Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Avraham: Extraordinary Compassion and Justice in the Same Chapter

This is the draft of my D'var Torah for tomorrow, focusing on Genesis 18 within Parashat Vayera.

One afternoon when Avraham did not feel at all great, two things happened. First, he saw three strangers going along their way and he ran out to them to bring them home. Second, and right after, he had a major debate with the God about whether five cities should be destroyed.

I was saying a few weeks ago, when we started from the beginning of the Torah, that we often deal with the Torah one story at a time. So Sodom and Gomorrah is one thing. Welcoming the three travelers is another thing. Each one has a lesson perhaps. But the Torah also has a structure and a flow, and among others the Talmudic rabbis were always wondering about what they called hekesh or juxtaposition – why is this story right next to that one.

So why are these two stories right next to each other?

One is a story of extraordinary chesed, love or lovingkindness, in which Avraham and Sarah go to great lengths in every way to bring people into their home and take care of them. The other is a story about tzedek, about the nature of justice and its application, and it’s also extraordinary because in all other places where God and people debate about tzedek it’s between doing it and not, but here God and Avraham are debating about how it applies.

The people who divided up the Torah into chapters in the Middle Ages, both the Jews and the Christians, made these two stories a single chapter. Which happens to be Genesis chapter 18, and maybe it’s a coincidence but 18 in Hebrew is represented in letters by chai, which means life. Both stories are actually life and death stories, which I’ll talk about. Somehow this chai chapter is about the relationship between chesed and tzedek, compassion and justice, which is both an evergreen topic and also something particularly of the day.

So what’s extraordinary about the first story is hinted at in the second verse. Avraham lifted up his eyes and whoa, three men were standing over him, and he saw and he ran toward them from the opening of his tent and he bowed to the ground (18:2). If they were standing over him, what does it mean that he ran toward them, and that he bowed?

Avraham didn’t just want to do something for them. He felt that he should make the effort to go up to them, even though they were already next to him. He felt that he should not stand over them, as some kind of lord, or as a wealthy shepherd like himself might do over a scraggly wanderer – he wanted to look up to them, even though he was already sitting and they were standing.

The Torah describes what Sarah and Avraham did next in the language of maher, which means hurrying. They didn’t stop to find out anything about these people until they could offer them some refreshment of water and food and restoring their feet. Only when they were sitting would Avraham and Sarah and their people stand.

We find out quickly that these aren’t random travelers, and they have a chai message especially for Sarah and Avraham, a message that they will be welcoming a new life in the next year. But for the first verses Avraham and Sarah have no idea. They don’t have a people where they live, except the camp of followers they have put together. Their land does not lack in enemies. They live on the edge of the desert, which is a dangerous place, and who knows if these are maurauders. As we will soon see, Avraham and Sarah don’t live too far from S’dom and ‘Amorah, where the people are known to be generally vile – maybe these three people come from there.

So I don’t think it’s too much to think that Sarah and Avraham are taking some risk in running toward these travelers and bringing them into their home. At the very least, Sarah and Avraham are do good and ask questions later. As far as they are concerned, it’s the three men who are in danger, from thirst and hunger and bandits. It’s life and death for the three possibly, and at the very least they need something now. That’s the only thing that Avraham and Sarah process.

So there is no hesitation. This is extraordinary chesed.

Avraham escorts them from his home, because it’s dangerous to go out from settlement and there is desert in two directions. They and Avraham stop on the mountain ridge overlooking S’dom and ‘Amorah, and God engages him in conversation. The Torah says that God has an inner monologue: “Should I cover up from Avraham what I am doing? Avraham is surely going to become a large and powerful nation, through whom all the earth’s nations will be blessed” (18:17-18). And God continues to think that all of this is because God wants Avraham to charge and command his descendants in the ways of justice so that they can become great in these ways. So God then speaks to Avraham and says essentially: What is going on down in the valley in S’dom and ‘Amorah is so evil and I’m going to check it out to see if it’s as bad as it sounds. I’m sending my team to investigate. That’s all God says at first, and the messengers leave and now it’s just God and Avraham.

And without hesitation Avraham says: “So you will even sweep away the innocent with the guilty, or the righteous with the evil, tzaddik im rasha?” (18:23) Not, “Tell me more about what you meant by that” – Avraham cuts right to it, and then posits this situation of fifty tzaddikim, and winds it up by saying, “It would be profane for You to put to death tzaddik and rasha, and the tzaddik would be just like the rasha. Profane for you – the Judge of all the world will not do justice.”

And as you know from there, Avraham and God have this negotiation which ends with an agreement to save the cities if there are ten tzaddikim, which again might mean righteous people or just innocent people.

So what’s interesting to me is how this part of the chapter, the tzedek part, has Avraham doing different things than the chesed part. He talks here very differently about people, and his relationship to the people down in the valley is very different, even though what he is trying to do is the same which is to save their lives.

The chesed story is up close human contact. In the tzedek story, Avraham is far away from the people he’s talking about, whom he describes in terms of numbers and concepts, abstractions even.

In the first story Avraham is bowing down to people he doesn’t know and who may be a threat to him. He calls them “my lords.” He makes a presumption of good. In the second, Avraham is on a mountain ridge looking down on them. He calls them tzaddik and rasha, righteous and evil. He has no problem with the language of good and evil, toward people or toward God.

The midrashim say that the people of S’dom believed what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine to a punctilious extreme, punishing someone who took a short cut across their property just as severely as they would punish a thief.

They had no language for cooperation, only isolation that would surge into small-scale violence and occasionally a mob. Avraham does not volunteer to go up close and get to know them better, and he’s fine looking down on them from the hills.

At our Ritual Committee meeting this week, Larry Rubin brought us an interpretation of Avraham’s pointed words to God. It’s not necessarily an accusation that God isn’t intending to treat the people in the cities justly, but a statement that it’s not enough to apply principles of legal justice. “The Judge of the entire earth wouldn’t only do justice.” Sometimes you have to figure out how to mix the law with mercy, and just calling people guilty even when that’s true is not enough to tell you what to do. Mishpat is the law, but tzedek or mishpat tzedek is the integration of the law and a higher justice.

How could Avraham be such an extraordinary man of chesed and such an extraordinary man of tzedek, not just the same person but the same day? To see all people as potentially good and essential for him, and to see people honestly as good and evil? To be generous up close and to make difficult justice decisions from 10,000 feet?

So I don’t know for sure, or at least I can say I haven’t learned how. There are some extraordinary people like that and they are in our local civic community and our Jewish community.

And I love to contemplate such people, and try to become like them, and I love to contemplate Avraham even when he is so beyond who I am. It is inspiring to be in the light of any real person who is an amazing ba’alat chesed or ba’al chesed, and to be in the presence of someone who is an amazing ba’alat tzedek or ba’al tzedek. There is a reason we were put in this community of Beit Avraham v’Sarah and connected to those two souls.

And I want to leave just three other points, which are not easy but are important.

One is that this analysis of Avraham is to remind us that chesed and tzedek are different and require different actions and words and thoughts. Avraham with the travelers is not the same as Avraham looking at S’dom. A thousand points of light are incredibly important, but they do not necessarily make one big light. Justice does not happen, injustice is not pushed back only by individual and small group acts of generosity and caring, no matter how many.

Nor can the right laws and the right policies by themselves create a compassionate society.

So second, most of us can’t be both Avrahams. But among us we can do both. So if you are more the person of chesed, make sure also to do anything you can for the people of tzedek, whether that means contributing to their causes and organizations, sharing their wisdom, or giving them moral support by taking them out for coffee if it’s a local person, or an encouraging word. And vice versa, if you are focused on tzedek work make sure to give to and support the chesed work even if that’s not what you yourself are mostly doing.

And finally I want to come back to where I started, which is that on the day Avraham did these two extraordinary things, he was not feeling great. It was right after his bris, so he didn’t feel physically like himself, and also I think he was carrying the weightiness of the brit, the covenant that God had just reaffirmed to him. Part of being so committed to a certain world, and knowing you and your descendants would be charged with making big dreams real, is feeling the weight of that responsibility. So whatever pain you are feeling right now, about the country and the world, know that it is covenantal pain. Avraham found extraordinary chesed and tzedek in himself precisely when he was not feeling like himself. So can we. So will you.

Shabbat Shalom.

After the Election: Take Love Seriously. Give Love Wildly.

 

This was my Dvar Torah last Shabbat, November 9, the first Shabbat after Election Day 2024.

First I want to say that the operation of a democracy is awe-inspiring. To experience a day when 300-million-plus people bring something of moral significance to a crescendo all at once. To contemplate what goes into that, philosophically and logistically. Which is why we are honoring today the people who have been closest to that process, as candidates and at the polls and in campaigns – and thank you to everyone who voted or brought a young person with you as you voted.

It has been an exhausting week. It has been an exhausting campaign, an exhausting thirteen months.

Also an exhausting pandemic and an exhausting decade. But right now, just an exhausting week. Regardless of how you assess the results, all or some of them. Which is why I am not going to tell you today how the Torah solves everything on our minds – like how you are feeling or how you think about other people who voted differently or what to do next. There’s no Torah insight that only suddenly became apparent this week, that we couldn’t have learned until now. Next Shabbat, I will speak toward those bigger pictures, but today I hope I can offer you something both more modest and more fundamental. Maybe soothing, maybe even useful, regardless of where you’re at right now.

There is a classic psychology study from 2008 by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh, in which participants were given a description of another person, and asked to make judgments based on that information about whether that person was generous or warm, or the opposite. Or in which they were given a short task and then had the opportunity to take a small reward for themselves or give something to another person. But the experiment actually began when the participant arrived and was met by a research assistant juggling a clipboard and papers and a drink, who then asked the participant to hold their drink for a moment. Sometimes, the drink was a warm coffee, and sometimes an iced coffee. Then the assistant took the drink back and escorted the subject to the research room.

And in this particular study, the subjects who held the warm drink were more likely to rate the person they read a packet about as a warm person, a generous person. Or to choose to give something away rather than take a small reward for themselves. Other things controlled, the very same person was judged more generously or more harshly based on this external physical factor, the warm or cold drink. Other things equal, a participant in this study was likely to be more generous or more selfish, if they had been primed by warmth or cold.

My point is that our recent time has been like this. Not warm, but so cold, and so hot. Even beyond our awareness, our minds and our hearts are affected in ways we don’t even realize, by the touch of something that is at the same time physical and emotional and spiritual. As much as we are trying to live warmly and judge warmly, we are all being handed scalding after scalding after scalding cup of coffee.

We have to notice that. And it’s what any of us can and ought to do something about starting from now –  whether you are more pleased or more disturbed by the results of the election, whether you are right now hopeful or despairing, whether you are thinking about what to do next or nowhere near ready for that. To put it negatively, what we need to address are the brutal and hateful words and calls. Everywhere around us. That brutality is the hot cup of coffee probably each of us has held to the point that it penetrates into our minds and our hearts.

Or to put it more positively: An antidote, even just for today, is love. It’s ahavah and chesed. It is simply, simply love. It is the practice of love. 

Love is the warm cup we have to hand each other, over and over and over.

At a few of our interfaith gatherings this week, Rev. Allison Palm, president of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council and minister for the Unitarian Universalist Church, shared this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, called “Because”:

So I can’t save the world—
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

Rev. Palm said to a few of us the other day that this love isn’t just that we should be kinder. Which certainly isn’t a bad thing. But more than that: To take love seriously./To give love wildly.

We know that kind of love right here, where love is saying Amen to everyone’s prayer, as if it were the most important prayer you yourself could say, even though you don’t know exactly what it is.

Love could be toward the people we are fearful for right now – the promise we make, even if it’s just right now to ourselves, that we will really follow through and love them, be there for them and speak up for them.

Love could be to stretch toward someone in our community or our society who baffles us, even if it’s just to appreciate their face or the beautiful sound of their voice when they speak about what matters to them.

Love must be toward yourself, so you can rest, have Shabbat, recharge for important things, or let yourself experience joy for no ulterior purpose at all.

Love is feeling that you are loved -- loved by the Divine; loved by someone else, perhaps in a church or a mosque somewhere, someone who is imagining you, appreciating your face or the beautiful sound of your voice when you speak about what matters most to you.

…practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.

…To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

And whenever we are angry and frustrated and outraged, we can be serious about love, by reminding ourselves that we only feel those things because we love. And it’s only the love behind the anger and frustration that will ever make a difference.

So whether you are trying to take a stand or whether you are simply sad, today just love. Give love wildly. 

Detoxing our environment of the ugliness and the brutality of tone will not by itself eliminate our divisions; nothing can. Nor will it miraculously reveal new public policies we have not found yet that everyone will rally behind, and the brutality will recede into small corners. But it is the thing that is always possible, even right now.

And at least in here, every Shabbat, we can be together in love. As we juggle our prayerbooks and our handouts, our plates at Kiddush, we hand each other the warm cup of coffee. The warm cider, the cocoa, that helps us see the world as our hearts want to see it – full of warmth, full of generosity. Give it to each other, again and again and again. If we do that here, we will be better able to do that outside as well. 

So:

…today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. 

To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

Shabbat Shalom.