The Covenant Between the Parts
When Avraham Avinu was fifty-five years old, he left his homeland and ascended to the Land of Israel. Avraham settled in the Land and immediately began his sacred work: “to know, to make known, and to bring others to know that He is E-l; He is the Maker, He is the Creator.”
Fifteen years later, when Avraham was seventy years old, the wondrous event known as the Covenant Between the Parts took place.
The sun began to incline toward the west, and Avraham Avinu, the greatest of the giants, merited to experience the “sleep of prophecy”—that exalted and wondrous state in which the physical body, for a moment, ceases to serve as a barrier between man and visions of G-dliness.
In that awesome vision, Avraham Avinu was shown all that the Jewish people would endure at the hands of the nations: thousands of years of persecution, killing, cruelty, and wickedness. Who could possibly describe the weight of Jewish suffering, or capture in words the cry, “He has made me desolate and faint all day long” (Eichah 1:13)?
The Torah describes these exiles in the words, “And behold, dread, darkness, great, fell upon him” (Bereishit 15:12). These words allude to the four exiles, as the Midrash teaches (Bereishit Rabbah 44:17): “Dread” refers to the Babylonian exile. “ darkness” refers to the Median exile. “Great” refers to the Greek exile. “ fell upon him” refers to the Edomite exile.
After showing Avraham Avinu the four exiles, the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed to him: ‘Know with certainty that your descendants will be strangers in a land not theirs, and they will enslave them and afflict them for four hundred years. But also the nation that they will serve, I will judge, and afterward they will go out with great wealth” (Bereishit 15:13–14).
The Holy One, blessed be He, was telling Avraham: Know that your children will be in a foreign land, stripped of all rights, without any respected status, despised in the eyes of all. In addition to all this, they will be turned into slaves, and throughout their enslavement their oppressors will try to break their spirit of life through suffering and crushing labor.
The Covenant Between the Parts ended, and Avraham Avinu returned to Charan, but his soul and spirit burned with intense longing to return and dwell once again in the Land of Israel, the place about which it is said, “The eyes of the L-rd your G-d are upon it, from the beginning of the year until the end of the year” (Devarim 11:12).
With great longing of the soul, he cried out to Hashem, “If only I had wings like a dove; I would fly away and dwell” (Tehillim 55:7).5
While in Charan, Avraham’s power and esteem grew stronger and stronger, until he became king-like.
Wellsprings of Wisdom
5. The Shelah HaKadosh writes in Sha'ar HaOtiyot (letter kuf, Kedushah 23), based on the Midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 39:8), that the Holy One, blessed be He, first told Avraham Avinu to go to the Land of Israel, see it, and then return. After Avraham returned, he was not given permission to go back for five years. During those years, he longed intensely to return, and it was then that he said, “If only I had wings like a dove; I would fly away and dwell” (Tehillim 55:7). Before Avraham had entered the Land, he did not yet feel this longing. But once he had seen, through prophecy, the precious beauty of its holiness, his soul yearned to return. From Avraham we learn for all generations to long for the Land of Israel, even when life there involves hardship, and to cherish its holiness with joy.
