“Desire is a relation of being to lack…It isn’t the lack of this or that, but a lack of being whereby the being exists…This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil.” (Jacques Lacan Seminar II, pp. 223)
There was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. (Genesis 12:10)
For the land that you are about to enter and possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come. There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own labors, like a vegetable garden; but the land you are about to cross into and possess, a land of hills and valleys, soaks up its water from the rains of heaven. It is a land which the LORD your God looks after, on which the LORD your God always keeps God’s eye, from year’s beginning to year’s end. (Deuteronomy 11:10-12)
The Torah often describes Canaan, the Promised Land, as a place of famine and scarcity. Meanwhile, it presents Egypt, its neighbor and foil, as a place of wealth and abundance. Canaan and Egypt are geographically proximate, yet spiritually and existentially worlds apart.
Both places debut in this week’s parasha, Lech L’cha. Canaan is the place Abraham must go by divine command, the destination of his quest. But Egypt is the place he must go, by karmic necessity and by utilitarian calculus, as a detour on his roundabout journey. Abraham receives a blessing and a covenant in Canaan. He builds an altar to God and prays in Canaan. But he becomes prosperous in Egypt. Abraham fulfills his mission in Canaan, but spends his 9-5, as it were, “as a stranger in a strange land.” In Canaan, he is asked to walk in God’s ways and have integrity. In Egypt, he discovers just how difficult that can be when survival is on the line.
If the only episode we had of Abraham was the one in which he tells Sarah, his wife, to pretend to be his sister, we would not be particularly impressed. This is the person appointed to be “father of a great nation”?
Commentators disagree as to whether Abraham was right to leave Canaan in a time of famine and head to Egypt. On the face of it, it was the smart, obvious thing to do. But Nachmanides argues that Abraham should have prayed for help—going to Egypt represents a lack of faith precisely at a moment when Abraham should have known better. (Nachmanides is a big proponent of praying in a time of crisis, arguing elsewhere in a legal context that we are only obligated to pray insofar as we experience ourselves to be in need).
The subsequent descent of Jacob and his children at the end of Genesis is a kind of recapitulation of—or, on Nachmanides’s view, even a punishment for—the precedent Abraham has set. The enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt, necessary as it may be, narratively and developmentally, is the direct consequence of Abraham’s choice to leave Canaan for Egypt shortly after arriving and receiving God’s blessing.
We can see Abraham’s story as a microcosm or fractal of subsequent Israelite history. The path to the promised land is full of exilic interlude. Nachmanides’s principle for this is maasei avot simanim l’banim—“the deeds of the ancestors are signs for the children.” They are signs in a double-sense: they are signs of what’s to come, and they are also clues we must decipher to better understand ourselves and our origins.
Genesis 10:6 tells us that Canaan and Egypt (Mitzrayim) were originally the names of two brothers, two children of Ham, two grandchildren of Noah. Their fates are entwined. They come as a pair. That God designates Canaan, and not Egypt, the Promised Land, fits the narrative pattern of Genesis in which we come to prefer the underdog to the incumbent. Yet to appreciate the meaning and purpose of going to Canaan we must first understand the Torah’s negative logic of why not Egypt?
That we could ask why not Egypt? though, implies Egypt is a contender, a road nearly taken. Lecha L’cha bears this out in two astonishing ways:
First, Abraham presents his wife, Sarah, as his sister, to Pharaoh, hoping to save their lives, but at the cost of her becoming Pharoah’s wife or handmaiden. Granted, it’s a gambit, and granted Abraham and Sarah are saved from having to go through with the ploy, but through the drama, the narrator allows us to wonder what would be so terrible if Sarah became an Egyptian princess? Is it really so important that she not intermarry with the Egyptians? Maybe it’s even a boon for her and Abraham’s mission—the very path through which they can bring their discovery of YHWH—to the world?
Second, Abraham—at the behest of Sarah—fathers a child, Ishmael, with Hagar, whom the Torah describes explicitly as an Egyptian! (16:1). Rashi suggests that Hagar came with Sarah out of Egypt. Hagar’s name, which literally means “the stranger” or “the foreigner” is also connected to the word “lagur”—to sojourn or dwell (temporarily)—the very word the Torah uses to characterize Abraham’s trip to Egypt: vayered Avraham mitzrayma lagur sham (Genesis 12:10). In the same way that the text asks to imagine Pharaoh as the would-be husband of Sarah, it also asks us to imagine Hagar as Abraham’s would-be wife. The Torah wants us to imagine Egypt as the would-be covenantal partner of Israel.
Canaan and Mitrayim are both children of the cursed Ham. Yet the former can be changed into Israel, while the latter cannot. Canaan represents the possibility of transformation and alchemy of negativity into positivity, curse into blessing, weakness into strength. Egypt, though, cannot be transformed, but instead is a kind of necessary evil that one must go to, but also leave. This is the realist concession of the Torah—after Eden, and after Babel: some evils can be rectified; some simply have to be accepted as part of life. If universalism fails in self-centeredly imagining everyone to be just like me and particularism fails in self-centeredly assuming I have nothing in common with others, we need a middle way. Canaan represents the universalistic impulse within the Torah, while Egypt represents its limits.
Noah left the world behind to hide in an ark. Abraham must leave Egypt behind—but Canaan he cannot and must not. Canaan is his avodah (spiritual path). Just because we can’t work on every issue, doesn’t mean we are exempt from finding the one issue we care about and giving our all to it. Just because we can’t love everyone equally, doesn’t mean we must renounce love altogether. Canaan it is. We’re limited.
What if the problem with Egypt is, in fact, that it is impossible to feel limited in a place where the Nile constantly flows? What if it is only in the place of constriction that we discover—and appreciate—our limitation, which is also our distinction? So that Canaan is preferable to Egypt precisely because is is in a state of lack that we desire and in a state of desire that we find divinity and in divinity that find awe and in awe that we find concern for our human condition?
Two weeks ago, I wrote that the lesson of Bereishit is that to be human is to be an outsider to all categories, all types and definitions. But what if Egypt/Mitzrayim is the place where desire is fulfilled—and thereby abolished—precisely by putting people in categories. It is Pharaoh, after all, in Exodus 1, who first calls the children of Israel a nation, who forgets Joseph (the individual) and sees only one swarming mass of others (rav v’atzum mimenu) threatening to overtake his country. Yes, Egypt is a place of great technological achievement, but it’s also a place of brutal slavery. Its greatest architectural splendor is also a tomb.
Jacques Lacan reminds us that desire is not determined or caused by something out there in the world, but is instead constitutive of consciousness. Desire is the result of a sense of lack, yet it is this sense of lack that is our vitality. To take away our sense of lack, or to think that we can satisfy it through some objective external means (if I only had this, accomplished this, saw that, etc.) is to take away our humanity. Each of our senses of lack is unique, made in the image of a God who is also uniquely lacking.
Canaan is preferable to Egypt, because it is in the arid place, not the fertile one, that we know ourselves as beings who desire. Desire exceeds need, and is the basis for our creativity. Needs pertain to survival. Desire to love. Needs pertain—as the etymology suggests—to what is necessary; desire to what is extra. Needs are predictable, automatic. Desire is wild, dynamic.
Lacan says that our lack is beyond anything we can represent or know directly, which is strikingly similar to how Maimonides and proponents of the via negativa describe God. What we desire, in other words, is not the rain in its season, though we pray for it, but that which we can only intimate through prayer. What we desire is not even the land of Canaan itself, but the reflection of its veil. The fire, but God is not in the fire. The still small murmur, but God is not even there. This moment, but now it’s gone. Canaan is the promised land, not because it is or will be delivered to us, but because in it, we discover our desire for desire itself. Egypt denies us our disappointment, seeks to repress our sense that there can and should be more. In Canaan, we are at home, precisely because we are not. Even in Canaan, we long for Canaan.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
Sarah Leading Hagar to Abraham, Caspar Netscher (1673)