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41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
    
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
    
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.

41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.

The Sacrifice of Yitzchak: Remembering Rabin on the Anniversary of His Assassination

October 29, 2020 is by the Jewish calendar the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin z"l, by a Jewish religious extremist opposed to Rabin's peacemaking with the Palestinians. This is the D'var Torah I gave five years ago for Rabin's yahrzeit.

This is the week of the 20th yahrzeit for Yitzchak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel who was assassinated by a Jewish religious religious fanatic.  By the Jewish calendar it was last Sunday, and by the secular calendar next Wednesday.  His murder took place in the first hours of the week of פרשת וירא, this morning’s reading, and I will never forget one of the headlines in an Israeli paper the week of his funeral:  עקדת יצחק, the sacrifice of Yitzchak.

There is a particular story told about Yitzchak Rabin in all the biographies and memoirs from Israel’s War of Independence.  It was June of 1948, only about a month after the State of Israel officially came into being.  The Jews of Jerusalem were under siege, living truly near starvation, because the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was cut off around its midpoint by the Arab Legion, which was holding a police fortress in a place called Latrun.  The Israelis had already tried several times to storm Latrun without success.  The fortress was on ground just high enough to see the plain around it, and the Israelis did not have enough troops to take it by overwhelming force.  The battles for Latrun had been some of the costliest in the war in terms of lives lost; many of the soldiers had been refugees from the Holocaust, just liberated from displaced persons camps, with almost no training and no language in common to hear instructions in battle.

As dire as the siege was in Jerusalem, there were Arab armies threatening Jewish areas all over the country.  The Israeli commanders felt they had to make choices about where to deploy their limited number of trained forces, and they knew that attacking Latrun again would be futile  But David Ben Gurion was obsessed with Latrun and had summoned his army leaders repeatedly to demand an attack on Latrun to open the road to Jerusalem.

The commanders responsible in early June for the area of the road to Jerusalem included Mickey Marcus, an American Jew and experienced solider who had come to volunteer.  Some of you may know him and this part of the war through the film “Cast a Giant Shadow”, where he was played by Kirk Douglas.  Also Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmach, the most elite and well-trained Jewish fighting group.  Yitzchak Rabin was the young commander of the Harel Brigade of the Palmach.  Ben Gurion summonded his commanders, and Alon and Marcus knew they would be asked to divert their scarce resources to Latrun, and when they would object they would be subject to Ben Gurion’s fury.

So they decided instead to sacrifice Yitzchak.  The 26-year-old Rabin went by himself to talk to Ben-Gurion, to present an alternative proposal.  By accident, one of Rabin’s underlings had discovered a way to go around Latrun, out of sight of the Arabs, and create a path for supplies to get to Jerusalem.   Rabin would propose that they pave a new supply route and avoid Latrun altogether.

When Rabin came to Ben Gurion, the prime minister lived up to his name, son of a lion cub, and flew into a two-hour rage.  Yitzchak was astounded as Ben Gurion at one point threatened to shoot his own commander, Yigal Allon, in the head, but Rabin stood his ground.  Where other times Ben Gurion had overruled a more senior commander and ordered an attack on Latrun, not this time.  The attack did not take place, the road was built, and the siege of Jerusalem came to an end just in the nick of time.

For people who knew Rabin or wrote later about his life, that confrontation with Ben Gurion exemplified a couple key things about the man.  His wife Leah wrote in her memoir that as a commander and a statesman, Yitzchak was fanatical about his goals and but always looking for the least costly way to achieve them.  He tried to minimize risk to soldiers in battle -- by doing his own detail work of intelligence and reconnaissance to outmaneuver his enemy, by considering creative alternatives, rather than relying on superior force alone which could lose more more lives.  After Ben Gurion, Rabin was probably the most detail-oriented and methodical prime minister Israel has ever had.

The confrontation with Ben-Gurion also showed how little Rabin was interested in ingratiating himself with anyone if those things put the mission at risk.  He didn’t care overly about the feelings of his peers or his superiors, but about the many people he knew less well, the men who served under him.  So Rabin didn’t bother to join Mapai, Ben Gurion’s political party, even though he would have advanced much faster if he had.  He had no hesitation when he was prime minister about cutting his own mentor, Yigal Allon, down to size when he disagreed with him.  

Later on, as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. and then as prime minister, Rabin could be plenty sharp and critical.  He could seem detached.  But at the same time, and this was key -- as long as he could win he had no need to demonize the people who disagreed with him.

These were not the things we call people skills.  Rabin was not a jolly man, and in no way a glad-handing politician.  Leah reprints a letter she received when they were dating in the mid-1940s and Yitzchak was imprisoned by the British, and it was more like a business letter than a love letter.  Rabin was not beloved or revered, the way his peers like Moshe Dayan would be.  He didn’t unite his country when he was prime minister or when he signed the agreement with PLO on the White House lawn.  It seemed ridiculous to me when Bill Clinton called Rabin his friend.

Yet without the typical people skills, Rabin was able, at key times, to surprise people and earn their trust.  How could Rabin have possibly negotiated with the Palestinians?  For fifty years, he had not only defeated them in battle -- he had out-organized and outwitted and outsmarted them.  He had every reason to have contempt for them, as soliders and leaders, and therefore to doubt their ability to do the things they were promising -- but he chose to see them simply as opponents.  Just as in 1948, Rabin was willing to fight only the battle that was necessary, in the 1990s Rabin was clear about exactly how much he needed to be the PLO’s opponent and in what ways he could be their partner.

Rabin knew that in order to bring Israelis along with the peace process, he would have to teach through his example how to balance peace ahead with justice and grief looking back.  At first, he wasn’t going to go to the White House to sign the Oslo agreement, but eventually he figured out that if he didn’t, Israelis would write it off as a ridiculous dream cooked up by Shimon Peres.  Rabin managed every step so carefully, relating just as in 1948 not to his fellow leaders but to the average Israeli.  So he opened his speech at the White House by talking about Israeli families who would never stop grievning, he shook Arafat’s hand in the only way he could, politely but not enthusiastically.  

At the White House and in later ceremonies to sign agreements with Arafat, Rabin put on his non-Israeli-style suit and looked like an adult, and made Arafat look like a child who could not take off his costume.  Rabin made sure to have a working relationship with Arafat and to show that when they appeared together, but he was also carefuly not to portray to Israelis that he and Arafat were becoming friends.  He was perfect for the role; he wasn’t big for smiling or scolding, his natural face and voice were holding back even when he tried to do revolutionary things.

Rabin understood that leadership is not like other relationships.  He didn’t try to use on the people skills he didn’t have, because that’s not what leading his people is only about.  And Rabin could lead because he was aware that he was modeling a new way of being a Jew in a new world.  Not just modeling, but maybe inventing it as he went along.

In 1994, at an award ceremony honoring Israeli writers just a year after the White House handshake, Rabin said:  “These days we are in the midst of a battle without cannons in a war without fire, which may turn out to be perhaps one of the most significant and decisive battles in the annals of the Jewish people in recent generations.”  In that speech, he said:

Let us admit the truth: the atmosphere of siege, the hostility, and the war have elicited tremendous energies from us for almost five decades. Much of what has been achieved in the State of Israel in all areas is a direct or indirect outcome of the necessity to defend our existence, of the atmosphere of siege from which we are so glad to free ourselves these days. Ours was a productive unity, a healthy unity, standing shoulder to shoulder against the manifestations of enmity and facing a hostile world. Just between us, we have become accustomed to this lifestyle, and, already, we think we cannot do without it. Perhaps we have even come to love the pleasant warmth of power and the encircling siege.

And now? What are we to do now? What message should we deliver to our people these days? How should we avoid becoming entangled in delivering a double, and contradictory, message: are we on the brink of peace, or do we expect another war? How do we change the atmosphere that has characterized our state for generations? What should we choose – should we declaim again and again: "a state under siege," "the whole world is against us," "all the Arabs are the same"? Or perhaps we should bear a new message: "the new Middle East," "the peace of the brave," "nation shall not lift up sword against nation," "He who makes peace in heaven above..."?

How do we become accustomed to a world of new concepts, to a different culture, a different style, and at the same time not completely abandon the old world, just in case, God forbid, we might need it again? How do we maintain the invigorating rhythm of our lives, the Jewish mind, all those tremendous energies of ours, our unity – without the sword hanging over our heads?

This is the Rabin who was taken from us by his assassin. How do we become accustomed to a world of new concepts,.... and at the same time not completely abandon the old world, just in case, God forbid, we might need it again?  This is who the Jewish people lost on the 12th of Marcheshvan 5755.  Not necessarily the man who signed the Oslo agreement, which may well have stalled even had he lived.  We lost the man who fought wars until the moment he thought they were not necessary, and was prepared to fight them again if necessary.  We lost the one who hoped we might figure out how to live as Jews in the world we are in and not in the mythic worlds of dreamy peace or eternal Jew-hatred.  

Rabin’s assassin took the worst message from the Akedah -- that to be Jewish is to live as though you were always just escaping a knife at your throat; and that extreme atrocities are beloved to God.  That is a Judaism of no joy and no hope, an impossible Judaism -- and in the square 20 years ago a desecration of God’s name.

Yitzchak Rabin was the truer heir of the biblical Yitzchak.  He lived through the wars of survival and knew they were over for his people, and he didn’t pretend to know for sure what was next or how long it would take.

We would honor Yitzchak Rabin’s memory most if we could find a way as Jews of being comfortable with our power, and with taking responsibility for how we use it.  We would honor his legacy if we could take the proper measure of the threats to Israel, and to Jews, and fight them rather than our ghosts, and take satisfaction when we are defeating them  That is the true spirituality of Zionism.  To know the perfect place between the smile and the scold, to scowl appropriately while trying revolutionary things.

Yehi zichro baruch -- May Yitzchak’s memory be a blessing.

Parashat Vayera: A Spiritual Lens for Election 2010

Parashat Vayera opens with two scenes in chapter 18 of Bereshit.  First, Avraham and Sarah open their homes to three travelers whom Avraham notices in the distance.  Immediately after, Avraham and God engage in a discussion about the fate of the evil city of Sodom and the other cities around it, and whether the overall injustice of those communities justifies destroying all the people who live in them.

I have been looking for a way to frame a spiritual perspective on the upcoming elections.  Parashat Vayera, and the figure of Avraham, hold an important key for us.  Disclaimer:  No candidate or party endorsements here.  I'm instead thinking about this:  How do we orient ourselves to the act of making a choice when we go to vote.

There is no spiritual formula that can tell you whom to vote for.  What I'm calling a spiritual approach to voting is instead a way of preparing, so that the vote each of us casts is grounded in something deeper than self-interest, cynicism, or even ideology.

If you are eligible, you must vote.  Out of gratitude, after centuries upon centuries when Jews (and most human beings) lived under tyranny.  To live out fully the meaning of freedom.  As I posted the day of the primary, I say a bracha (blessing) in the booth:  Baruch...she-asani ben (bat) chorin.  Blessed is God, who has made me a free person.

What does Avraham teach us that we can apply to the election?  The two scenes represent two types of connection to other people.

First connection:  up close.  Avraham pays attention to three figures moving on the horizon, and he goes to them.  They are strangers, and they are brought into the home.

So the first spiritual discipline before deciding who to vote for is to bring individuals up close, into your mind.  Consider all the people who are affected by your decision -- and I mean consider them, bring each into the mind's eye.  Assess who will be affected and how by the attitudes and policies a particular candidate has articulated.  Businesspeople, students, sick people, parents, those who work more than one job, those without a job or a good job, senior citizens, people with disabilities, those who are losing a home, and more.

In the desert, Avraham's decision to welcome the distant hikers was not simply an act of warmth.  It was a decision about life and death.  To leave the travelers alone and far off would have meant exposing them to thirst, or to bandits.  Tax rates, deficit levels, and budgets are not numbers, but decisions that translate into life or death, health or illness, suffering or sufficiency.

Second connection:  a view from on high.  When Avraham and God talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, Avraham is on a hill overlooking the plain where the five cities are located.  They talk about individuals, but they are not looking at individuals.  It is the character of the communities that sets the stage for their conversation.  So the second spiritual discipline is to think about the kind of community that would flow from your choice, if everyone were to vote as you do.

There is one view that a city, state, or country is made up of individuals.  We deal with each other for our own needs, and make the rules we need for basic fairness and safety.  This is the modern view, from thinkers like John Locke onward.  In the midrash, though, this attitude is associated with the city of Sodom.  In Sodom, according to one view, each person lived in his own home and viewed his own property as an absolute.

Spiritually, I view any community living in an area as a brit, a covenantal community.  Our ties include our economic ties and our safety, to be sure.  But we share in each other beyond the favors we trade.  We share the water, air, and energy that only briefly pass through our privately-owned pipes, lungs, and wires.  We share ideas and identity.  We share the possibility of banding together to solve problems that affect us all.  We share the need to believe that we are living in a world of justice.  We need the flourishing of as many people as possible, or else our own flourishings will seem incomplete and perhaps selfish.

So the second spiritual discipline before you vote is to stand on the hilltop and consider the kind of society that could flow from the election.  Does a candidate see us as one group, facing common problems -- or does she or he say things that pit one group against another?  Does he or she measure our individual economic wellbeing only, or also count our solidarity for something?

It's hard to answer these questions.  No single person is enough of an economist or sociologist to arrive at a certain answer.  The issues and problems before us are complex, and we are most of us laypeople when it comes to public policy.  Still, the vote is a decision with vast consequences, for individuals and for society.  Any decision that big requires a spiritual preparation.

You can go through the thought process I'm outlining and vote Democrat or Republican.  You may ask yourselves these questions, and end up with the same vote you originally thought, or the same party or ideology that you supported the last time.   Or, you might reach a new conclusion this time.

Either way, it makes a difference if you vote a certain way out of habit or frustration, of if you vote out of spiritual concern for yourself, others, and society as a whole.  Our votes together will be much better and lead to much better citizenship if we can follow Avraham, to the horizon and the hilltop.  To see everyone who is affected by our vote up close, and to consider as well the character of our society as a whole.

Parashat Vayera: Peace and Service, In Family and The World

This past Shabbat, many of the discussions in shul about Avraham centered on his contradictions.  We tell stories about how Avraham stood up to his father who sold idols, to the powerful king of Ur, to God God-self over the fate of Sodom and Gomorroah.  Yet he was willing to put his wife Sarah at risk and did not speak up when his sons were in danger for their lives.  Here is a Dvar Torah I wrote a few years ago and published on-line originally at socialaction.com.  It's one attempt to bring the disjointed strands of Avraham together.  (I should credit myjewishlearning.com, a great site, which apparently own the "rights" to what follows as well.)

"Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing?… For I have known him in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice" (Genesis 18:17-19). So says God as God contemplates plans for the city of Sodom and its surroundings, whose reputation for evil and whose shrieks of corruption have become more than God can bear.

God knows that for Abraham and his descendents to become responsible for justice in the world, God must first apprentice Abraham, including him in a monumental decision about justice and human beings. (Abraham, of course, ends up challenging God to save the population of the cities if even ten righteous people can be found in the area.)

Parashat Vayera places this passage in the middle of a flow of events that somehow link the issue of justice in the wider world to Abraham's own family struggles. As the Torah reading begins, Abraham sprints from the door of his desert tent toward three travelers, who turn out to be divine messengers come to announce the birth of a son to elderly Sarah and Abraham. As the reading ends, Ishmael and his mother Hagar are driven out, because of Sarah's jealousy and her urge to secure the inheritance of her own son Isaac. God saves the cast-out boy and his mother. God then tests Abraham, asking him to give up his remaining son Isaac as a sacrifice on Mt. Moriah. Yet again God intercedes and saves the boy.

This interplay between the discussion about Sodom and the struggle for peace and justice in Abraham's household resists an easy lesson.

Toward the end of this week's reading is an episode most of us don't remember. Between the banishment of Ishmael and the binding of Isaac, Abraham is approached by Avimelech, king of the neighboring Philistines. Avimelech proposes a treaty, in recognition of past friendship. After the covenant is made official, the Torah relates that "Abraham planted an eshel-tree in Be'er Sheva, and there he called the name of Adonai, Eternal God. And Abraham lived in the land of the Philistines a long time" (21:33-34).

The peace treaty is jarring--it comes as Abraham's own family seems to be collapsing, and stands in counterpoint to the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah. The rabbis of the midrash (rabbinic exegetical narrative) try to make sense of the episode, and their point of entry is, of all things, the tree.

In one midrash, two rabbis offer their views on what exactly the eshel was. One says: an orchard. The other says: an inn, a waystation for desert travelers. Either way, Abraham marks his new bond with the Philistines by getting involved with them, providing and sharing food. For Abraham, the alliance isn't just with Avimelech, and it isn't just an agreement to insure against future conflicts. It has to create a new relationship of hesed, of covenantal kindness, between two peoples, starting now.

Maybe Abraham was reflecting on his experience with Sodom. He had argued on their behalf, but from a comfortable distance--looking down into the valley from his home up in the hills. For all his talk of justice, he had done nothing to engage with the evil and corruption right in those cities. Here, Abraham decides to take seriously his own talk about justice, creating community right there in the desert, looking out for vulnerable travelers among the Philistines as well as his own people.

The rabbi who teaches that an eshel is an inn has to justify his creative translation. The three letters of the Hebrew word eshel, he says, each stand for an element of Abraham's hospitality: aleph for "achilah," eating; shin for "shtiya," drinking, and lamed for "l'vaya," accompanying travelers on their way.

"Then Abraham lived in the land of Philistines a long time." Not in the cities he had settled in when God first brought him to Canaan, but in the land of the Philistines. Who knows how many strangers Abraham met, what he learned as he shared meals with them, what they taught him as he escorted them toward a safer journey. If they thanked him, say the rabbis, he would respond: Do you think you have me to thank? Let us thank God together, for it is God's food we are sharing.

And, we might add: It is God who brought me to this land, who separated me from people so that I would have to figure out from the beginning how to order my relationships, how to sustain justice in my own home, which I realize is a place of ayn-shalom, no peace.

What is Abraham's life, after all, but a twisting story about connection and disconnection? Leaving home, wandering the new land, leaving it in time of famine. Reaching out to travelers, speaking out for ten hypothetical innocents hidden in a culture of evil. In the middle of the desert, Abraham makes a tentative step, staking out a small parcel for peace and devotion to others with no expectations in return. None of them will be announcing miracles to Sarah or good fortune for their descendents. The eshel is a moment of pure service.

It is interesting that in one rabbinic legend, this is the time that Abraham sends messengers to check on Ishmael, and eventually to reunite the family--only for a time, of course, before the terrible challenge from God to offer his other son. But I like to think about that legend, and to imagine Abraham and Sarah with their children at the eshel in Be'er Sheva. Peace in the home, service to others. How to preserve that moment, they do not teach us--Torah forwards that challenge to us.