Judaism: Parsha Vayeira Genesis 18:1-22:24

From Patheos:

Parsha Vayeira Genesis 18:1 – 22:24


October 22, 2010
By Talia Davis



The parsha (weekly Torah portion) for this week is Vayeira. Vayeira means “and He appeared,” and it is the first distinctive word in the portion. Be sure to check out the video at the end of this article!



This week’s parsha comes on the heels of a very big event. Last week, we left off with Avraham being circumcised along with his son and all the men of his group. This parsha picks up three days after the circumcision. Now, I wouldn’t know about this, being a girl and all, but according to what I have heard, the pain on the third day after the circumcision is the worst. Three men/angels came to his home. Avraham was known for his hospitality and ability to give love. He ran out to greet his guests, offered to bathe their feet (which was a common welcoming custom at the time) and give them food. Abe ran to Sarah to get her to prepare the bread while he prepared a calf to eat along with some cream. While they ate, the angels asked after Sarah and here they delivered a big prophesy. Here they tell Abe that he and Sarah will have a son in the next year. Sarah laughs. She is 90 years old at this point. How can she give birth to a child? G-d admonished Sarah for laughing in doubt. Why? Because G-d is G-d and G-d can make anything happen. So the men get up and start to head out to their next location . . . Sodom, where Abe’s nephew, Lot, lived.



Here we have an unusual passage. Chapter 18, verse 17 says: “And G-d said, ‘Should I conceal from Avraham what I am doing?’ Why would G-d ask this question? G-d is all knowing and if we believe that G-d is infinite, how can we believe that G-d questions G-d’s actions? Rather than G-d questioning G-dself, G-d is letting us know that since he gave all this land to Abe, he deserves to know what is going on. So G-d tells Avraham that since G-d has heard the cries from Sodom, Gemora, and three other cities, G-d is now going to “descend and see.” [Again, why should an almighty G-d need to “descend” to see what is going on? Rashi, a sage who gave us a great commentary on the Torah, tells us that it is, in fact, a direction to judges. You cannot rule on a capital punishment case without seeing/investigating for yourself.] So the men who were visiting Abe (minus one) went to Sodom and Abe stood there with G-d.



Avraham asks G-d, “Look, you can’t really destroy the good with the bad, can you? What if there are fifty righteous men to be found? Can you save it for fifty?” Why fifty? Because there were five cities and Avraham was asking for ten men from each city. [Why ten? Prior to Avraham, the world had been destroyed by a mabul (a flood) because there were no righteous men, only Noah and his family. That is eight people (Noah + wife + three sons + wives =eight) plus G-d equals nine righteous entities in the world. If G-d destroyed the world with nine righteous souls, wouldn’t at least one more make the world worth saving? So Abe asks for ten from each town.] But there weren’t fifty. So Abe thinks, what if there were only nine per city, so forty-five total? Couldn’t G-d make the tenth and save them? G-d agrees. Then what about forty (meaning four cities saved and one not)? G-d agrees. Then what about thirty (meaning three cities saved)? G-d agrees. Then what about twenty (meaning two cities saved)? G-d agrees. What about ten righteous people, G-d? Will you leave one city intact? G-d agrees. Mind you, Avraham wasn’t just bargaining himself down; in between each step they looked and could not find enough righteous people. Abe lands at ten people and as we pointed out before, Abe wouldn’t go below ten because he knew that G-d had already destroyed the world in the Generation of the Flood. Finally there wasn’t any more to be done and G-d and Abe parted.



Chapter 19 opens with two angels coming to Sodom. [Think back to the beginning. How many men/angels came to Avraham? Three. Where did we lose one on the way? Well, Rashi teaches us that every angel has only one specific mission. They aren’t big on multitasking; so one angel had completed his mission when he told Sarah that she was going to have Isaac. One was supposed to destroy Sodom and the other four cities, and the other gets Lot and his family to safety.] So these two guys show up and Lot sees them. He knows where he lives and what these people are like. He invites them in, offers to wash their feet and encourages them to stay with him but they refuse. Lot, again knowing his neighbors, urges them to stay with him and eat. The men accept. They ate and drank and enjoyed themselves . . . until the neighbors come a-knocking. They surround Lot’s house and demand that he send out the newcomers so they can have a little fun with them. They specifically say that they want to be intimate with them. Lot, thinking he can put them off the guests, begs that they leave them alone but in their place offers his . . . ready for this? Virgin daughters. Yes and yikes. They push Lot up against the door but the men/angels grab him and bring him in the house then the people who had gathered were struck with blindness that kept them from attacking the house.


The men say to Lot, look . . . get your family, even your married daughters and sons-in-law and get out of here! Lot went to his two married daughters and their husbands and tried to convince them to leave with him but he was laughed out of their homes by the sons-in-law. The men/angels tell him to cut his losses and get out with his wife and two unmarried daughters. He hemmed and hawed and finally the men pushed them out. The men told Lot’s family to get out and run to the mountain and don’t look back. Lot begged. He wanted to go to another city rather than the mountains. He negotiated with the angels and they finally settled on the city named Zoar. Then G-d destroyed the cities in a big show of fire and smoke. With all the confusion, Lot’s wife looked behind her and she immediately turned into a pillar of salt. [Why was this such a transgression? Well, when do we look back? When we are longing for something or missing something. And why should Lot’s wife pine for this horrible place or their horrible ways? And why salt? Well, one of the midrasha’s teach us that she sinned with salt when the men came to her house by refusing to give them any and criticizing her husband’s hospitality to these guests.]




So all this destruction freaked Lot out and he remembered that the angels were there to tell him to go to the mountain, so in his fear, he fled the city. He took his two daughters and fled to the mountains. While in the mountains, it seemed that the whole world had been destroyed. Lot’s two daughters were concerned. If the world has been destroyed, how will we repopulate? So they decided to -- okay folks, brace yourselves for this part -- get their father drunk and sleep with him. They both got pregnant with sons. The elder daughter named her son Moab and he is the father of the Moabite tribe. The name Moab literally means “seed of my father.” [Well, I suppose you can’t get more literal than that. The Moabites were then forever cast as the bad guys in our stories. Her transgression was great and the Moabites are pushed away from G-d. Moabite men cannot convert to Judaism; however, the women can and from these people we get one of our heroines, Ruth who is directly related to King David.] The younger daughter gives birth to a son named Ben-Ami, which means son of the people. Ben-Ami is the father of the Ammonites. And that is the end of Chapter 19.



Now we switch back to Avraham and Sarah’s story line. For those of you playing the home game, when last we heard from Abe and Sarah the angels had just delivered the news that Sarah will be delivering a much-awaited son. Avraham and Sarah head out on another trip and here again, as with Egypt in the last parsha, Abe calls Sarah his sister for fear of his life. One would have thought he learned his lesson from the last time. So Avimelech, the King of Gerar, took her but G-d came to him in his dreams and warned him that she was actually married. And yet again Avraham gets in trouble by the king, however we learn that Sarah was actually his half-sister or more likely, half-niece. [How is this so? Rashi brings down that grandchildren are like children and Abe and Sarah’s mother had the same father but not mother. Was that confusing enough for you? Let’s just say it’s a bit too close for our modern comfort.] So Avimelech and Avraham find a nice settlement where Avimelech gives him a bunch of land and animals and maids, etc., and they lived peacefully together for a while. Abe prays to G-d and helps out the Avi and his crew because they were barren as well. As it turns out, if you mess with someone as holy as the mother of the Jewish people, you might be made barren too.



In chapter 21, Sarah gives birth to a son, just like G-d promised them and they named him Yitzhak (Isaac). At eight days old, he is circumcised. [Why is this detail important? Because this is the first Jew to be born into the covenant with G-d. Prior to this it wasn’t a birthright and now Avraham made a covenant with G-d and a new nation would spring up.] Yitzhak is eight days old and Avraham is 100 years old. They made a big party and feast and celebrated this amazing event, but Sarah noticed Hagar, the servant, “making merry.” The Hebrew here isn’t exact. This could mean practicing idolatry, some form of illicit sexual relations, or encouraging the boys to get up and fight each other to the death. I know . . . those are very different options, but that is the beauty of Hebrew.

Needless to say, Sarah was furious and protective of this long-awaited child. She told Avraham that this woman and her son must go. G-d enforces this by telling Abe that he should listen to whatever Sarah tells him. I am not making this up, guys, G-d said, “Listen to your wife.” So the next morning Avraham got up and gave Hagar some food and water and sent them on their way. She was heading back home to Egypt but ran out of water so she put her son under a bush (mind you, he is at least 14 years old at this point) and walks away to cry and not watch him die. But G-d heard Ishmael cry and spoke to Hagar reassuring her that from his line would come a great nation (Islam). With that, they found some water and headed to Egypt and Ishmael married an Egyptian woman.




Avraham’s and Avimelech’s servants were having a dispute over a well and Avimelech decided his servants were in the wrong, but to ensure that there would never be a dispute again, Avraham “paid” Avimelech in seven lambs. From that point on the area is known as Beer Sheva (you can still visit it today), which means the Well of Seven. And now, as we pull into the end of our parsha, we hit one of the most famous moments in biblical history. In Hebrew it is called the Akeida, the Binding of Isaac -- chapter 22.



So some time has passed and G-d sends Abe a tweet or a text message and Abe’s immediate response is “Here I am,” not dodging the call. G-d tells Avraham to take his son (which one?), your only one (well, I have one with each woman . . .), whom you love (ahhh! The son of my beloved, Isaac), and take him up to the mountains for a burnt offering. Avraham doesn’t respond, but the next day he wakes up, packs a bag, gathers some wood, grabs two servants and his son, and heads out. They reach the location G-d designated and Avraham tells the servants to stay with the donkeys while he goes up the mountain with his son and this big knife and some wood.



About halfway up the mountain, Isaac starts to get curious. We have the wood, the knife, and the fire, but where is the offering? “G-d will provide, son.” They get to the top and start to prepare the altar and then Avraham ties up his beloved son and starts the process to slaughter him. But an angel calls out to him twice, “Avraham, Avraham” (nothing in the Torah is an accident, this is an expression of affection), and tells him not to sacrifice his son. Rather, G-d knows he wouldn’t withhold the thing he loves most in this world from G-d and so right in front of him there is a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. Avraham goes about sacrificing the ram and not his son. Because of this act of faith and trust, G-d will multiple Avraham’s descendants and be blessed. The parsha ends with a bit of genealogy until we reach our next big character, Rivka (Rebecca).



My father has a theory about the Akeida. When you invite someone out to dinner, you aren’t intending to eat this person, correct? You are inviting them to come with you. Perhaps Avraham misinterpreted G-d’s request; perhaps G-d just wanted Abe to familiarize Yitzhak with the process. This, however, isn’t a popular opinion within more orthodox circles. The Rosh Yeshiva of the Mayanot Women’s Seminary gave over this -- “Avraham’s final test is to go against his nature. He was about love for G-d, his family, and man. The true test for any human being is when the right thing goes against our normal pattern. Could we really get out of our box and go beyond ourselves to do the right thing. Or do we always find the right thing that is coherent with our comfort zone.” -- Rabbi Meir Levinger



Avraham Avineu (Abraham our father) is recognized for his intense Chesed, loving-kindness. He is characterized by this trait. He did incredible outreach and spread love all over the place. Not only that, but this child was so desperately wanted and loved. How could G-d ask such a thing? Because G-d knew it would go completely against his nature and the only way to reveal a person’s true self is to jump outside the box.