Parshat Lech Lecha: Leaving Without an Address

· Ariel Hanasi · Six1Trey · Parashah · Lech Lecha (Genesis 12:1–17:27)

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Title card: לֶךְ־לְךָ — Parashat Lech-Lecha, Leave everything you know, in gold Hebrew and white lettering on black

Parshat Lech Lecha (Genesis 12:1–17:27) is read on Shabbat, October 24, 2026. It begins with two words that every person who ever walked away from an old life understands in their body: lech lecha, "go for yourself".

לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ "Go for yourself from your land, and from your birthplace, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you." (Genesis 12:1)

Last week, Parshat Noach ended on a road: Terach, his son Avram and Avram's wife Sarai left Ur and stopped halfway, in Charan. This week Hashem tells Avram to finish the trip alone. Meet the man himself on our OGz page: Who is Avraham Avinu?

The parasha in seven aliyot

  1. Rishon (12:1–13): "Go for yourself." Avram, Sarai and Lot travel to Canaan. Famine drives them to Egypt.
  2. Sheni (12:14–13:4): Pharaoh takes Sarai; plagues strike Pharaoh's house; Avram leaves Egypt wealthy.
  3. Shlishi (13:5–18): Avram's and Lot's shepherds quarrel. They separate; Lot chooses Sodom. Hashem promises Avram the land.
  4. Revi'i (14:1–20): The war of the four kings against five. Lot is captured. Avram goes to war and rescues him. Malki-tzedek blesses him.
  5. Chamishi (14:21–15:6): Avram refuses the spoils of Sodom. "Count the stars." Avram believes.
  6. Shishi (15:7–17:6): The covenant between the pieces. Hagar and Yishmael. Avram becomes Avraham.
  7. Shvi'i (17:7–27): The covenant of brit milah. Sarai becomes Sarah. Avraham circumcises himself at 99.

1. Go for yourself

Hashem's first words to Avram are not "believe in Me" or "build Me a temple". They are "go". And not just "go", but lech lecha, literally "go for yourself" or "go to yourself".

Rashi explains: "for your own benefit, for your own good." There, in the new land, I will make you into a great nation; here, you won't even merit having children. And there I will make your character known throughout the world.

In other words, Hashem doesn't ask Avram to leave as a punishment or a sacrifice. He asks him to leave because staying is killing his future. Every person who has had to walk away from a neighborhood, a crew or a family knows this exact argument. You don't leave because you hate where you came from. You leave because there is no future for you there, and there is one where you're going.

Reb Noson of Breslov read the words even more personally: "go to yourself". Wherever you travel, the real journey is toward the person you actually are, underneath the cravings, the money and the need for respect. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called it inner-directedness: the courage to follow the inner voice instead of the crowd.

2. The order of leaving

Look at the order again: your land, your birthplace, your father's house. The circles get smaller and closer. The land is the easiest to leave. Your birthplace, the neighborhood, the people who knew you as a kid, is harder. Your father's house, the voice in your head that tells you who you are, is the hardest of all.

People think getting out means moving. You can move across an ocean and still carry the whole block with you: the reflexes, the code, the way you size up every room. Lech Lecha says the move isn't finished until you've left your father's house too, the inherited story of who you have to be.

And Hashem doesn't give him the destination: "to the land that I will show you". You leave first. The address comes later.

3. Famine, Egypt and a hard compromise

Avram arrives in Canaan, and almost immediately there is a famine (12:10). The promised land, and nothing to eat.

So he goes down to Egypt, and he's afraid. He tells Sarai, "Say you are my sister", so that the Egyptians won't kill him to take her (12:11–13). Pharaoh takes Sarai into his palace. Hashem strikes Pharaoh's house with plagues, and Pharaoh sends them away (12:17–20).

The commentators argue about whether Avram did the right thing. The Ramban, for one, says he sinned by leaving the land and by putting Sarai in danger. Whatever the answer, the Torah doesn't hide it. The first Jew had bad days. His first steps in the promised land went sideways. If your new life started with a famine and a bad decision, you're in good company. Keep walking.

4. Lot's shepherds: "it's going to be ours anyway"

Back in Canaan, Avram and his nephew Lot are both rich, and the land can't hold both their flocks. Their shepherds start fighting (13:7).

Rashi explains what the fight was about: Lot's shepherds were wicked men who grazed their animals in other people's fields. Avram's shepherds rebuked them for stealing. Lot's shepherds answered: "The land was promised to Avram, and he has no son, so Lot will inherit it. It's not stealing."

That's the oldest justification in the world: it's going to be mine anyway. They owe me. Everybody does it. Avram's answer is to separate. "Let there be no strife between me and you… for we are brothers. Separate yourself from me" (13:8–9). He even lets Lot choose first.

Lot looks at the well-watered plain of the Jordan and chooses Sodom (13:10–12), the richest and most wicked place around. He chose with his eyes. Next week we'll see what that cost him.

Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is let someone go, even family, when their way of making money will drag you down with them.

5. Avram goes to war

Four kings defeat five kings, and Lot, who now lives in Sodom, is taken captive (14:12). A survivor runs to tell Avram (14:13). The same Avram who gave Lot first choice and let him walk away now arms 318 men of his household, chases the armies north and rescues him (14:14–16).

Look at the number again: 318. Rashi brings the opinion of the Sages that it was really Eliezer alone, his one trusted servant, because the numerical value of the name Eliezer is exactly 318 (Nedarim 32a). And Rashi notes that the Torah calls them his trained ones (14:14): people he had raised in good deeds. Avraham didn't win with an army. He won with one person he had invested in. You don't need a crew of hundreds. You need one person who's really with you, and you need to be that person for someone else.

Avram separated from Lot's lifestyle. He never stopped being his uncle. When family gets in real trouble, you go get them. Those two things aren't in conflict.

6. "Not a thread or a shoelace"

After the victory, the king of Sodom offers Avram a deal: "Give me the people, and take the goods for yourself" (14:21). It's a lot of money, and he earned it.

Avram refuses: "I will not take a thread nor a shoelace nor anything that is yours, lest you should say, 'I have made Avram rich'" (14:22–23).

This might be the most important lesson in the parasha for anyone coming out of the street economy. Money from Sodom always comes with a story attached. The man who paid you will tell everyone he made you, and he'll come to collect one day. Avram wouldn't let his wealth have that man's name on it. Like the dove's olive leaf last week, he chose clean money from Hashem's hand over dirty money from a man's.

He did let the young men who fought with him take their share (14:24). He held himself to the higher standard, and didn't force it on others.

7. Count the stars

Right after he turns down the money, Avram is afraid. He has no child. Whatever he has built will go to a servant. Hashem takes him outside: "Look now toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them… So shall your seed be" (15:5).

"And he believed in Hashem, and He counted it to him for righteousness" (15:6). Rashi notes that Avram didn't ask for a sign about the children. He just believed. (About the land, a few verses later, he does ask, "How shall I know?")

There's a time to ask questions and a time to just look up. An old man with no son, standing outside at night, counting stars he can't count, and choosing to believe.

8. The covenant between the pieces

Then comes a strange, dark ceremony: Avram cuts animals in half, a great darkness falls on him, and Hashem tells him the future. His descendants will be "strangers in a land that is not theirs", enslaved for four hundred years, and then they will come out with great wealth (15:13–14). A smoking furnace and a flaming torch pass between the pieces (15:17).

The covenant includes the exile. Hashem doesn't promise Avram's children an easy road; He promises them a road that ends in freedom. If you are in the middle of your own four hundred years, the covenant between the pieces is your promise too.

9. Hagar and Yishmael

Sarai has no children, so she gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Avram as a wife (16:1–3). Hagar conceives, tensions explode, and Hagar runs away into the desert. An angel finds her by a spring and tells her to go back, and that her son will be named Yishmael, "G-d hears", because Hashem has heard her affliction (16:11).

Hagar is the first person in the Torah to whom an angel speaks, and the first to give Hashem a name: "You are the G-d who sees me" (16:13). A runaway servant girl in the desert, and Hashem sees her. Nobody is too far out to be seen.

10. A new name and a covenant in the body

At ninety-nine, Avram receives a new name, Avraham, "father of a multitude of nations" (17:5), and Sarai becomes Sarah (17:15). Breslov teachers note that both names gain the letter hei, a letter of Hashem's own Name.

Then the command of brit milah, "a covenant in your flesh for an everlasting covenant" (17:13). And Avraham does it that same day, at ninety-nine, with his son Yishmael and every man in his house (17:23–26).

Avraham started this parasha at seventy-five with a voice telling him to leave. He ends it at ninety-nine with a new name and a covenant in his body. Twenty-four years, and he's still becoming. Nobody is finished at seventy-five. Nobody is too old at ninety-nine.

11. The father of converts

Lech Lecha is the parasha of converts. Rashi says "the souls they made in Charan" (12:5) were people Avraham and Sarah brought under the wings of the Shechinah: Avraham the men, Sarah the women. The first Jewish family arrived in the land with converts already in tow.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that exile itself has this purpose: the Talmud says the Jewish people were scattered among the nations so that converts would join them, and the Rebbe read that both literally and spiritually, as the sparks of holiness gathered up from every place a Jew is sent. Every ger takes the name ben Avraham Avinu, son of Avraham our father. Read more on our page Who is Avraham Avinu?, and about another famous convert, Onkelos.

Bread, wine and the first tithe

On his way back from the war, Avram is met by Malki-tzedek, king of Shalem (later Jerusalem), "priest of G-d the Most High", who brings out bread and wine and blesses him (14:18–19). And Avram gives him a tenth of everything (14:20).

That's the first maaser, the first tenth, in the Torah. Avram has just won a war. The natural move is to keep everything. Instead, the first thing he does with his winnings is give a tenth to holiness. Then he refuses the rest from Sodom.

Notice the order: give first, then refuse the dirty money. A person who knows that a tenth of what comes in belongs to Hashem has a much easier time saying no to money that comes from the wrong place. Bread and wine, the things we bless on Shabbat, show up here for the first time, carried by a king who meets a tired warrior on the road.

Altars everywhere he goes

Every time Avram stops somewhere in this parasha, he does the same thing: he builds an altar and calls out in the Name of Hashem. At Shechem (12:7), between Beit-El and Ai (12:8), when he comes back from Egypt to the same place (13:4), and in Hebron by the oaks of Mamre (13:18).

He was a stranger everywhere. He didn't own any of this land yet. But everywhere he pitched his tent, he marked it for Hashem. The Rambam describes him calling out in the Name of Hashem to the people around him, teaching them, until thousands came to know the truth.

When you move into a new place, a new job, a new neighborhood, a new life, what's the first thing you set up? Avraham set up an altar. Today it might be a mezuzah on the door, a set time for learning, a shelf with a Chumash, a Shabbat table. Mark the ground before the ground marks you.

"Lech lecha" twice

The words lech lecha appear only twice in the whole Torah, both times to Avraham. The first is here: go from your land, your birthplace and your father's house. The second is at the Akeida, the binding of Yitzchak: "Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Yitzchak, and go for yourself to the land of Moriah" (22:2).

The first time, Hashem asked him to let go of his past. The last time, He asked him to let go of his future. Between those two "go"s is Avraham's whole life: twenty-four years of tests in this parasha alone, and decades more after.

The lesson for anybody starting over is simple and hard: lech lecha is not a one-time event. The first time you walk away from the old life is the first test, not the last. There will be another "go" later, and it might be harder. The good news is that the same Avraham who was afraid in Egypt at the start was the one who walked up Moriah at the end. The going makes you stronger for the next going.

The haftarah: "Fear not, worm of Yaakov"

The haftarah is Isaiah 40:27–41:16. It mentions Avraham directly: "the seed of Avraham, My friend" (41:8). And it speaks to people who feel small and worn out: "They that wait for Hashem shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary" (40:31). "Fear not, worm of Yaakov… I will help you, says Hashem" (41:14).

If you feel like a worm, the prophet says, you're still Hashem's worm, and He's coming to help.

How to read Lech Lecha this week

  • Sunday to Friday, one aliyah a day. The seven aliyot are listed at the top of this post. Read each one in your language, then once more in Hebrew if you can.
  • Read Rashi and Onkelos alongside. Sefaria puts both next to every verse. Onkelos gives you each word's meaning in Aramaic, and Rashi tells you what question to ask.
  • Follow one person. This week, read the parasha through Lot's eyes, or Hagar's, or Sarai's. Each one is making a choice about where to go.
  • Watch the reading with Hebrew and English captions on the Six1Trey Torah page.
  • Bring the questions below to your Shabbat table, or to one friend, if that's your table this week.

Five questions for your Shabbat table

  1. What is your "father's house"? The hardest circle to leave is the closest one. What story about yourself did you inherit that you need to leave behind?
  2. "It's going to be mine anyway." Where in your life are you using Lot's shepherds' excuse?
  3. What money won't you take? Avraham refused a thread and a shoelace from Sodom. Is there a deal on the table you should walk away from?
  4. Can you count the stars? What are you being asked to believe before you can see it?
  5. What's your new name? Avram became Avraham at ninety-nine. Who are you becoming?

Rashi this week

New to Rashi? Meet him here: Who is Rashi?

What other teachers are saying this week

Learn from more than one voice. Here is what four great Torah sources teach on Lech Lecha. Read them in full on their sites:

  • Chabad.org · The Lubavitcher Rebbe: 5 Powerful Insights From the Rebbe on Lech-Lecha. Exile as a mission to gather holy sparks and converts, Yitzchak and Yishmael as two kinds of bond with Hashem, and lech lecha as a journey to your true self.
  • Aish.com · Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: Inner-Directedness and The Courage Not to Conform. Following the inner voice instead of the crowd, and why being a Jew means being willing to be different.
  • Aish Latino · Rav Shraga Simmons: Ve para ti mismo (in Spanish). Avraham questioned the beliefs he inherited, and Hashem sent him on a journey of self-discovery away from social and family pressure.
  • Breslov.org · Chaya Rivka Zwolinski: Parshat Lech Lecha: Go To Yourself!. Reb Noson reads lech lecha as going to your true self, leaving behind cravings, materialism and the hunger for honor.

More on Lech Lecha: Lech Lecha archive (Aish.com) · Lej Leja Land (Aish Latino) · The Heh of Avraham (Breslov.org)

From the book

G2G: From Gangster to Ger is a Lech Lecha story: a man who left his land, his birthplace and finally his father's house, without knowing the address, and found it. Read G2G free.

Shabbat shalom.

Sources: Torah text and Rashi from Sefaria (JPS 1917 and the Rosenbaum & Silbermann translation of Rashi, public domain); haftarah Isaiah 40:27–41:16. Teachings attributed to other teachers are summarized in our words; please read their original articles at the links above.