The language is striking. Abram and Sarai were childless. Yet among their retinue were “the souls they had formed in Haran”.
Who were these souls?
For Resh Lakish, the talmudic sage, the implication is profound. Abram and Sarai were teachers: “Anyone who teaches Torah to the child of another,” he says, “the verse ascribes them credit as though they formed that student” (Sanhedrin 99b).
Teachers do not merely impart information: they help form people. Pupils instinctively know this. Ask children their favourite subject and they will often answer by naming their favourite teacher. As David Brooks memorably put it: “people learn from people they love.”
Much modern education understandably focuses on acquiring knowledge: learning facts and gaining understanding about a subject.
Yet Torah suggests that knowledge is also relational. Adam “knew” Eve his wife (Genesis 4:1). Hashem says of King Josiah: “He judged the cause of the poor and needy… is not this to know Me?” (Jeremiah 22:16). To know God is not merely to possess correct propositions about Him, but to live in relationship with Him.
Even chinuch, the Hebrew word for education, points towards formation. Later in Lech Lecha, Abram mobilises his chanichav (Genesis 14:14). Rashi explains the root as initiating a person into the path in which they are intended to remain. The Piaseczner Rebbe develops this further: education means drawing out a child’s hidden capacities, bringing what exists in potential into actuality. Quite simply, education helps a person become the best version of themselves.
Similarly, Martin Buber understood education as a fundamentally human encounter: the teacher attends not simply to what a pupil knows, but to the person the pupil is becoming.
George Steiner, too, explored the almost mysterious power of the teacher-pupil relationship: knowledge passes not merely through books or ideas, but through the personality, example and presence of another human being. Education is therefore never entirely impersonal; who teaches can matter almost as much as what is taught.
This matters more than ever in the age of AI. Machines can increasingly surpass us in accessing and transmitting information. But they cannot replace human relationships characterised by care, dedication and personal motivation.
Abram and Sarai remind us that the greatest teachers do not merely fill minds. They help form human beings.
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