Vayera (18:1 - 22:24)

And (God) Appeared (To Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob)

* Abraham welcomes three visitors, who announce that Sarah will soon have a son. (18:1-15)

* Abraham argues with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. (18:16-33)

* Lot's home is attacked by the people of Sodom. Lot and his two daughters escape as the cities are being destroyed. Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt. (19:1-29)

* Lot impregnates his daughters, and they bear children who become the founders of the nations Moab and Ammon. (19:30-38)

* Abimelech, king of Gerar, takes Sarah as his wife after Abraham claims that she is his sister. (20:1-18)

* Isaac is born, circumcised, and weaned. Hagar and her son, Ishmael, are sent away; an angel saves their lives. (21:1-21)

* God tests Abraham, instructing him to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. (22:1-19)

LSJS Gila Sacks

Story of failure of responsibility

Adam/Eve - Failure of PERSONAL responsibility

Cain - Failure of MORAL responsibility

Babel - Failure of ONTOLOGIC responsibility

Failure of COLLECTIVE responsibility (Noah)

Ontologic failure as explained by Rabbi Sacks -

This story seems to have little to do with responsibility, and to be focusing on a different issue than do the first three. However, not accidentally does the word responsibility suggest response-ability. The Hebrew equivalent, achrayut, comes from the word aĥer, meaning “an other.” Responsibility is always a response to something or someone. In Judaism, it means response to the command of God. By attempting to reach heaven, the builders of Babel were in effect saying: we are going to take the place of God. We are not going to respond to His law or respect His boundaries, not going to accept His Otherness. We are going to create an environment where we rule, not Him, where the Other is replaced by Self. Babel is the failure of ontological responsibility – the idea that something beyond us makes a call on us.

Gila Sacks

Jacob Blessing - Seeing the distinctiveness of each child thus enabling their reconciliation and therefore able to bury their father, come together and form a nation.Bereshit is about families, that is where we learn how to handle conflict, relate to others

Thick and Thin Morality

Why is Abraham chosen?

"I know him in order that he will"

He is chosen on what he will become. Jews are chosen because of that they will do.

“This is the second tale that promises the birth of Isaac and tells why he will be named Yitzhak, “laughter”. In the first, Abraham laughed to himself and Adonai knew it. In this one, Sarah laughed inside and Adonai knew it.”

“Paley’s comments can shed powerful light on what Abraham does when he seemingly walks away from God and toward his guests. Abraham is not postponing the theological at all; rather he is fulfilling it in all its depths. Walking toward one’s guests is walking toward God, and in that sense Abraham goes from one form of greeting God to another. As Paley himself writes, “Being careful with and attentive to the honor of your fellow is the acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of heaven.”64

We are obligated to treat other human beings not just with the honor and respect due to human kings, Paley argues, but with the honor and respect due to the ultimate king, to God. In loving his neighbors, Abraham is not delaying loving God; rather he is loving God at that very moment and in that very action.”

“God wants Abraham to train his descendants to do what is just and right, but Abraham cannot teach what he himself has not yet learned. Abraham needs to learn how to stand up for justice and how to plead for mercy, so God places him in a situation in which he can do just that. Subtly the text communicates a powerful lesson, one that is learned all too slowly, if at all, by those of us blessed with children: We cannot teach our children values that we ourselves do not embody. If Abraham is to father a people who will stand up for what is good and just, he will first have to do so himself.”

“R. David Hartman (1931–2013) finds in Genesis 18 a key to Jewish theology as a whole. “The God of nature,” he writes, “acts alone. The God of covenantal history, however, acts in a relational context. . . . Abraham represents the shift from God the solitary Creator of Nature to God the self-limiting covenantal Lord of history. Abraham is not simply an instrument of the omnipotent Master of Nature; he stands over and against God as an other; his importance as a historical figure is marked by divine self-limitation.”

Excerpt From

The Heart of Torah, Volume 1

Shai Held

“God appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men were standing over against him; and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent entrance, and bowed down to the earth… (18:1–2)

Thus Parashat Vayera opens with one of the most famous scenes in the Bible: Abraham’s meeting with the three enigmatic strangers. The text calls them men. We later discover that they were in fact angels, each with a specific mission.

The chapter at first glance seems simple, almost fable-like. It is, however, complex qand ambiguous. It consists of three sections:

Verse 1: God appears to Abraham.

Verses 2–16: Abraham meets the men/angels.

Verses 17–33: The dialogue between God and Abraham about the fate of Sodom.”

“One cannot worship impersonal forces and remain a person; compassionate, humane, generous, forgiving. Precisely because we believe that God is personal, someone to whom we can say “You,” we honour human dignity as sacrosanct.

Abraham, father of monotheism, knew the paradoxical truth that to live the life of faith is to see the trace of God in the face of the stranger. It is easy to receive the Divine Presence when God appears as God. What is difficult is to sense the Divine Presence when it comes disguised as three anonymous passers-by. That was Abraham’s greatness. He knew that serving God and offering hospitality to strangers were not two things but one.

In one of the most beautiful comments on this episode, Rabbi Shalom of Belz notes that in verse 2, the visitors are spoken of as standing above Abraham (nitzavim alav), while in verse 8, Abraham is described as standing above them (omed aleihem). At first, the visitors were higher than Abraham because they were angels and he a mere human being. But when he gave them food and drink and shelter, he stood even higher than the angels.5”

“Yet how can this be? How can finite, fallible human beings challenge God Himself, and this, not in opposition to faith, but as part of the life of faith itself? For it is notable that it is not heretics, skeptics or atheists who raise these questions, but heroes of the spirit. How, in our parasha, can Abraham, who describes himself as mere “dust and ashes,” confront “the Judge of all the earth,” challenging God’s verdict on the people of Sodom?”

“The fundamental principle of the Torah is that God rules by right, not might. That in itself was enough to separate Judaism from every other faith in the ancient world. God is not merely powerful but ethical, and it is precisely the pursuit of the ethical that brings God and humanity together in a covenant based on righteousness and justice.”

“Again there is a threefold emphasis in the way the text speaks about those involved. They were: (1) all the men, (2) from every part of the city, (3) both young and old. The Torah is telling us that there were not “fifty” or “ten” innocent people in the town – the numbers cited by Abraham and agreed to by God. There was not even one.”

“That is what God wants of Abraham: to be the defence attorney for the people of Sodom; to argue their case; to be the voice of the other side. And that is precisely what Abraham does. If God invites His own verdict to be challenged in this way, how much more so does He expect the verdict of a human court to be challenged.

Justice is a process, not just a product. It is not enough for the court to be right. It must hear both sides of the argument. Ultimately, this is what the book of Job is about. Job does not insist on being found innocent. But he does insist on being heard.”

“God needs humanity to become His partner in the administration of justice. He needs to hear a dissenting voice. No judge, however omniscient and infallible, can execute justice in the absence of counterargument.”

“Torah does not have a word for ambivalence – the nearest is Elijah’s question to the Baal-worshipping Israelites: “How long will you waver between two opinions?” (I Kings 18:1). It does, however, have a tune for it. This is the rare note known as the shalshelet.

The shalshelet is an unusual note, going up and down, up and down, as if unable to move forward to the next note. The sixteenth-century commentator Rabbi Joseph ibn Caspi1 best defined what it was meant to convey: namely, a psychological state of uncertainty and indecision. The graphic notation of the shalshelet itself looks like a streak of lightning, a “zigzag movement” (tenua me’uvetet), a mark that goes repeatedly backwards and forwards. It conveys frozen motion – what Hamlet called “the native hue of resolution sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought”2 – in which the agent is torn by inner conflict. The shalshelet is the music of ambivalence.”

“Which brings us to Parashat Vayera, the first appearance of the shalshelet in the Torah. Here the conflict is explicit. Two of the angels who had visited Abraham now come to Lot in Sodom. They warn him that the city and its inhabitants are about to be destroyed. He and his family must leave immediately. But Lot delays:”

“Over “he hesitated” is a shalshelet.”

“Yet despite this, he hesitates. He has invested too much of himself into the project of making his home among the people of the plain. He is a prime example of what Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance.9 According to Festinger, the need to avoid dissonance and the unbearable tension it creates, is fundamental to human beings. It is this tension that Lot cannot resolve – and which is signalled by the shalshelet over “he hesitated.” This was a moment when he faced the ultimate existential question: “Who am I?” Having tried so hard to become one of them, he finds it almost impossible to tear himself away.”

“The lives of Lot and Abraham exemplify for all time the contrast between ambivalence and the security that comes from knowing who one is and why. Lot, who tried to become someone else, found himself regarded by his neighbours as an alien, an arriviste, an interloper, a parvenu. To his own sons-in-law he was a “joker.” Abraham lived a different kind of life. He fought a war on behalf of his neighbours. He prayed for them. But he lived apart, true to his faith, his mission and his covenant with God. Yet even as he called himself a “stranger and sojourner” (23:4), the Hittites saw him as “a prince of God in our midst” (23:6). That equation has not changed. Non-Jews respect Jews who respect Judaism. They are embarrassed by Jews who are embarrassed by Judaism. Never be ambivalent about who and what you are.

“Throughout history, Jews were called on to treasure children. Our entire value system is built on it. Our citadels are schools, our passion, education, and our greatest heroes, teachers. The seder service on Passover opens with questions asked by a child. On the first day of the New Year, we read not about the creation of the universe but about the birth of a child – Isaac to Sarah, Samuel to Hannah. Ours is a supremely child-centred faith.

That is why, at the dawn of Jewish time, God put Abraham and Sarah through these trials – the long wait, the unmet hope, the binding itself – so that neither they nor their descendants would ever take children for granted. Every child is a miracle. Being a parent is the closest we get to God – bringing life into being through an act of love.”

Excerpt From

Covenant & Conversation: Genesis

Jonathan Sacks