CHOCHMAS NASHIM: LECH LECHA AND YAHRTZEIT OF RACHEL:
AVRAHAM AND RACHEL’S CROSSROAD
By; Suri Davis
There is a prayer to say at the grave of Rachel our foremother, which includes the following:
“What can we say and what can we declare? If for the first exile, which was only for seventy years, Rachel stormed the world, what will she say now in this bitter and difficult exile, in which for over nineteen hundred years we are in diaspora after diaspora, dispersed and banished to the four corners of the earth under the yoke ofkings and masters and in which we are lowly and disgraced; and we are like cut-off thorns in their eyes, and the curse of each day is greater than that of the prvious one…What will you say, O Rachel our mother? How can you rest in your grave? Arise and waken those asleep in Chevron (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sara, Rebecca and Leah) and Moses the faithful shepherd and all the holy forefathers! Get up now, stand fast now, pray now before His Blessed Honor for the remnants of the survivors of your people, the House of Israel, who sigh and cry out, alone and plundered, lowly and disgraced, and consigned to the lowest level. Until when, O G-d, will the tormentor revile…
This prayer is said at Rachel’s tomb, even though I sit in my home now on the eve of Rachel’s yahrtzeit, I read and ask HKBH, Ad Masai/until when, will we be forsaken and removed from your holy home, the temple. We’ve been in exile for thousands of years, it’s time to be redeemed.
What does this have to do with this week’s torah portion of Lech Lecha? The first person to enter Israel was Abraham, and he voluntarily left to go to Egypt. Some commentaries believe that his leaving the land of Israel showed a lack in faith in G-d during a famine. It appears to me, knowing that all that is revealed in the Book of Genesis is a paradigm for all generations, that Abraham’s voluntarily leaving Israel for Egypt, set the precedence for Jacob and his sons to leave Israel during the famine to live in Egypt, which was a prelude to their being enslaved for 210 years.
Abraham exiled himself and his family, Rachel’s soul has been crying ever since for redemption. It is a lesson on how our actions have a rippling effect on the world, and how our eternal souls work to repair that which we harm or break. Our actions and soul take up space currently and seemingly forever.
Every year, we fall back in time and get a chance to redo an hour. Every spring we lose an hour of opportunity. Our sages tell us that we are concerned with our assets but not with the hours of our days, our assets are of no use to us in the world to come, and the hours that we waste, can never be returned to us, so we have to make every minute count in this world.
Don’t forget to turn the clock on Sunday morning from 2am to 1am.
Gut Shabbos.
-Suri