When Abraham is told “Lech lecha”,לך-לך “go for yourself”ת and to leave Ur of the Chaldeans, this is not only a geographical departure.

It is also a movement of consciousness. Ur is a city of fire: kilns, bricks, furnaces, crafted light ma’orei esh, מאורי אש light that is produced, controlled, and sustained by human making.

Fire gives light, but it also consumes. It needs fuel. It depends on constant effort. Abraham is asked to step away from that world, from light that is manufactured, and to walk toward something else: ma’orei or מאורי אור. Not light that is made, but light that is. Light as a given condition of being, not as a product.

This is why the call is toward the El Chai אל-חי the Living God. Not a god of fire and force, not a manufactured God of the process in space and time, a god which is a product, or object, but a presence that does not burn, does not demand fuel, does not consume what it illuminates.

Abraham’s journey, then, is a quiet but radical shift: from produced light to revealed light, from heat to clarity, from mastery to listening. He does not carry fire with him.He learns how to walk by light that is already there.
_