Unscrolled Lech Lecha: The Story of an Image

In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1967 short story “The Slaughterer,” a pious Jew named Yoineh Meir finds himself increasingly revolted by the gore of his work as the village’s kosher slaughterer.

At night, when the “smell of the slaughterhouse would not leave his nostrils,” he would seek respite in the study of Torah, but found that even the Torah was full of gore.

Indeed it is, especially in the story of the “Covenant of the Parts” found in Parashat Lech-Lecha.

God comes to Avram (not yet renamed Avraham) in a vision. At this moment, Avram is distraught—worried that he will leave no descendants upon the earth. God directs Avram’s glance skyward. “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them,” God says. “So shall your offspring be” (Genesis 15:5).

God then asks for an offering to seal this covenant.

Avram brings a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young bird. He then bisects the animals lengthwise (except for the bird) and lays their pieces side by side in a row in the soil.

Avram keeps watch over this strange configuration of body halves for long hours. When birds of prey come down to feast on the carcasses, he drives them away.

Then, just as the sun is about to set, a slumber falls upon Avram. In a dream, God speaks to him.

“Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years; but I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end, they shall go free with great wealth” (Ibid 15:13-14).

Avram then sees a smoking oven and a flaming torch passing to and fro between the divided animals as if held by phantoms.

Perhaps Yoineh Meir would turn away in disgust from the story of this strange, bloody ritual. Perhaps we, as modern readers, want to do the same. If, however, we keep our eyes on the page, we will find ourselves confronted by an image pregnant with countless unspoken meanings and associations.

If we keep our eyes on the page, we will find ourselves confronted by an image pregnant with countless unspoken meanings and associations.

In the animals, Rashi sees a foretelling of the animal sacrifices that will someday be offered in God’s Temple. Or, perhaps, these are the beastly kings of Babylonia, Persia, and Greece who will conquer and despoil Jerusalem and the children of Israel, with the unmutilated bird a symbol of the Jewish people who, though vulnerable and small, will survive each onslaught and go on to rebuild.

Life and death swirl in the vortex of this image. Past and future, like two rivers flowing in opposite directions, pool and churn in the whirlpool of the covenantal act, in which future exiles and redemptions lay coiled like DNA.

In the glowing clouds of smoke, we can see the revelation at Sinai.

In the divided animals, we can see the parted waters of the red sea.

The sight of the smoking oven evokes the pain, violence, and vulnerability of exile; while the glowing torch recalls the torches used to signal the arrival of the new moon in the land of Israel – thus signifying the triumphal ethos of return.

In other words, in the image of the covenant of the parts, we see all the thick history of the Jewish people—a history which is, like the image itself, sometimes difficult to confront, to make sense of, to make peace with.

Nevertheless, it is ours, undeniably and eternally since that dark night so many centuries ago when our forefather, hands red and brow wet, made a covenant with God under a sky full of stars.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.