaBechirah 7:12) reiterates the Mishnah: “All of Eretz Yisrael is holier than all other lands.”

By the Middle Ages, the term is fully entrenched across halakhic, theological, and philosophical writing.

Bottom Line

“Eretz Yisrael” is not a modern, Zionist, or political invention. It is a halakhic and theological constant across 2,000+ years.

Choosing Our People

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In Chayei Sarah, Abraham does something brave. When it’s time to find a wife for his son Isaac, he refuses to choose from the neighbors around him. These were the people he did business with, lived among, interacted with every day — but they did not share his values. So he sends his servant far away to find someone who does.

Abraham teaches us something simple and powerful: proximity is not loyalty. Geography is not identity. Values matter more than convenience.

Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride,” (c. 1665) originally called “Isaac and Rebecca”

We are living this lesson now. In the last year, too many of us have watched people we assumed were “ours” turn their backs — classmates, coworkers, fellow Jews, even friends who share our politics. Being nearby doesn’t make someone trustworthy. Sharing a label doesn’t make them aligned. We’ve learned, painfully, that not everyone who sits next to us stands with us.

Abraham reminds us that it’s okay — even necessary — to choose our people carefully. To build relationships around courage and truth, not comfort or habit. To seek out the ones who show up for Jewish dignity when it’s hard, not only when it’s fashionable.

Isaac didn’t need a local partner; he needed the right partner. So do we.

From the Merit of the Righteous to the Merit of Evil

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Abraham once defended the wicked on the merit of the righteous few. Today, the world defends the wicked for the sake of evil masses.


The Moral Math of Vayera
In Parashat Vayera, God tells Abraham that Sodom will be destroyed for its depravity. The city is beyond saving — cruelty is civic policy, justice a mockery. But Abraham does the unthinkable: he defends the wicked, not because he excuses them, but because he believes that within their city a few righteous might remain.

“Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?”
(Genesis 18:23)

Abraham bargains God down — fifty, forty-five, thirty, twenty, ten. If even one percent (population of Sodom estimated 1,000) righteous can be found, the city deserves another chance. Abraham’s plea becomes the Torah’s first moral equation: mercy for the many on the merit of the few. He argues for the wicked because of the righteous – or perhaps for only the righteous to be spared.

Abraham praying to God on behalf of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah, by Étienne Delaune (1518-1583)

A Sordid Defense of Evil
Four thousand years later, the moral logic has flipped. After the October 7 massacre — the torture, murder, and kidnapping of civilians — millions marched not to defend the righteous within Gaza, but to defend the wicked who carried out the atrocities. From London to New York, the cry was “Globalize the Intifada.” The United Nations would not even utter Hamas’s name.

They did not plead for ten good souls but glorified evil itself. Abraham argued for the guilty because he believed in goodness; today’s socialist-jihadists argue for the guilty because they despise Jews. That is not compassion — it is moral rot spreading far from the center of evil, infecting universities, newsrooms, and now city halls.

In Sodom’s time, no one defended depravity. Today, Genocide becomes “context.” Rape becomes “resistance.” Decapitation becomes “desperation.” Abraham fought for the 99 percent on the merit of the 1 percent righteous. Now we see millions fighting for the 75 percent wicked, based on the very actions of the depraved.

Nowhere is this clearer than in New York City — home to the world’s largest Jewish community — where activists chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and rape deniers will shape city politics. The descendants of Abraham are mocked as colonizers in their own synagogues and schools.

Swastikas, the symbol of the German National Socialist party of the 1930s and 1940s, painted on the Jewish Magen David School in Brooklyn, NY following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists

The Torah is silent on the punishment for those who aid and abet wickedness, but American law is not. The U.S. forbids “material support to terrorism.” Groups like CAIR face renewed scrutiny for Hamas ties; Students for Justice in Palestine has been banned from campuses for celebrating terror. Perhaps the law will finally catch up to those who glorify murder under the banner of justice.

Or New York City’s new mayor will bend and enforce the law to his own tune.

Abraham taught that one may plead for the wicked only on the merit of the righteous — never for the wicked in a moral void. The first is faith and mercy; the second, blasphemy and depravity. Today, we have lost the lesson, a moral stain on this generation.

Lech Lecha — The Courage to Stand Alone

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The first words God ever spoke to the first Jew were not of comfort, but command:

“Go forth from your country, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.”
(Genesis 12:1)

Abraham was told to leave everything that gave him safety — his home, his family, his people — and to walk alone to a foreign and unknown land.

That is the Jewish story. And it remains Israel’s story today.

Abraham Ortelius map “Journey of Abraham”, 1595

The Call to Walk Alone

Lech Lecha is more than a journey of geography; it is a test of courage. Abraham separated from a world that had lost its moral compass. He stood against the idols of his age.

Israel does the same now. The world pities the violent. It demands “restraint” from the victim and “understanding” for the murderer. Israel stands almost alone — mocked, pressured, condemned — for defending its people from those who glory in death.

Lech Lecha reminds us that holiness begins with separation. To follow conscience sometimes means turning your back on the crowd.

The Lonely Battle

When Abraham heard that his nephew Lot was taken captive, he didn’t wait for permission. He gathered a few hundred men and faced an army of kings. Outnumbered, he fought — and won.

That is Israel today. A small nation surrounded by hostile powers, fighting not for conquest but survival. Like Abraham, it refuses to wait for global approval before rescuing its own.

The Modern Lech Lecha

To stand alone is never easy. It is lonely, painful, and exhausting. But moral isolation is not failure — it is faith.

Abraham began our story by walking away from a world gone mad.
Israel continues it by standing firm in one.

Lech Lecha — Go forth. Fight on. Even if you walk alone.

Chosen Inheritance

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The Torah opens in a world where inheritance belongs to the firstborn — where privilege is order, and order is destiny. Yet from its very first stories, the Bible breaks that rule.

Cain, humanity’s firstborn, murders his brother and loses everything. Abel, the second, dies without heirs. Humanity continues through Seth, the third son. The pattern is set. Abraham, father of monotheism, is not his father’s eldest. His younger son Isaac inherits the covenant, and Isaac’s younger son Jacob inherits it again.

By the time Israel becomes a nation, the inversion is complete. The Jewish people today descend from Levi and Judah — the third and fourth sons — not from Reuben, the firstborn. A book born in a culture of primogeniture systematically overturns it.

Why?

The Bible begins by showing the cost of bad choices. Adam and Eve possess everything, yet choose wrongly. The Fall from Eden inaugurates the central lesson of Scripture: that moral choice determines inheritance. Paradise is not lost by fate but forfeiture.

Michelangelo, The Fall of Man (1509-10), Sistine Chapel, Rome

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote that this pattern is not incidental but revolutionary.

“The Torah is not a chronicle of power. It is a critique of power.”
— Covenant & Conversation: Genesis

The Bible’s rejection of firstborn privilege is a moral protest against the idea that greatness is inherited. Sacks called it “the divine displacement of power” — God’s way of declaring that leadership is not a birthright but a calling.

Each time the younger supplants the elder, it signals that the future is not fixed. The world may honor the order of birth, yet God honors the order of the heart. Greatness is not bestowed by lineage but achieved through moral courage.

This inversion gives agency to every person. The Torah’s message is that destiny is not preordained. We are not bound by family rank or societal hierarchy. Cain’s fall was not inevitable. Abraham could have ignored God’s call. Jacob could have reconciled instead of wrestled. Every figure in Genesis acts — and through action, alters the story of the world.

Sacks extends the idea to Israel itself:

“God’s chosen people are not the privileged people; they are the choosing people — those who freely choose to live by the call of holiness.”

We are all born into someone else’s order. Or disorder. The question is whether we accept it, or, like our forefathers, we choose holiness — and through that choice, earn that inheritance.