What Does Lech Lecha Really Mean? | Rabbi Yosef Benyaminov

The very first sentence in very hard to understand. Hashem tells Abra go for yourself from your land from place of your birth meaning the neighborhood and from your father's house to the land that I will show you. The commenters ask what do you mean? This seems to be counterintuitive the comp the opposite. When people leave a place they first leave the the father's house right the neighborhood and then they leave their land the country. So why do Hashem told them the same thing but in the reverse order and tell us something incredible. If you look at the the sentences, Hashem is telling Ara, it doesn't mean go for yourself. It goes it means go into yourself. In other words, this was a the challenge for Abra to go into himself to change everything about him. So it's not about physical leaving of the places. It's all about spiritual and emotional leaving. What does that mean? When he told them go from your land, that was the easiest one. Go from your land, meaning go from the land of people or people what they do things, you know, how uh what the country believes in, how people serve idols back then. So leave all of that. After that, Hashem expected Abraham to leave his neighborhood. meaning the upbringing that he had, the surrounding influences of his uh peers, his friends, neighbors, relatives, right? That's much harder to do. But was expected to do even that. And finally, Hashem told him, "Leave your father's house." I mean, the the core values that your father, the idolatry, brought you up with, you expected to leave even that. So it it was going from the lowest to the highest challenge for Abraham and this speaks to us as well. We are also as Jewish people obligated to leave different influences whether it's the national influence of the country we live in politics whether it's our neighborhood that we grew up with kids kids were that you know were had different views on life not maybe Torah oriented and finally even our parents sometimes that tell us to do things that are wrong and we kind of don't know what to do with that but we have example greater example of Ram he became who he realized because he was able to overcome these challenges and to leave all three of these