In 1938, as the Nazis tightened their grip on Austria, Sigmund Freud found himself confronting a decision that no one should ever have to make. The founder of psychoanalysis was eighty-two years old, internationally famous, and deeply attached to Vienna, the city in which he had spent almost his entire life.

His home at Berggasse 19 was more than just a residence. It was the place where he had developed his revolutionary theories, received his patients, entertained his colleagues, and assembled his extraordinary collection of books and antiquities.

But following the Anschluss with Germany in March 1938, Vienna was no longer the city Freud had known. His daughter Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo, his publishing business was targeted, and his Jewish identity suddenly became the defining fact of his existence in the eyes of the Nazi authorities.

Friends and supporters abroad urged him to leave. Eventually he managed to secure permission to travel to London. But what is particularly striking about Freud’s departure is what he insisted on taking with him.

Freud did not simply pack a suitcase and abandon his past. He arranged for his library, furniture, and beloved antiquities to accompany him. When he arrived in London, his new home at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead was furnished to resemble his Viennese study, with the familiar objects surrounding the couch on which his patients had lain.

Freud had left Vienna. But he had not left behind everything that Vienna meant to him.

There is something profoundly human about this. When circumstances force us to move on, we instinctively distinguish between what we must abandon and what we cannot bear to lose. Sometimes the distinction is straightforward. Sometimes it is anything but straightforward.

I can relate to this in a very personal way. When Sabine and I moved from London to Los Angeles in 2011, we were embarking on an entirely new chapter in our lives. We were leaving behind the city and country in which we had grown up, the familiar rhythms of life, longstanding friendships, and a world we knew intimately.

Los Angeles was not simply London with better weather. It was a different culture, a different environment, and a different way of life.

And yet, like Freud, we brought familiar possessions with us — furniture, books, photographs, and all those little things that make a house feel like home. They provided continuity and reassurance in unfamiliar surroundings.

But there was an important distinction. We had not moved to Los Angeles to recreate London in California. We had left London behind, and we were determined to embrace the new reality in which we found ourselves. We could treasure everything our previous life had given us without allowing it to dictate what our new life would become.

And that, I believe, is the key to understanding the opening of this week’s parsha, which contains one of the most consequential instructions in the entire Torah.

God addresses Avraham with words that have echoed through Jewish history for nearly four thousand years: לֶךְ לְךָ מֵאַרצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ – “Go for yourself, from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.”

It is a breathtaking command. Avraham, already seventy-five years old, is instructed to leave the familiar world in which he has lived and embark on a journey to an undisclosed destination.

There is no itinerary, no advance reconnaissance, and no indication of precisely what he can expect.

Rashi famously explains that the words Lech Lecha mean “for your own benefit and for your own good.” But I want to focus on a different aspect of this opening passage, one which I believe contains an important lesson about Jewish identity, personal growth, and the relationship between our past and our future.

Because immediately after commanding Avraham to leave everything behind, the Torah tells us something rather surprising:

וַיִּקַּח אַבְרָם אֶת שָׂרַי אִשְׁתּוֹ וְאֶת לוֹט בֶן אָחִיו וְאֶת כָּל רְכוּשָׁם אֲשֶׁר רָכָשׁוּ וְאֶת הַנֶּפֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר עָשׂוּ בְחָרָן

“Avram took Sarai his wife, Lot his nephew, all the possessions they had acquired, and the souls they had made in Charan.”

In other words, Avraham leaves his homeland, but… he takes his family, his possessions, and the people whose lives he has influenced.

Which raises an obvious question. What exactly was he leaving behind? After all, if the purpose of God’s instruction is to make a complete break with the past, why does Avraham bring so much of that past along with him?

The answer is that the Torah is teaching us something far more sophisticated than the importance of making a fresh start. It is teaching us the difference between abandoning our past and refusing to be imprisoned by it. And these are two very different things.

The first clue is in the unusual structure of God’s instruction. Avraham is told to leave his country, his birthplace, and his father’s house. But surely the natural order would be the reverse. A person first leaves his father’s house, then his birthplace, and finally his country.

Rashi explains that God deliberately mentions these categories to emphasize the difficulty of the separation. Leaving one’s homeland is painful, leaving one’s birthplace is even more personal, and leaving one’s father’s house means separating from the deepest emotional foundations of one’s life.

The progression is not geographical. It is psychological.

And that is why the instruction is so demanding. God is not telling Avraham just to relocate. He is asking him to reconsider the assumptions, loyalties, and expectations that have shaped his whole identity.

But there is a crucial distinction here. Avraham is not being told that everything associated with his previous life is worthless. He is being told that his previous life must no longer determine the limits of his future.

And it is this distinction we have to think about when we consider the Rambam’s account of Avraham’s spiritual development.

In Chapter One of Hilchot Avodat Kochavim, the Rambam describes how Avraham, while still a young child, began questioning the idolatrous beliefs of the society around him. He looked at the world, observed the movement of the heavenly bodies, and gradually concluded that there must be a single Creator responsible for everything.

Eventually, Avraham began publicly challenging the religious assumptions of his generation.

The Rambam’s description is remarkable because Avraham’s journey toward God begins long before the command of Lech Lecha. By the time God instructs him to leave Charan, Avraham has already undergone an extraordinary intellectual and spiritual transformation.

He had questioned the beliefs of his upbringing, rejected idolatry, and developed an entirely new understanding of the universe.

So why does God still need to tell him to leave?

I think the true answer is that there is a big difference between changing what you believe and changing the life you live.

It is entirely possible to reject an idea intellectually while remaining emotionally attached to the world that produced it. It is possible to recognize that something needs to change, while continuing to organize one’s life around the very assumptions one has supposedly abandoned.

Avraham discovered the truth. Now he had to build a life around it. And that required a journey.

So what did he take with him? The Torah mentions הַנֶּפֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר עָשׂוּ בְחָרָן — the souls they had made in Charan.

Rashi explains that this refers to the people whom Avraham and Sarah had brought under the wings of the Shechinah. Avraham had influenced the men, Sarah had influenced the women, and the Torah considers their spiritual influence equivalent to having created those individuals.

It’s an extraordinary detail.

Avraham is leaving the society whose religious assumptions he had rejected, but he refuses to abandon the people whose lives he has transformed.

He is making a break with the ideology of his past, not with the responsibilities he acquired while living there.

And perhaps that is the real significance of the Torah’s insistence that he takes his possessions as well. The command to leave does not require him to destroy everything he has built. His accumulated resources, his relationships, and his achievements are not obstacles to his mission. Properly understood, they are instruments through which that mission can be fulfilled.

There is a fascinating historical parallel in the life of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, European Jewry was undergoing a profound crisis. Traditional Jewish life was being challenged by emancipation, secular education, religious reform, and the enormous social pressures of modern European society.

For many Jews, the choice seemed brutally simple. Either remain within the traditional Jewish world and reject modernity, or embrace modernity and gradually abandon traditional Judaism.

But Rabbi Hirsch rejected this choice altogether. When he arrived in Frankfurt in 1851 to lead a small Orthodox community, he developed an educational and communal model in which rigorous Torah observance could coexist with serious engagement in secular knowledge and wider society.

His philosophy, commonly described as Torah im Derech Eretz, was not an attempt to dilute Judaism. It was an insistence that Judaism possessed the strength and intellectual depth to engage with the modern world without losing its essential character.

In a sense, Rabbi Hirsch was confronting the same fundamental challenge that faced Avraham. What must we leave behind, and what must we take with us?

For Rabbi Hirsch, Jewish commitment was nonnegotiable, but many of the cultural forms in which Jewish life had previously been expressed were not. A Jew could acquire new languages, pursue new professions, and participate in a changing society without surrendering the covenant that defined Jewish existence.

The danger was not change itself. The danger was allowing change to determine what could no longer be retained.

And that is a lesson which I believe is particularly relevant to Jewish life in America today.

We live in a society that places enormous value on reinvention. People change careers, move cities, establish new identities, and regularly announce that they are beginning a new chapter. The language of personal transformation has become almost a secular religion.

But there is a problem with the modern obsession with reinvention. It sometimes encourages us to believe that growth requires repudiating everything that came before.

Tradition becomes a burden. Family expectations become constraints. Religious obligations become remnants of an earlier stage of development. The past is something to escape rather than something to understand.

Judaism offers a radically different model. It’s the Lech Lecha model. We are a people whose entire identity depends on remembering the past while continually moving toward the future.

Jewish history has never been static. We have moved across continents, developed new communities, encountered new civilizations, and confronted challenges that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

Do you know why the Jewish people have survived? Not because we refused to move, but because we understood what had to move with us.

Perhaps this is why the Jewish people began with Avraham. Our original ancestor was not simply the man who was brave enough to leave home — he was the man who knew what was worth carrying with him.

Which brings me back to Sigmund Freud and his remarkable departure from Vienna.

Freud could not preserve the world in which he had lived. That world was collapsing around him. But by recreating his study in London, surrounded by the objects that had accompanied his life’s work, he demonstrated a powerful human instinct: a new beginning does not require the erasure of everything that preceded it.

And perhaps that is the challenge of Lech Lecha for every one of us.

There are moments in life when God calls upon us to leave something behind. Sometimes it is a place. Sometimes it is an assumption. Sometimes it is a habit, a prejudice, a fear, or an idea about ourselves that has become an obstacle to growth.

But the challenge is not simply to leave. It is to distinguish between the baggage that weighs us down and the inheritance that gives us strength.

And that, ultimately, is the Jewish journey: to have the courage to go somewhere new, while possessing the wisdom to know what must never be left behind.