Leaders lead. That doesn't mean to say that they don't follow, but what they follow is different from what most people follow.

They don't conform for the sake of conforming. They don't do what others do, merely because others are doing it.

They follow an inner voice, a call. They have a vision not of what is, but

of what might be. They think, outside the box. They march to a different tune. Never was this

more dramatically signaled. Then in the first words of God to Abraham the words that set Jewish

history in motion, Lachlachach, me adzachach, me moladitch, and be saviah,

leave your land, your birthplace, and your father's house,

and go to the land that I will show you.

Why? Because people do conform.

They adopt the standards and absorb the culture of the time

and place in which they live.

That's what the terror means by talking about your land.

At a deeper level, they're influenced by friends and neighbors, your birthplace.

More deeply still, they're shaped by their parents and the family in which they grew up your father's house.

I want you, says God to Abraham, to be different.

Not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of starting something new,

a religion that won't worship power and the symbols of power, for that's what idols really

were and are.

I want you, said God to, in his words, teach your children and your household afterward, to

follow the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right.

To be a Jew is to be willing to challenge the prevailing consensus.

When, as so often happens, nations slip into worshipping the old

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