Stars, Sand and Dust: God’s Promise and Our Challenge
Parshat Vayetze 5765

The Book of Genesis is a book filled with promises. Time and again in the pages of Genesis we read of the promises that God makes first to all humankind and later to our ancestors. God promises to establish a covenant with Noah and later He creates a special bond with Avraham Aveenu and his descendents. God says, “Never again will I doom the earth because of human beings,” “I will make you a blessing,” and “I will make your name great.” These promises sustained our ancestors long ago and they have given hope to our people over the millennia of Jewish existence.

But I’d like to suggest this morning that these are more than just promises or simple gifts. They’re also challenges.

What we often forget is that God not only makes promises; God also challenges us to strive to attain these blessings ourselves. In every promise there is a partnership, an obligation which obligates the recipient as much as the donor. Implicit in God’s promises, then, is a challenge for us to be our best, to rise above human failings and pain; not only to “be” a blessing but to strive to “become” a blessing in the world. That is the real challenge in Jewish life today.

In the stories of the Patriarchs there are basically three promises that we find. They can be reduced to three words: stars, sand and dust. To Abraham and his offspring God says, “I will make your descendents as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sands on the seashore.” To a childless old man, this must have seemed like an impossible dream. In a sense it is a promise that is still unfulfilled: we are but a tiny minority in a large and populous world, not even a single percent. If we have a worry today it is that we are too countable! Yet despite our numbers Jews are a presence; we are a people who make a difference in the world.

The images of stars, sand and dust must have been vivid and concrete for Abraham and Sarah. God tells Abraham to go outside and look up at the heavens. “Abraham,” He says, “Can you count all the stars in the sky?” “Of course not,” says Abraham, “There are too many.” “So shall your ancestors be!” says God. Isn’t it fascinating that at a time when people had no idea about the size of the universe, they already understood that the stars were beyond the ken of accountability? To look up, then, is a constant reminder of the impossible dream that God had shared with our forefather, Abraham.

To stand by the shore of the sea is an equally powerful promise. Who can count all each separate grain of sand? Yet the sand of the sea is not only numerous: it also gives shape to the land. Sand holds back the destructive power of the ocean. So, too, the descendents of Abraham Isaac and Jacob must become a nation that sets boundaries and creates values that shape our moral universe.

There is a third promise in Genesis, one that appears in this week’s Torah portion. It is the strangest promise of all. As Jacob lies down all alone in the wilderness, having fled his parents’ home, he dreams of the Sulam Mutzav Artza, “of a ladder stationed on the earth reaching to heaven.” God tells our forefather “Your descendents shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and the east, the north and the south. All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants.”

If you think about it, this is the strangest promise of all. It’s one thing to be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. There’s something romantic and even visionary about these images. But who wants to be like the dust of the earth? Who wants to be dirt, the stuff that we tread on thoughtlessly every day. Sure, the dust of the earth may be numerous and ubiquitous, but pardon me if this image doesn’t sound very complimentary!

The Midrash suggests that there is a warning implicit in this promise. “When you follow God’s commandments you’ll be like the stars in the sky,” says one sage, “but when you fail to do so you will become like the dust of the earth, tread upon by the rest of the world.”

So why would God make such a promise if it’s really a threat? I came across a wonderful explanation of this expression attributed to Rabbi Aaron Levin, a Polish scholar in the years just prior to the Holocaust. He explains that while stars and sand may sound romantic and even complimentary, dust has a quality that the other two images do not. When we look up at the sky, says rabbi Levin, we see many stars but they are spread across the face of the heavens. So there are many of them but they are disconnected. Similarly, when we look at the sea shore we see millions and millions of little grains of sand but each one is separate from the other. The dust of the earth, on the other hand, clings together. It becomes a clump which can be shaped into all types of things.

In this, Rabbi Levin comments, God challenges the Jewish people. It is not enough to be numerous; we must learn to cleave to one another as well. Only when we become like the dust of the earth will we spread out to the north, south, east and west. Rabbi Levin writes, “There is no greater power in the universe than the unity of the Jewish people!”

These days there is a great deal of discussion about demographics in the Jewish people. But the real issue is not how many of us there are but whether we are one people united by common values and ideals. The greatest threats that we have faced throughout our long history have not come from the outside but from within. It is the threat of Sinat Chinam, causeless hatred, among the Jewish people and worthless controversies that are not waged in the name of heaven. It is about being more concerned with power than pride!

This is a promise that God can not make to us. God can promise us that we will be numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore but He cannot promise us that we will be one people. That is completely up to each and every one of us. That we should be like the dust of the earth is not a promise but a challenge. Just as the dust of the earth is humble and unassuming, it is only in a community where there is humility and love that true unity is possible.

But dust has yet another meaning. Dust is not only the stuff that is underfoot. It is the stuff from which human beings are fashioned. In Genesis, we are told, “The Lord, God formed human beings from the dust of the earth…” When God promises Abraham that his descendents will be like the dust of the earth, He is really telling him that we each contain the stuff from which humanity is fashioned. From within ourselves we can create a true humanity in the best sense of the word. Or in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, we human beings are comprised of both dust and divinity. There is a constant struggle about which shall gain ascendancy. It is a promise and a challenge.

Who are we? We are God’s children, the dust of the earth. From that dust we can fashion a great and blessed city!

Shabbat Shalom