Lech-Lecha
Genesis 12:1–17:27

By Jen Smith

When God first speaks to Abram, the words are startlingly simple: Lech-Lecha…Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. (Genesis 12:1)

There’s no roadmap. Instead of opening the chapter of Abram’s story with declaration of faith or theology, the Torah begins with movement, characterized by a divine nudge: Go.

The great mystical text, the Zohar, teaches us to consider these words differently: Lech Lecha does not just mean “go forth,” it also means “go to yourself.” In other words, God isn’t just sending Abram out into the desert – He’s sending him inward. The spiritual journey is never merely about distance or direction; it’s about discovering who we are when we strip away the external (our habits, identities, and expectations) and listen for the quiet inner voice of the soul.

Around this same time of year, as nights grow longer and pumpkins glow from porch steps, Jewish folklore offers us another story of creation: the legend of the Golem of Prague.

In that tale, the 16th-century sage Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, shapes a figure out of clay to protect the Jewish community from persecution. Using God’s sacred names, he breathes a spark of life into the clay form. Suddenly, the Golem comes alive as a powerful and obedient entity, if also devoid of soul.

Eventually, the rabbi must erase the holy letters from the Golem’s forehead, returning him to dust. For all his strength, the Golem lacks the one ingredient that makes a person human – the divine breath of discernment, compassion, and moral choice.

In a way, Lech-Lecha represents the very opposite of the Golem story. The Golem is a creation without consciousness, while Abram embodies consciousness awakened. The Golem can act, but he cannot evolve. Abram, by contrast, becomes the first Jew precisely because he dares to become more than what he was made to be. He listens to the voice that says: Lech lecha – go find your truest self.

Jewish mysticism teaches that God did not create the world once, long ago; instead, we learn that creation is ongoing. Each breath and each moment is another pulse of divine energy flowing through the cosmos and through us.

When Abram leaves everything familiar behind, rejecting the Gods of his father, he becomes a partner in that unfolding act of creation. Hardly the picture of blind faith in this story, Abram’s faith is dynamic and participatory. Instead of waiting for proof or comfort, Abram embraces his journey by creating meaning through motion. And that’s what it means, even now, to live as a Jew: understanding at our core that rather than being grounded in answers, faith is about daring to walk, to question, to build, and to repair. It’s about seeing our own ordinary, human hands as tools of divine artistry.

In the Golem legend, Rabbi Loew writes the sacred word emet (truth) on the Golem’s forehead to bring him to life. When he erases the first letter, leaving only met (death), the Golem returns to dust and reveals a universal principle: truth is what sustains life. When we forget the truth, we disconnect from the soul, becoming the lump of clay again.

As we enter the darker season of the year, both Lech-Lecha and the legend of the Golem remind us of two sides of the same human experience: the courage to create and the humility to ensure that what we create is imbued with soul.

We live in a world of technology, algorithms, and artificial intelligence – modern golems of our own making. They can process and perform, but they cannot feel, pray, or love. The Torah’s wisdom is timeless: what makes us truly alive is not what we can build, but who we choose to become.

I love that Lech-Lecha always arrives just as the nights grow longer and the air turns colder; a time when we, too, are invited to go inward. The legend of the Golem feels right for this season; what animates us isn’t the clay from which we are made, but rather, the breath of life that nudges us forward on our journeys to become the truest versions of ourselves.

So this Shabbat, as we read Lech-Lecha, may we each hear the whisper that calls across millennia and into our own hearts: Go forth. Leave behind the familiar. Travel toward your essence. Bring your soul into the world’s clay. Because every time we act with integrity, compassion, and courage – every time we choose to see the divine spark in another – we become, in our own way, a living answer to God’s first call to Abram.

Shabbat Shalom!