For over a thousand years, the sidrot or weekly Torah portions have been known by their present names with only minor changes. According to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, these titles are “Torah names,” headings to which the Torah gives special significance, for they somehow reveal the inner essence of the whole of the sidra. So, this week’s portion is called Lekh-Lekha, which means, “Get thee out,” be active and move. Literally, the idiom means, “go to yourself,” return to your spiritual identity, climb up the ladder to spiritual heights, reach your own soul in your ascent. A Jew must never be static. He must be dynamic and progressive in his Avodat Hashem, in his service of the Lord, in moving himself and history in the direction of God. This, then, is the essence of all that is related in this week’s sidra. Thus, we read today of how Abraham goes to the Land of Israel. He is not traveling as a sight-seeing tourist with first-class accommodations. His journey is a symbolic conquest. As Ramban points out, וילך למסעיו, Abraham’s journeys in Canaan, prefigured the Jewish possession of the Land by חזקה, by actual possession when he staked out the territory. All of this is part of Abraham’s “going,” his Lekh-Lekha.

However, there are several important incidents which spell not progress but decline. The foremost failure or set-back is the verse: ויהי רעב בארץ וירד אברהם מצרימה, “And there was famine in the land and Abram went down to Egypt.” This is not merely an incidental decision to change residence. Psychologically, it was a major crisis for Abraham. He had left Canaan with the divine promise “I shall make you into a great nation and I shall bless you.” Some blessing! He had just come to Canaan, and instead of bringing with him posterity, he had become the harbinger of hunger, and he was already fleeing the land. What a disappointment – history’s first עוֺלֶה had become history’s first יוֺרֵד!

Religiously, too, Abram’s descent to Egypt was frustrating, almost abortive of his whole mission. His journey to Canaan was meant to be a kiddush hashem, an act of sanctifying the Divine Name by making the One God available and accessible to humans. The Midrash compares the situation to an open box of incense. If it stands in a corner, no one can smell it and it is of no use. But if you take it and move it about in the middle of the room, then your motion causes the odor to be wafted and to benefit all who are present. So, God said to Abram: טלטל עצמך ממקום למקום ושמך מתגדל בעולם, “Move yourself from place to place in Canaan, and thus will your name be made great in the world” – and through your reputation will the divine Name be sanctified and the divine message be known. The journey to Canaan was to be the launching of Abraham’s religious career. However, if וירד, if Abraham “went down” to Egypt, that cancelled out his mission and vitiated his message.

Domestically, this descent to Egypt was the cause of many troubles for Abraham. For it is here in Egypt that there took place the abduction of Sarah: ותקח האשה בית פרעה, she was kidnapped and taken into the harem of Pharaoh. So our sidra relates troubles as well as triumphs.

And, spiritually and historically as well, we are faced with problems in this sidra. We know the principle that our Rabbis laid down: מעשה אבות סימן לבנים, the deeds of the fathers are the symbol of the recurring pattern in the lives of their children. But some Jewish teachers, especially Hasidim, taught that this does not mean only that the lives of the Patriarchs were symbolic of the historic patterns of their descendants, but that the Patriarchs actually participated in the history that came after them, that their actions were the commencement of Jewish history. Therefore, וירד אברהם מצרימה means not only that Abraham’s descent to Egypt was a historic symbol of the later Egyptian exile, but that it was in some way itself the beginning of that terrible and bitter exile.

But if that is the case, and such were the blows suffered by Abraham and Sarah, how can we account for the name Lekh-Lekha, which indicates progress and growth and advancement?

The answer provided for us by the Lubavitcher Rebbe is, in essence, this: ירידה זו לצורך עליה, sometimes descent is for the purpose of ascent, often you must go down in order to go up to an even higher level than that at which you began. Some failures are merely temporary, they are the future successes in disguise. Sometimes the set-back is instrumental to later success. Often you must retreat in order to move on, in which case the retreat is preparatory and part of progress and advance.

Therefore we read in today’s sidra וירד אברהם מצרימה, Abraham’s going down to Egypt, led to and was part of ויעל אברהם ממצרים, that Abraham went up again from Egypt. His going down was part and for the purpose of his later going up.

Even Sarah’s abduction to the harem of Pharaoh served such a function. One of the great Hasidic teachers has taught us that her chaste conduct in the court of Pharaoh was so exemplary that it became the model and guarantee of Jewish conduct through the centuries of exile in foreign lands. The descendants of Sarah, inspired by her model, refused to assimilate, they did not permit the purity of their faith to be defiled, they protected the honor of their emunah in God.

And so it is with the redemption from Egypt. Bad as the exile was, the positive values of the redemption were even greater. The Torah tells us that when the Israelites left Egypt, they took with them רכוש גדול, great wealth. Our Kabbalistic tradition maintains that his wealth was not only or even primarily material, but that it was spiritual: they took out from Egypt the ניצוצות הקדושה, “the lost sparks of sanctity” embedded in Egyptian culture. By this they meant to say, that despite the corruption of Egypt, there were some values which one might consider divine, some aspects that had enduring value, and that these “sparks” were not condemned to destruction with Egypt. They were redeemed by Israel who learned them from the Egyptians and, by taking them along with them, preserved them forever.

So וירד is part of ויעל; the descent leading to the ascent is all part of Lekh-Lekhah, of general progress.  ירידה לצורך עלייה. Or, to use a metaphor more known to us from the popular literature of recent years, sometimes you go down, but it is only going “down the up-staircase”: your decline is merely a part of the procedure of ultimate ascent.

So it is with our national life. Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery. All the brothers later, and Joseph at the time, thought that this event was an unmitigated disaster. But, as Joseph later told them when he revealed his identity to them, כי למחיה שלחני לפניכם, all the agony of my slavery was part of the divine plan to save the entire family now. He went down – but it was on the up-staircase, which led even higher.

Or, to take a more recent case: In 1947, Prime Minister Bevin of England refused to issue 100,000 visas to Jewish refugees languishing in camps in Europe and Cyprus. How grief-stricken we all were! We were facing a blank wall. Yet, we now appreciate that had he issued these visas, the pressure for independence would have been severely reduced, and perhaps a million or two million other Jewish immigrants would never be living today in the State of Israel. It was ירידה – לצורך עליה.

The same is true with the State of Israel today. Often we are plunged into a gray mood when we consider our international and even internal situation. The constant attrition, the state of no-war-no peace, the ever-impending threat of greater warfare involving the Great Powers, the increasing isolation of Israel from neutrals and friends – all this is not calculated to encourage great cheer on behalf of those who love Israel. Nevertheless, we must never permit ourselves to lose our sense of balance. We are only humans, and therefore our perspectives are limited. Even we, in our present situation, can begin to appreciate that quite possibly our present situation is the best of all, that the alternatives may be far worse, that what is happening at the present may be propaedeutic to something much greater, much nobler, much happier. Our present ירידה may well be part of an ultimate עליה. May God grant that!

And the same holds true for personal life. Life is full of crises. No human being can be spared trauma in his existence. If we lose heart and are discouraged and become crushed, then our pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We lose sight of opportunities, and we almost wish ourselves into a plunging descent. But if we look at our situation as ירידה לצורך עליה, if we adopt a more sanguine attitude, then our optimism becomes self-fulfilling as it sensitizes us to the creative possibilities in descent. So let us leave the pessimistic views to the anti-Semites. Recall what Zeresh, wife of Haman, told him when his star began to fail: אם מזרע היהודים מרדכי אשר החילות לנפול לפניו לא תוכל לו כי נפול תיפול לפניו – “If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is one of the children of the Jews, then you shall not prevail over him but you will fall completely.” There was a ירידה, a descent, which was permanent. Jews must take a different attitude. For ourselves we must learn to endure the ירידה לצורך עליה, as but a temporary setback, preparation for a greater rise.

How often has a middle-aged man, suffering a coronary, been told by his physician: how lucky you are! This is a warning which may well save your life and prolong it. The same is true for business or professional or academic setbacks. It may be a warning, it may save us from more disastrous adventures, it may teach us something whereby we will better be able to attain our ultimate goal.

This message is not one of simplistic, unrealistic, happy-go-luckyism. On the contrary, I am pleading for a more sophisticated and higher realism: the confidence and rational understanding that, caught in crisis, man is often prone to depression because he takes an overly dim view, because he is limited emotionally and his vision is therefore curbed; the knowledge that life is never all up or all down, but a series of zig-zags – and he never knows when he is zigging or zagging; the faith that while our own personal perspective is limited, that we can only begin to discern events and their true proportions in retrospect but never in prospect, that from the perspective of God what seems to us like ירידה  is really לצורך עליה. I think often, in this context, of the famous story of Mark Twain who awoke one morning to find his obituary in the daily paper, whereupon he wrote a letter to the editor and said, “I read the notice of my death and wish to report to you that it is grossly exaggerated.” Because we are so affected personally by our own situation, we tend to exaggerate, and we do not know that we are doing so or in what measure. In the depths, it is hard to realize that you have gone down in order to go up. But it is an act of faith – and intelligence as well.

So, Lekh-Lekha, both by content and name, leaves us with this encouraging message: if we suffer, whether it be illness, financial reverses, any form of domestic misery or loneliness or frustration, remember that ירידה לצורך עליה. I do not mean that things will always get better; but they usually do, little as we expect it. Let us then not despair. Let each of us, in his own situation, bear this in mind – not as a palliative or peace-of-mind preachment, but as part of emunah, part of Jewish faith.

Then it will be true of us, as it was said of Abraham in today’s sidra: והאמין בה' ויחשבה לו לצדקה, which we translate as: “And he (Abraham) believed in the Lord, and He accounted to him as righteousness.” But this is meant to show that God considered Abraham’s faith as a special act of righteousness. But the word צדקה  derives from the word meaning “justice.” We might therefore translate that as: “And Abraham believed in the Lord, and God accredited it to him and justified his faith.”

When we will have emunah or faith that the downturn is part of an up-going, that ירידה לצורך עליה, and that faith will prove צדקה, our confidence will be vindicated and justified, and indeed עלה נעלה.

The call or Lekh-Lekha, of climbing ever higher, will be ours to achieve.