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Dear Friends,

The name of the Torah portion this week is Vayera, “God appeared [to Abraham].” This “appearance” refers to the famous story in which three wayfarers, who later turn out to be angels, visit Abraham to announce that he and his elderly wife, Sarah, are destined, at last, to have their long promised child. Sarah will name the child “Isaac,” Yitzhak, from the word meaning “laughter.” Sarah laughs when she hears the news, thinking, “How am I to bear a child with Abraham so old?”

As the portion unfolds, we again hear many rich and dramatic stories: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the birth of Isaac, the escalating jealousy and conflict between Sarah and Hagar, her maidservant, and just before the conclusion of the portion, the famous tale of The Binding of Isaac.” Vayera is surely one of the longest and most densely packed narratives of all the weekly Torah portions.

As regular attendees at Shabbat Morning Torah Study have heard me say on many occasions, when studying the weekly Torah portion, I often crack open my copy of The Torah: a Women’s Commentary. Published by the Women of Reform Judaism in 2008, it is unique in the world of annotated Torah volumes in that every bit of commentary was written by female rabbis, poets, writers and academics. I love this edition of the Torah because I can open it to any page and learn something new, whether it’s an interpretation of a familiar passage that I’ve never encountered before, or simply something that leads me to think about the text in a new and different way.  And so it was this week with the portion for Shabbat, Vayera.

Tammi J. Schneider, an academic and archaeologist, says this about our portion for the week:
“… The individual episodes [in the portion] do more than chart the hazards and successes that follow God’s promises of progeny and land… Rather, they vividly depict the challenges, anguish, and joy that human beings experience as they create families and discover the complexities of multiple commitments.”
“Challenges. Anguish. Joy.”

These are the building blocks of our lives, and, as Professor Schneider points out, we experience them, perhaps most intensely, in our own families. And the irresistible, gravitational force that pulls us back to study these family stories from the book of Genesis, year after year, is precisely their mixture of antiquity and present-tense, personal relatability. 
We know Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel and Leah. In all their flawed humanity and in their often clumsy navigating of what Schneider calls “the complexities of multiple commitments,” their stories hold up a mirror to our own challenges, anguish and joy. They enrich our understanding of the world and ourselves. 
Ask anyone you know who attends Torah Study with Rabbi Levy and me on Saturday mornings and, each in their own way, they will reflect upon the power of these texts to open eyes and change lives.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Folberg