Ask someone why they don’t light candles on Friday night, and they will rarely tell you they think the practice is wrong. More often, the answer sounds something like this: I’m not really religious. I’ve never recited the blessing. I’d feel like a fraud. In 1978, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes labeled that last feeling the “impostor phenomenon” – the fear that sooner or later, someone will discover that you never really belonged.
Lech Lecha, this week’s parsha, opens with a man who had every reason to feel like an impostor. God tells Abram, later Abraham, to leave his land “for the land that I will show you.” The Torah gives no reason that he was chosen. Nor does it give him a religious pedigree: the book of Joshua recalls that his father Terach worshipped idols.
In fact, Bereshit Rabbah, an early collection of rabbinic interpretations, pictures Abram worrying that he still bears the guilt of his own years of idol worship. God reassures him with a line from Psalms: “Yours is the dew of your youth” (110:3). Just as dew is heavy at dawn and disappears by mid-morning, so too will the burden of Abram’s past be lifted.
But being freed from the past did not mean that Abram suddenly felt secure about the future. Later, God tells him, “Walk before Me,” while the Torah had earlier said that Noah walked with God. The Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew of sixteenth-century Prague, sees a difference between the two. Noah walks with God beside God; Abram is asked to move forward without that same sense of reassurance. As the first Jew, he has to take the next step before he is sure he is ready for it.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reads the same contrast from another direction. “God signals the way,” he wrote, “then challenges His children to walk on ahead.” For Rabbi Sacks, this is how a parent loves: “To be a parent in Judaism is to make space within which a child can grow.” God is teaching Abram how to act on his own. His confidence will follow later.
That makes Abram’s experience much closer to the feeling we now call impostor syndrome. Sometimes feeling unqualified does not mean that you are in the wrong place. It means that you have entered a place in which no one else can take the step for you.
Nobody lighting candles for the first time knows the full road ahead, and Abram did not either. Somewhere this Friday, a little before sunset, someone will strike a match, read the blessing, and feel faintly ridiculous. That feeling does not mean they do not belong. Sometimes it is simply what starting out looks like.
Rabbi Matt Marks is Executive Head of Tribe UK, the youth arm of the United Synagogue, and a PhD researcher specialising in the thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. He lives in Brighton & Hove with his wife and their four daughters, where he also serves as a Strategic Adviser for Jewish Life and works with the UK Jewish Chaplaincy team.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
