Lech Lecha (Genesis 12:1-17:27); Diane was the Torah reader, and I gave a drash (interpretive reading) on the portion, which I thought I’d post here.

“Go forth from your native land and your father’s house to the land that I will show you…and you shall be a blessing.” That was God’s challenge to Abram. And Abram accepted the challenge.

But every day, we face a similar challenge. Every day, we must leave what we know and face the unknown – the future. Some days, the journey is easy. Other days, the journey is difficult. But when we set out, we never know what to expect – we only know that today will be different than it was yesterday.

God told Abram to go forth, and he did. But he did not go alone. He brought his wife, his nephew, and his household on the trip. Similarly, we don’t face the future alone – we go with our families, our neighbors, our country, and the rest of the world. Not everyone will help us on our journey, but we need to be mindful of our companions.

And, of course, God went with Abram. Does God go with us? Perhaps not in as direct a form as Abram saw and heard, but if we want God’s company, we can have it.

Abram faced obstacles on his journey, as do we. Since 9/11, some of those obstacles have seemed a lot bigger. Remember when the biggest worry about the mail was getting rid of the junk? Remember when CNN didn’t have a constant war ticker on the bottom of the screen? Remember when airport security was just an annoyance?

I know I spent the first month or so after 9/11 in a funk. I watched more TV news that month than I usually see in a year, and I checked news websites every few minutes while I was at work. And at the end of every day, I felt that I hadn’t done anything.

But a couple of weeks ago, things changed. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but somehow, I realized that I had a life to live. I started getting work done at work again. I started to read things other than the news. I even started watching TV for fun (mostly reruns, of course!).

I realized that the terrorists’ main objective wasn’t crashing four airplanes. It wasn’t knocking down the World Trade Center. It wasn’t even killing thousands of people. What they wanted to do was simple: they wanted to force people to stop living their normal lives. To stop looking forward to each day’s journey, but rather to fear it. And they had done it to me, at least for a while.

This week, I went forth. To Atlanta, for my first business trip since 9/11. I can’t say that I was really looking forward to the hassles – but by the time my first flight landed, I felt far better than I had for a long time – even though the airport was strangely empty and hushed, and even though the news on CNN was still bad. I was back on my journey.

Abram’s journey continues after the end of today’s parsha – we know of the challenges he has yet to face, and how he’ll respond. We know that God’s promise is fulfilled, and that Abram is the ancestor of a great nation. We don’t know what lies ahead of each of us on our journey, but at the end of every day, we can look back and see what progress we made. Did we learn? Did we grow? Did we contribute to tikkun olam? Were we a blessing?

Shabbat shalom.

My trip home yesterday was under the auspices of the Fairy Godmother Department (see Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road).

Originally, my meeting was supposed to end about 1:30pm, so I’d booked a 3:15pm flight out of Atlanta Airport to Dallas, which would get me home about 10:30pm Eastern. But then they revised the agenda so that we’d finish at 11am, leaving me a long wait for my flight.

A friend was planning to leave on the 1:30pm flight so she could get home to Austin at a decent hour, so we left the meeting promptly at 11 (slightly before the last speaker finished, but such is life), and were at the American Airlines counter at 11:30. I asked if there was room on the 1:30. The agent asked me if I wouldn’t rather take the noon flight(!), but I didn’t know how far the gate was or how long it would take to get through security (on the bus from the hotel, we’d heard horror stories of 90-minute lines that very day), so I said “no,” and she put me on the 1:30 with a reasonable connection in Dallas, and I went to get in line.

The line was the longest one I’d been in on this trip — about ten people. I was clever this time and put my metal-tipped belt in my suitcase instead of wearing it, but it didn’t help me; I was selected for a random scan and had to be wanded and patted down anyway. Despite that delay, I was past the checkpoint at 11:45 — and the gate for the noon flight was only a couple of hundred feet away. So we zipped down there and got onto the noon flight.

En route, I used a secret trick and called American Airlines Reservations for free on the Airphone (hint: dial *044) to see if I could get an even earlier flight home from Dallas. There was one available, but I’d have to wait till I was Dallas to see if there would be room.

In Dallas, I walked over to the Terminal B Admiral’s Club (the longest walk I’d taken in three days — I needed it!) to see if the earlier flight had room. It did — and I was even able to upgrade to First Class, where I was delighted to find that warm nuts were still served on this flight, but I was not so happy to find that the people in front of me were determined to get their money’s worth of the liquor being poured. But eventually they got quiet.

I’d called my regular taxi driver while I was in Dallas, and he was waiting for me; I got home before Diane and Jeffrey did. While I was waiting for them, the driver called me back to tell me my luck was still holding — we’d had a fast trip down from the airport, but now there had been a wreck, and traffic on 880 South from the airport was snarled up badly. But I’d missed all of that.

All in all, a much better trip home than I’d expected. And getting home four hours early made it even better.

Shabbat Shalom!