Take a moment and think about something that prevents you from forging a new journey with a sense of your own wholeness. Do you pay homage to this thing so that it has, perhaps, become an idol? Maybe that idol is depression, a trauma, a sour relationship, the way you view your body. How might you be able to smash it, like Avram does in the midrash?
Fire has rained down from the heavens. Rivers have run with blood. This is not a baby’s book of cute animals waddling onto the Ark. This is a Torah of Horror.
It is only on the condition that we remember that we have been given all of the blessings that come with freedom. Let us use that freedom, then, to work for the blessings of freedom for all peoples.
Did you know there are five species of dolphins that are found in the Mediterranean Sea? There are bottle-nose dolphins, short beaked dolphins, striped and fiascos dolphins.
Wrestling with God, life, ourselves, takes different forms— But whatever it’s pushing through, whether pain in football, pain over the death of someone we love, or pain over political differences, we are different afterwards…hopefully we are stronger, because we brought our best selves to the struggle.
Even though G-d confronts Sarah, she isn’t punished for laughing. Maybe her laughter made sure she got her baby. Maybe her laugh was like a dare, and the challenge made G-d really want to make good on the promise.
The origin of the idea that Abraham and Sarah were so welcoming of guests actually comes from this week’s Torah portion, Vayera. The portion begins, “And the Eternal appeared to him [Abraham] in the plains of Mamre; and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. And he lifted up his eyes and looked and lo, three men stood by him; and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground.”
“You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and, HaShem, your God, redeemed you from there. On account of this I command you to do this thing.” (Deuteronomy 24:18)
There is no default setting. We have to show up and make our whole selves visible. Once we have found each other, once we have said yes, we are just getting started. The real journey is the back and forth and delicious curiosity and brave truth telling and honest desire, through which we will remake the world.
Without this commitment to Jewish competence, our re-invented Judaism is in peril of being all head and no body. All gate and no household. If we lose Eshet Chayil, if we forsake her in the reboot, we lose the creative force that animates a living Jewish civilization.