לך לך - A Journey
This week I want to focus on Avram and his journey to becoming Avraham. The name of the parsha this week is לך לך (lech lecha), which unto itself is worth an analysis. This command that G-d gives Avram, can be literally understood as ״Go, to you.” Here G-d is telling Avram that it is time to leave and to go to a new home, on a promise.
Where are you going?
We see instances in Biblical Hebrew where repetition is a stylistic tool to show intensification or emphasis. Rabbi David Kimhi, known as Radak, points out in his commentary that the phrase לך לך follows a pattern of Hebrew that has multiple occurrences in the Torah. In לך לך, the masculine second person singular “you” is first encoded in the verbal imperative of “to go” and then again as the objective suffix of the preposition “to". G-d is making a clear point to Avram “You, go!” Or as is often rendered in English, simply: “Go!” In my opinion the simple English translation loses the gravitas that the Hebrew is trying to convey. It is also tempting in the Hebrew to read this as a deeper statement, not of a physical journey but of a spiritual, introspective journey: “Go [inward] to yourself!”
English is not the only translation that changes the טעם or “taste” of the Hebrew. In Onkelos, the Aramaic אִיזֵל לָךְ is a literal translation. Though retaining the emphasis in repetition, it loses the visual and auditory play of the Hebrew לך לך (it also loses the ambiguity of the written words when reading the Hebrew without vowels). Looking at the Septuagint and reading a little further into the pasuk (verse) we have ἔξελθε ἐκ τῆς γῆς. The doubling of the ἐκ after ἔξ- has consonance, though I’m inclined to think it may be coincidental. The second ἐκ is also translating from the Hebrew a מ prefix “from,” and is not a part of לך לך.
Similar to how our in-person conversations are heavily coded with body language, written language encodes both visual and auditory information. Often, translation is insufficient in capturing these subtle data points (or introduces its own encoding, which we will explore in future posts אי״ה). Personally, I have to keep in mind that there is a diachronic nature to translation, where texts and their translations exist in cultural settings often far from each other in time (perhaps by more than a thousand years) and that this influences the translator’s understanding and rendering of a text.
Recognizing that translation cannot always capture the subtle or stylistic aspects of a language, it invites us to sit with the text not in a transactional way of reading, but rather as an experience or conversation. This Shabbat, may we reflect on the inward journey “into ourselves”, and how we like Avra(ha)m are adding a little bit of something to ourselves every time we learn the parsha, and furthermore how those around us may not always interpret us in the same way that we see ourselves.