The Courage of a Beginning
Reflections on Lech Lecha
Lech Lecha is my favourite parsha.
I often think about what growth looks like when you zoom out far enough to see it.
Imagine a graph with positive linear growth. At the beginning, the line barely lifts off the bottom. If you held a ruler between the line and the axis, the space would be almost imperceptible. But if that line keeps moving in the same direction, by the end of the graph, the distance is undeniable.
It’s easy to underestimate the beginning of something. The first step rarely looks like the transformation it sets in motion.
In Lech Lecha, Avraham is told to leave his father’s home, his land, his familiar world.
Lech lecha — go forth. Go toward yourself.
There’s something so beautiful about this being the beginning of Avraham’s journey. Before the covenant, before the generations, before the story becomes a people, there is a departure. A willingness to step outside the world that has shaped you and enter the one you haven’t met yet.
Sometimes we need distance from what we know to see it clearly. Sometimes the familiar is so woven into us that we can’t tell the difference between what we’ve inherited and what we actually want to carry forward. And sometimes we don’t know what we’re capable of until life asks us to become someone we haven’t needed to be before.
But going forth doesn’t always mean making a dramatic change.
Sometimes it begins with something so small that we almost overlook it.
A prayer whispered before opening your eyes in the morning. A moment of gratitude before the day rushes in. Lighting candles, preparing a meal, or pausing long enough to notice the people gathered around your table.
These rituals might seem insignificant on any given day. You can’t necessarily measure what changes when you take thirty seconds to pray before your feet touch the floor. But over time, these small acts of intention shape the way we move through the world. They bring us back to what matters, again and again, until the practice itself becomes part of who we are.
And sometimes, lech lecha looks different. Sometimes it’s a brave decision to move in a new direction. To choose something more aligned with who you’re becoming, even when that choice is uncomfortable, uncertain, or impossible to quantify. You may not see the impact of that decision for years. You may not even recognize it as a turning point when you’re standing inside it.
But the decision sets something in motion. And each faithful step that follows compounds on the one before it.
Maybe this is part of what makes the beginning so powerful: we rarely get to see the whole trajectory from where we’re standing. We can only choose the next step, trusting that even when the change isn’t yet visible, the direction matters.
Going forth can mean leaving home in the literal sense. It might also mean questioning a belief you’ve never thought to question. Entering a room where you don’t yet know anyone. Trying something badly before you know how to do it well. Letting yourself be changed by a conversation, a place, a person, a possibility you couldn’t have encountered from where you were standing.
There is a kind of trust in that. Not the certainty that everything will work out as planned, but the willingness to meet what comes next without needing to know exactly who we’ll be when we get there.
One small step. Then another. A prayer before the eyes open. A moment of presence before the first task. A brave decision to choose a different path.
And somewhere along the way, almost imperceptibly, the line begins to rise.
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