Avraham and Sarah - The Original Soulmates
This week's Torah portion begins with Gd's call to Avraham: Lech Lecha — go forward, for your own sake — from Charan in northern Syria to an unknown land due south. It is the beginning of everything. But before we can understand what Avraham was called to, we have to ask a question that haunted the Sages, the commentators, and Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: why Avraham at all?
The Torah is usually generous with its reasoning. We know why Gd chose Noah: "Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation." We understand why Gd chose Moshe — we see him as a young man, unable to stand idly by when he witnesses injustice. But the Torah gives us nothing of the kind for Avraham. He simply receives the call, and goes.
To fill this gap, Rabbi Sacks points to a Midrash built on a striking image: a traveler who comes upon a palace engulfed in flames. He wonders — can it be that a palace this magnificent has no owner? And at that moment, the owner looks out from a window and says: I am the owner of the palace. So too, the Midrash tells us, Avraham looked at the world and could not reconcile its beauty with the chaos and cruelty within it. Gd responded: I am here — and I need your help to put out the flames.
That is who Avraham is. Not merely a philosopher or an iconoclast, but someone who saw Gd's world burning and felt compelled to act. Gd gave humans free will, which meant Gd could not simply intervene — but Gd could find a partner willing to do the hard work of repair. Avraham was that partner. He was Humanity 3.0, chosen to perform a literal Tikkun Olam: to identify the flames and, one by one, extinguish them.
And so the question becomes: which flames? Where do we first see Avraham beginning the work of repair?
The answer, I want to suggest, is hiding in plain sight — in the most troubling episode of this week's parsha: the journey to Egypt.
But before we get there, we need to understand what the world looked like before Avraham arrived. Since the very beginning, one of the most persistent flames burning in the palace had been the relationship between Man and Woman.
When humans were first created, the Torah tells us Gd fashioned them in the divine likeness — tzelem Elohim — creating both male and female. Some read this as a single being, male and female in one. Either way, the language implies that Man and Woman were conceived as equals, both bearing the image of Gd.
The second account of creation tells a different story. Woman is formed from Man's rib, and Man names her — Isha, because from Man this was taken. In the act of naming, Man begins to exert authority over Woman. The inequality is then further entrenched in the aftermath of the sin of the Etz HaDaat, when Woman is told: "And to your Man you will cling, and he will control you."
By the time we reach the first eleven chapters of Bereishit, the relationship between husband and wife has hardened into a legal and social reality captured in a single word. The term used for marriage throughout these chapters derives from the root לקח — to take. Marriage was not a partnership. It was an act performed on a woman by a man. She was moved, transferred, acquired. She lacked autonomy in any meaningful sense.
And then, just before the call to Lech Lecha, the Torah uses this very language to describe Avraham's own marriage:
וַיִּקַּח אַבְרָם אֶת־שָׂרַי אִשְׁתּוֹ — and Avram took his wife Sarai.
When Avraham and Sarah set out for Canaan, and from there toward Egypt, this is the status of their relationship. Sarah is not a partner on the journey. She is luggage — taken along, to be acted upon, her decisions made for her.
When famine drives them toward Egypt, Avraham realizes a problem. Sarah is beautiful, and the Egyptians will want her. They will inquire about her availability, conclude that her husband is an obstacle, and remove the obstacle. So Avraham turns to Sarah with a request:
אִמְרִי־נָא אֲחֹתִי אָתְּ לְמַעַן יִיטַב־לִי בַעֲבוּרֵךְ וְחָיְתָה נַפְשִׁי בִּגְלָלֵךְ
Say, please, that you are my sister, so that they will do good to me for you, and my nefesh will live because of you.
The commentators are troubled by this on multiple levels. How could Avraham knowingly expose Sarah to this danger? How could Humanity 3.0 — the man tasked with repairing the world — be the instrument through which Pharaoh nearly commits adultery, one of the very sins that caused the world to need repairing in the first place?
But the question that interests us most is the one that gets the least attention: why does Avraham first mention yitav li — that they will do good to him, which clearly refers to material gain — and only then mention fearing for his life? That is a strange ordering of priorities. When a man fears for his life, why is his first thought financial profit?
Unless it isn't.
The key is the word nefesh. Every translation I am aware of renders it here as soul or life — Avraham is saying that Sarah will save his life. But just a few verses earlier, the Torah uses the exact same word in a very different context. When Avraham departs Charan for Canaan, he takes his rechush (possessions) and
וְאֶת־הַנֶּפֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר־עָשׂוּ בְחָרָן — the nefesh that they had made in Charan.
There, the commentators unanimously explain that nefesh refers to the followers or slaves that Avraham and Sarah had accumulated — not souls in the existential sense, but dependents, a household, a community.
The same word, in the same story, a few verses apart. This is not coincidence. The Torah's literary economy is precise: when a word appears twice in close proximity, the second appearance is meant to be read through the first. So when Avraham says וְחָיְתָה נַפְשִׁי בִּגְלָלֵךְ, he is not saying my soul will survive because of you. He is saying: my nefesh — my household, my followers, everything I have built — will be yours, because of you.
Read this way, Avraham is not pleading. He is negotiating. In exchange for Sarah's cooperation — for her agreeing to take a risk that is genuinely hers to take or refuse — Avraham is offering her something: full and equal ownership of his rechush and his nefesh. Everything that was his would now be theirs. The Lech Lecha — the journey undertaken for Avraham's sake — would become, from this moment, a Lech Lechem: a journey undertaken for both of them together.
This is why the ordering makes sense. Avraham first mentions yitav li — material benefit — because that is what is on the table. He is making her an offer. And then he seals it: and my nefesh will live — thrive — because of you. It is not a threat or a plea. It is a partnership.
Sarah never speaks during the Egypt episode. She is acted upon at every turn — taken to Pharaoh's palace, then returned. The reader might see this as further evidence of her powerlessness. But there is another way to read her silence: she agreed to the deal. She went along. And by the time the couple emerged from Egypt, something had fundamentally changed.
The Torah does not say, as they leave, that Avraham took Sarah back to Canaan. The language of לקח — which had defined their relationship from the beginning — simply disappears. Instead, the Torah says: וַיַּעַל אַבְרָם מִמִּצְרַיִם הוּא וְאִשְׁתּוֹ — Avraham went up from Egypt, he and his wife. Not he took his wife. He went up, and she went with him. She is no longer the object of his journey. She is his companion on it.
The לקח is gone and it never comes back — not for this couple. From this moment forward, Sarah has agency. She cannot be taken. She can only choose to go.
This, I want to argue, is one of the flames Avraham was sent to extinguish.
Recall the midrash. The world is a palace on fire. Gd built it with the intention that Man and Woman would be equal — both bearing the tzelem Elohim, both partners in the project of creation. But the flames of human failure had reduced Woman to an object, something to be named, controlled, acquired with the word לקח. The broken relationship between husband and wife was one of the original fires burning in the palace.
In the journey to Egypt, Avraham recognized this — and made a deal. He treated Sarah not as luggage but as a counterparty, someone with something to offer and something to gain, someone whose participation in their shared project had to be negotiated rather than commanded. The deal transformed her from property to partner.
It is no accident that this is precisely the moment the Torah's language shifts. The disappearance of לקח is not incidental. It is the Torah's way of marking what happened: a tikkun in the most fundamental human relationship. Avraham and Sarah became, in the truest sense, the model for what Gd intended from the beginning — two people, each bearing the divine image, walking forward together.
Humanity 3.0 had begun to do its work. The palace, in this one corner, was a little less in flames.
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