Imagine if you could return to that moment: Abraham hears a voice that tells him to go to a land he does not know and has not seen. Imagine if you could whisper to Abraham all the beauty and pain and yearning and loss and renewal that land would see in the thousands of years to come. What if Abraham knew how his first step would affect the course of human history?

As we know today, it changed everything. Of course, it determined the course of Abraham’s life and Sarah’s life and that of their family. But the journey went so far beyond those domestic dramas. Abraham’s step changed the beliefs of more than half the world, the faith and battles and progress of Europe, the creation of world religions, and at times, the intolerance and brutality of people who saw faith as a sword, not a shield.

In these painful days, it is a strange feeling to revisit that first step, as we do in this week’s parasha. It is like the feeling of returning to one’s home town and seeing how the decision you made while standing on this corner, or in that house, determined more than you ever knew. God said, “Go.” Abraham went. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Therefore, it is important to say this about that moment in history. I have spent a good deal of my life reading and studying Jewish texts and writers and poets and thinkers. The range of subjects they address is as broad as the reach of mind and as wide as the expanse of sky. Yet although they address the long and often agonizing saga of Jewish wandering and suffering nowhere have I seen expressed the wish that Abraham had not taken that first step.

Sometimes in a house of shiva, or mourning, I have asked the mourner, “Do you wish the one you had lost had never lived?” No, they invariably say, knowing the great truth that the measure of our blessing is the measure of our loss. When we stand now in a place of pain amidst a conflict that may grow, do we wish that Abraham had not taken that step? Surely we do not. The great truth of Jewish life is that we begin each day in appreciation and end each day in praise. The pain is real, the suffering sometimes overwhelming and the fear of what may come is acute. We are a people of too much experience to believe that life can be unaccompanied by struggle and suffering. But looking back on the remarkable brocade of the Jewish story, we are nonetheless grateful that at the greatest hinge of history, when God said, “Lech L’cha,” Go forth, Abraham took the first step.