Lech Lecha — Gnot Your Daddy

Lech Lecha isn’t just the start of Jewish history; it’s the moment human history fractures.  When God tells Avraham, “Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house,” He creates not merely a nation but a new kind of being. From that command onward, Israel is destined to live the paradox of בָּדָד יִשְׁכֹּן וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב — “a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.”  That verse describes more than isolation; it names the ontology of Jewish existence. The Jewish story refuses to dissolve into anyone else’s, and that defiance still drives the world crazy.

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The Ontology That Offends

Both ideological poles stumble on the same rock.

The hard right resents a people that insists on equality without conversion — Jews who say, “We’ll stand beside you, not beneath you.” Hence the fury of Christian nationalists from Nick Fuentes to Tucker Carlson, who see Zionism as arrogance rather than survival.

The hard left, meanwhile, despises a people that cannot melt into intersectional universalism. Jewish particularism — a nation defined by covenant and boundary — is a fatal contradiction in a creed that preaches salvation through sameness.

Both sides rage at the same thing: the refusal to be absorbed. The right wants the Jew to kneel; the left wants the Jew to melt. Neither can abide a people who are apart without being against.

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Two Temptations: Shevna and Zimri

Every generation breeds its Shevnas and Zimris.

Shevna, Isaiah’s court scholar, was “great in Torah” yet drunk on prestige. He led a “peace camp” urging surrender to Assyria while carving his own tomb like a Pharaoh. His sin wasn’t ignorance but vanity — intellect unmoored from covenant. Modern heirs preach that if Jews only apologize more, modernize more, soften more, the world will finally love them.

Zimri, in Parashat Balak, made rebellion into spectacle. Dragging a Midianite princess before Moshe, he tried to turn desecration into doctrine — sin as statement. Today’s versions wield body, identity, and protest as sacraments of self.

Shevna’s is the power-paganism of intellect; Zimri’s, of flesh. One worships influence, the other impulse. Both mistake self-expression for transcendence — and both end up consumed by the very fires they light.

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Avraham’s Bounded Chesed

Avraham, by contrast, practiced chesed — kindness with borders. He prayed for Sodom but didn’t move there; he rescued Lot but refused the king of Sodom’s spoils. His compassion was fierce but disciplined.

The Talmud imagines him at the gates of Gehinnom, rescuing all but those who “cast off the covenant.” That unsettling image captures Judaism’s moral realism: love that sanctifies, not love that erases.

Our culture confuses empathy with endorsement, compassion with collapse. Avraham’s mercy says otherwise: without moral geometry, kindness curdles into cruelty.

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The Horseshoe

Look at the political map and you’ll see the ends curving toward each other like a horseshoe. The far right and the far left, supposedly enemies, are united by their fury at Jewish distinctness.

The right dreams of a Christianized order; the left, of borderless utopia. Each demands redemption through erasure. And at the gap where the ends should meet stands Israel — the unerasable reminder that moral limits exist.

Judaism is the world’s cosmic contraceptive. It prevents humanity from reproducing its idolatries unchecked. Every empire that seeks to flatten difference — Rome, Moscow, Silicon Valley — eventually collides with the Jewish fact: there is one God, but many nations; one morality, not one monoculture.

Antisemitism is never really about Jews. It’s rebellion against accountability — the hatred of limit itself.

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Lech Lecha — Still Walking

Lech Lecha remains the command to walk away — from flattery, from fashion, from the ideologies that promise acceptance at the price of integrity. To “go to yourself” means to find the self measured by covenant, not by crowd.

Avraham is av hamon goyim — father of many nations — because he first learned to be no one’s son but God’s. The nations still want his ethics without his ontology, his compassion without his covenant. But the source cannot be severed from the spring.

So the command still echoes:

Walk away from the idols of the age.

Walk toward the promise that being different is the highest form of solidarity.

“הֶן עָם לְבָדָד יִשְׁכֹּן וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב.”

A people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.

Not lonely. Just eternal.

Bereishis: We WERE Here First

The Torah famously opens not with the first mitzvah given to Israel but with a cosmic declaration:

“כֹּחַ מַעֲשָׂיו הִגִּיד לְעַמּוֹ, לָתֵת לָהֶם נַחֲלַת גּוֹיִם” (Psalms 111:6)

“He declared the power of His works to His people, to give them the inheritance of nations.”

Rashi famously explains on Genesis 1:1 that the Torah begins with this declaration so that if the nations accuse Israel of being “thieves” for taking the land of Canaan, the response is clear: the land belongs to God, who created it and gave it to whom He pleased. At one point He gave it to the Canaanites; then He took it from them and gave it to Israel. Crucially, this answer is not aimed at the nations of the world but at Israel itself — “koach ma’asav higid le’amo.” 

The point is to prevent moral self-doubt.

This becomes more pointed later in the text. On Genesis 12:6, Rashi comments:

“והכנעני אז בארץ — היה הולך וכובש את ארץ ישראל מזרעו של שם.”

“And the Canaanite was then in the land — he was in the process of conquering the Land of Israel from the descendants of Shem.”

Here the moral and historical frame is flipped on its head: the Canaanites are not the natives; they are the occupiers. The divine promise to Abraham is not conquest ex nihilo but restoration: the return of ancestral territory to its rightful heirs.

A number of modern rabbinic thinkers have stressed that Rashi’s opening comment is directed inward. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Shlomo Goren all emphasized that the pasuk is not hasbara for the United Nations. It is a theological anchor meant to prevent Jews from apologizing for possessing their own land.

Rashi on Genesis 12:6 adds a second layer. By noting that the Canaanite was already in the act of conquering the land from Shem’s descendants, the Torah presents Israel’s arrival centuries later not as an imperial act but as a rectification of a previous usurpation. This is more than a narrative flourish. It is a fundamental reframing of moral legitimacy: the Jews are not the conquerors but the heirs returning home.

This reading has had a long afterlife. In the modern period, three broad streams — religious Zionist, academic, and secular nationalist — all converged on this verse, each in its own register.

Religious Zionist thinkers such as Goren, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Shlomo Aviner, and Yoel Bin-Nun have repeatedly cited Rashi on Genesis 12:6 to underline the moral asymmetry of the Jewish return. Aviner even borrowed halakhic language, likening Israel’s modern return to the Land to hashavat aveidah — the mitzvah of returning lost property. “This is not conquest,” he said, “but returning what was stolen from us.”

Academic biblical scholars — notably Yehezkel Kaufmann, Yair Zakovitch, Moshe Weinfeld, Israel Finkelstein, and Shmuel Ahituv — interpret the phrase “והכנעני אז בארץ” as a deliberate ideological marker. It frames the Canaanites as latecomers, not natives, and casts Israel’s conquest as the rectification of an earlier wrong. Even from a strictly historical-critical perspective, the verse is an anti-occupier polemic embedded in the biblical text.

Early secular Zionist leaders embraced this logic as well. David Ben-Gurion explicitly cited Genesis 12:6 in speeches from the 1930s through the early years of statehood: “We are not conquerors. We are returning to our ancient homeland. Others conquered it after us, but it was never truly theirs.” Berl Katznelson and A. D. Gordon likewise used “return” and “restoration” language rather than “conquest.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, said essentially the same thing: “This land is ours — not because we conquered it, but because it was ours and was taken from us.”

For roughly the first half of the 20th century, this restorationist frame was a shared national narrative that transcended religious-secular divides.

By the late 20th century, however, this framing had largely disappeared from mainstream Israeli discourse. Historians and legal scholars have identified several reasons:

Secularization of political language: Post-1948 leaders like Moshe Sharett preferred legalistic and civic nationalism to biblical language. The restoration claim, associated with Genesis and covenant, was seen as too religious and “unmodern.”

Temporal narrowing: After 1948 and especially after 1967, the world framed the conflict around contemporary events — wars, armistice lines, occupation — not 3,000-year-old claims. Israel responded within that narrowed frame, letting the ancient narrative fade from view.

Legal pragmatism: In diplomatic and legal forums, appeals to Bronze Age ownership have no standing. Israeli legal teams emphasized Mandate history, defensive war, and sovereignty — pragmatic arguments that sidelined theological or historical rhetoric.

Ideological polarization: After 1967, biblical language became coded as belonging to the Religious Zionist right (e.g., Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Gush Emunim). Secular centrists recoiled from using language that now felt sectarian, even though the same verses had been invoked by Ben-Gurion a generation earlier.

The result was a kind of rhetorical amnesia: what had once been a powerful shared national narrative — “you were never the original owners” — was no longer part of the mainstream conversation. Internationally, the debate flattened into symmetrical claims: “ours” versus “ours,” as though both peoples stood on identical moral footing.

Here lies the irony. Moshe Sharett and the early diplomatic establishment deliberately avoided biblical language out of a desire to sound pragmatic and modern. But in doing so, they abandoned the single most powerful asymmetric claim available: that Jewish presence in the land is not merely a competing claim but a prior claim, rooted in both sacred text and national memory.

Had they followed the logic of the first Rashi — “Koach ma’asav higid le’amo” — they might have realized that this was never primarily a foreign-policy argument. It was a narrative for themselves: a way of framing their own return without apology or embarrassment. A people that stops telling its own story leaves the stage for others to tell it for them.

Two Rashis — one on Genesis 1:1 and one on 12:6 — contain a remarkably sophisticated land claim. The first teaches that Jewish moral confidence comes from knowing that possession of the land is not theft but divine allocation. The second reframes history: Canaanite occupation was itself an act of conquest, and Israel’s later arrival was an act of restoration.

For centuries this was understood as theological argument. In the early Zionist period, it was secularized into a national-historical narrative that unified religious and secular leaders alike. But in the post-1948 era, that language was gradually abandoned in favor of pragmatic, legal, and security-based rhetoric — a shift that unintentionally weakened Israel’s moral narrative on the world stage.

The irony is striking: the first Rashi, so often read as a religious apologetic, may in fact have been the strongest secular rhetorical asset early Zionism ever had. By ceasing to use it, the movement inadvertently flattened its own claim. The result was not modern sophistication but a self-imposed amnesia — one that reduced a 3,000-year story to a mere border dispute.

Perhaps it is time to listen again to Rashi’s opening line, not as prophecy, but as political clarity:

“כח מעשיו הגיד לְעַמּוֹ”

The point was never to convince the nations.

It was to remind ourselves who was here first.