The Ben Ish Chai comments on this week’s parshah that the reason that Hashem changes Avram’s name to Avraham is because everything Hashem does is for the best. If you take the letters of the Avos – Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov – it totals 13 letters. If you take all four Imahos – Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, and Leah – it also comes out to 13 letters. Thirteen plus 13 equal 26 – the numerical equivalent of Hashem’s name. Now we understand one of the reasons why Hashem added the letter hei: Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to have this calculation.
We know Hashem tells Avram to leave Ur Kasdim as a test. There is another test that wasn’t written in the Torah. Avram smashed all the idols and, as a result, he was thrown into the fire. The question is: Why isn’t this incident mentioned in the Torah? We can see from here that being thrown into fire isn’t something that happens every day, but something that we all can do, like helping, is something we can endeavor to do every day. My rebbe, Rabbi Aharon Walkin zt”l, used to always say: “Big people are made out of small actions.” This is something that we learn from Avraham in this parshah.
Daf Yomi is an opportunity started by Rav Meir Shapiro zt”l that has a bunch of small actions and, together after seven years, the whole Shas is completed.
By R' Yaniv Meirov