When two Jews get together who have never met before, they generally compare notes. They go through a process we often call “Jewish Geography” which involves finding out where a person is from, what schools they attended, and who they have ever come in contact with. And, undoubtedly, they are linked through friendship or family groups.
With some sixteen million people who classify themselves as Jews worldwide, and six and a half million in the US, we are just a drop of in the bucket of the estimated seven billion humans alive today, therefore we are all in some way mishpacha, family.
This is the message of this week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, which officially begins the journey of Abraham and Sarah, or as they are known in the portion Avram and Sarai. Lately, I have been reading the book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by geneticist Adam Rutherford. In it he announces, “something in the order of 107 billion modern humans existed, though the number depends on when you start counting. All of them – of us- are close cousins, because our species has a single African origin.”
Rutherford suggests that all of our geographic origins – race, nationality, and ethnicity – are meaningless, as our species has always been wanderers. So the Torah’s suggestion that the small clan of Abraham and Sarah would create multitudes is borne out by scientific evidence. Rutherford writes, “we only have to go back a few dozen centuries to see that most of the 7 billion of us alive today are descended from a tiny handful of people, the population of a village.”
No need to play Jewish Geography to find evidence of this. We should all just consider ourselves relatives from the very beginning, and maybe, just maybe we would treat one another with a little more respect.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex