Day Thirty Two

Psalm 105

7 For he is the Lord our God:
and his judgements are in all the earth.

8 He has remembered his covenant for ever:
the word that he ordained for a thousand generations.

9 The covenant that he made with Abraham:
the oath that he swore to Isaac. 10 And confirmed it to Jacob as a statute:
to Israel as an everlasting covenant.

From Zornberg (Beginning of Desire p76) a comment on an earlier part of the text in Genesis, but looking forward to a "new kind of nation":

"Sarai was barren" — the barrenness of Sarai evokes the other meaning of the word akara: the couple is uprooted, the ground cut from under their feet. Voluntarily, they respond to a call to alienation from all that gives self placement in the world. By removing themselves from the normal conditions of fruitfulness, they — at least on the face of things — cut off vital sources of nourishment, doom themselves to a sterile nomadic existence, in which no organic fibers of connection and fertility can grow.
That is why, according to Rashi (12:1), the blessings that follow immediately on the call of lekh lekha are so necessary and so paradoxical. The divine command thrusts Abram and Sarai into the eye of the storm, takes the problem of akarut (barrenness) and has them act out all the meanings of deracination, of disconnection from a succession of pasts.

An act of radical discontinuity is, it seems, depicted in the Torah as the essential basis for all continuity: for that act of birth that will engender the body and soul of a new kind of nation. …