When we celebrate a Bar Mitzvah in our synagogue community, we like to offer, in this weekly email a summary of the teaching offered by the young person in our community who celebrated becoming Bar Mitzvah. This past week it was Xander Segal, who, according to his mother Verna, is the fourth generation in his family to celebrate becoming Bar Mitzvah on the Bimah at 418 Spruce Street. Truly a legacy.
Xander’s portion was Vayera (defined below), which is the fourth portion in the Book of Genesis, and therefore the fourth portion in the entire Torah. We are in the earliest stages of the relationship between God and what was to become the Jewish people. Abraham and Sarah are the foundational couple, expecting a bountiful nation to come forth from them and yet Sarah is childless going into her tenth decade of life.
Sitting by his tent, Abraham sees three anashim, which the Jewish Publication Society defines as “figures,”—who turn out to be men with a message from God. After being received by Abraham and Sara with great generosity, one of the men says to Abraham, “I will return to you next year, and your wife Sarah shall have a son!”
Sarah, who considers herself long past her childbearing years, laughs upon hearing the news, to which none other that God responds, saying “Why did Sarah laugh? Is anything too wondrous for יהוה (God)?”
“Sara in responses Sarah lied, saying, ‘I did not laugh,’ for she was frightened. Came the reply, “You did laugh.'”
This lie in response to the laughter is what prompted Xander’s D’var Torah. Her reaction resonated for him in that it was, as he put it, a response to the unknown.
Sarah had not had any direct encounters with God up until this point. When she was called out for laughing, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know whether laughing was wrong, or okay. She simply didn’t know.
So she lied. Xander found comfort in the notion that our foremost ancestors also encountered the unknown and found it frightening. But rather than turn away from the unknown, he suggests we embrace it. “Everyone fears the unknown to a certain extent,” he wrote. “Life, in my opinion, is about questions. Sometimes you can’t answer a question, and that’s a scary thought. I feel that Sarah had this in mind.”
“Confronting the fear you hold about the unknown is an important part of life. I think the only real way to get over this fear is to come to terms with the fact that we might not be able to find the answer to every question. Closure is a rare thing for many of us. But coming to terms with that and accepting that we as humans can’t know everything is, while intimidating to some, a comforting thought to me. It comforts me to know that I’m not expected to know everything and that I can take things at my own pace.”
For Xander, internalizing the understanding that we can’t know everything, and yet, he concluded, “our experiences on earth as humans are just as big and matter just as much as answering life’s biggest questions.”
Thank you Xander, for your meaningful teaching.
I’d like to share with you the D’var Torah (teaching) I delivered on the evening of Xander’s Bar Mitzvah.
—
What a delight to be with you all to celebrate the Shabbat of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony of Xander Segal. Xander’s parashah, Xander’s Torah portion, is vayerah. Vayerah means “appeared”. Vayerah adonai elaiv—Adonai, the Source of Being, appeared, or became discernible, visually or otherwise, elav, to him, to Abraham, by the Terebinths of Mamre, the gorgeous cashew trees in the biblical site of Mamre.
It’s a striking image and it serves as the jumping off point to one of the most action-packed parashot, Torah portions, in all of Torah. In this parashah alone, we have the three divine figures visiting Abraham to let him know that he and Sarah, even in their nineties, will celebrate the birth of a son; it contains the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; it contains a kidnapping and rescue of Sarah, and the subsequent birth of Isaac, followed by the familiar story of the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael that we read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. It keeps going with the akedah: the binding of Isaac, that all-too-famous story that we read on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and concludes with a recitation of the lineage of Abraham’s brother Nahor, which includes the birth of our matriarch Rebecca. That is all in one Torah portion.
Fortunately for us, here at Society Hill Synagogue, we have adopted a version of the triennial cycle, where we read, more or less, just a third of the Torah portion each cycle, enabling us to focus in a little more on the richness of each episode.
So, tomorrow, the triennial cycle has us reading the first part of the parshah. The arrival of the three divine messengers, and their subsequent journey to the doomed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Xander is going to talk about the former, divine message, so it’s my privilege to talk about the latter, Sodom and Gomorrah, tonight. Thanks for that, Xander.
As perhaps we know, doomed cities is something of misnomer: from Abraham’s perspective, when he learned about the divine plan for the destruction of these cities, he saw this as anything but a fait accompli; in fact, he saw it as his duty to plea for God’s mercy, with respect to these cities. “הַאַ֣ף תִּסְפֶּ֔ה צַדִּ֖יק עִם־רָשָֽׁע” Abraham exclaims to God when he learns of their potential fate. “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” He proceeds to marshall his argument: “What if there should be fifty innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! הֲשֹׁפֵט֙ כׇּל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לֹ֥א יַעֲשֶׂ֖ה מִשְׁפָּֽט Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”
Of course we know what happens next: God makes space for Abraham’s plea, conceding that God will not destroy the cities if fifty innocent people can be found within. Nor just 45, nor 30, nor 20, nor ten. God concedes to Abraham’s point; if we can find innocents, God suggests, I will not destroy the city. As it happens, those 30, those 20, those 10 innocents cannot be found within. And the cities are destroyed.
But while at a certain point the fate of the cities became inevitable, what was not a foregone conclusion was whether Abraham would be included in a deliberation about their destiny.
Just a few verses earlier we read, וַֽיהֹוָ֖ה אָמָ֑ר, “Now Adonai had said” “ הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ מֵֽאַבְרָהָ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֲנִ֥י עֹשֶֽׂה׃” “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?”
It’s a striking depiction of God in our tradition, with God not only experiencing doubt — “Shall I? I don’t know” — but God being concerned with a human being’s perception of, or perhaps reaction to, God’s plans.
And yet, upon reflection it’s not surprising that God would have some ambivalence about how to engage with humanity regarding the prospect of God’s plans. This is not the first time God has been down this road,
I am referring, of course, to hamabul. The flood. Just as here, with respect to the flood generation God saw that a significant portion of humanity had been corrupted beyond repair. And yet in sharing the divine plans with Noah, the text seems to suggest that God was hoping Noah would step up and fight for humanity. The rabbis teach that when the text says et ha’elohim hit’ha’lech noach, Noah walked with God, it means Noah may have been attuned to God, but he was indifferent to the plight of his fellow human beings.
So here, with the case of Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham, God is presented with a similar dilemma: הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ מֵֽאַבְרָהָ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֲנִ֥י עֹשֶֽׂה׃” “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?”
Past experience would suggest to God, “what’s the point?” Humanity and I are not close. We go our separate ways. I do what I do; and they do what they do. Space for dialogue is not warranted. Space for closeness is not warranted. They’ll just disappoint me like Noah did.
And yet something about Abraham suggests a second chance, dialogue, engagement is justified. Dialogue, the text says, “so that he may guide his children and his posterity to keep the way of יהוה (Adonai) doing what is just and right.” I have faith in Abraham.
God determines that in order to facilitate a real relationship, God needs to demonstrate some faith in God’s partner. To tell him even the hard stuff.
This can apply, the teaching suggests, to our own relationships—professional relationships, platonic relationships, romantic relationships. Having faith in our partner, in whatever context, that they will be able to hear, to make space for, to compromise around, as renowned relationship psychologist John Gottman suggests, our plans, our hopes, our, dreams.
In this story, it’s about God’s plans for humanity; in our own lives it’s often about our dreams, which Gottman defines as, “the hopes, aspirations, and wishes that are part of [our] identity and give purpose and meaning to [our lives].”
We have to have faith, the text suggests, that our partners—business, friends, loving partners—can internalize our aspirations and make space for them, rather than us taking the shortcut of trying to sneak these dreams past them without telling them, trying to achieve them without their collaboration, or resenting them for not making space for the thing we haven’t even entrusted them to make space for.
“Often,” Gottman writes, “deeply personal dreams go unspoken or underground because we assume they must in order to make the relationship work. It’s common for both partners not to feel entitled to their dreams. They may see their own desires as ‘childish’ or ‘impractical.’ But such labels don’t end the longing. So if the relationship doesn’t honor the dream, conflict will almost inevitably ensue. In other words, when you bury a dream, it just resurfaces in disguised form.”
He gives the example of a couple who “thinks they are at loggerheads over whether to go out to dinner every Sunday night, but the bottom-line issue has to do with something much deeper than a restaurant meal. Sunday night holds a special place in both of their hearts, stemming from their childhoods. Her dream is to eat out because her family did that every Sunday, a treat that made her feel special. But for her husband, a restaurant meal was always much less of a treat than having his very busy [parents] cook for the family—something [they] only did on Sundays. So the question of a restaurant versus a home meal is really symbolic of what makes each of them feel loved.”
Only when we share the nature of our aspirations with our partner can they make space for them. Even if it ultimately means some form of compromise is necessary, that compromise can be reached with the clarity of understanding the motivations of the other.
Sharing our underlying dreams, sharing what it is we’re yearning for, in the meaningful relationships in our lives—not just romantic relationships, but friendships, working relationships, parents and children—signifies a trust in the other person, a faith in them that they can hear us out—that while we may not get everything we want all the time, for the sake of our relationship and for the sake of ourselves we have to trust that we can name our yearnings, our wrestlings, and then figure it out with them.
Instead of turning away from humanity after the disaster of the flood, God turns towards us, towards Abraham. הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ מֵֽאַבְרָהָ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֲנִ֥י עֹשֶֽׂה׃” “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am contemplating?” No. I will tell him. So that he may guide his children and his posterity to keep the way of יהוה by doing what is just and right. I have faith in Abraham.
The faith in Abraham was warranted. Abraham fought for Sodom and Gomorrah down to the last person, until Abraham realized it was a lost cause. Nonetheless it fostered dialogue, closeness, trust between Abraham and God. God and humanity. Give our partners a chance, the tradition teaches. Place our dreams in their hands. They might just surprise us. Shabbat Shalom.
