Tzipiyah.com

Representatives from different midrashot (seminaries) are starting to come around to the various girls’ high schools in the area and tell us, the seniors, about the different institutions they represent, what each place has to offer. The choices are astounding: new midrashot seem to be springing up all the time, offering this special program or that special program. There is a program for everyone at every end of the religious spectrum, and the influx of all the information is really quite dizzying.

Interestingly enough, within the past two days, representatives from two very different midrashot said several similar things. When asked about their dress code, they both replied “Halachik.” Both brought up the movie Ushpizin, though for different reasons. But the similarity that struck me was the Dvar Torah they both used to introduce their programs.

The famous Akedat Yitzchak, the Binding of Isaac, appears in this week’s parasha, Vayera. How scary it must have been for Avraham! How terrible and heart wrenching. Avraham didn’t pretend that sacrificing his son for G-d was easy; he mourned, he journeyed to the site of the sacrifice quite stoically. He respected G-d’s word without suppressing his emotions.

The Akeda is the climactic, final of Avraham’s 10 tests. The first of them is G-d’s command for him to leave his home in Ur Kasdim and come “…to the land that I will show you.” G-d phrases both of these commandments with the words “Lech Licha,” go for yourself. This linguistic similarity begs us to ask, what did the two tests have in common?

Both tests weren’t just obstacle courses that Avraham had to complete under a short period of time. They attacked his emotion, stunned him, threw him into an unknown so great that it is unbelievable that he could have looked past that and seen straight into the essence of the matter, that it is, ultimately, G-d’s will.

As far off, lofty a thing as that sounds, the Rabbis both said, that is how we, at this point in our lives, can relate to Avraham on a personal level. Avraham was told to leave everything he knew: his homeland and area of familiarity, in one case, and in the other, his family and future, and follow G-d, clueless to what would come ahead. These journeys of uncertainty are what we are going through now. We’re being asked to choose, based on what we are told, not what we see (ein shmi’a kiyiri’ah, there is no better way to hear something than to see it), where we will spend our time, next year, in a foreign land, away from our homes. This idea troubled me extremely.

Is this what life has become to those around me? Have the communities in America become so self-contained, so comfortable, that Israel is the foreign land, and America the home base? I understand that America is our area of familiarity, but that Israel isn’t even the homeland? Just a foreign country that we spend time in because the Torah says so? Where did the spirit go? Why isn’t time in Israel presented as an Aliyah? Why is it no longer a precious opportunity, to be desired? Why isn’t this coming year looked upon as an exciting time in our lives? Why has the importance and love of Israel become tafel in our consciousness, and the slightly more peripheral aspect of the fear of change and transition become the ikar? Have we lost all perspective?