Vayeira

This past Sunday I visited our third grade class. One of the students asked me a question – How many letters are there in a Torah? In rabbinic school we learn that although we “Rabbis to be” will not be able to answer every question put to us, we will be able to know where to go and look for the answer to any question we cannot answer immediately. I immediately knew exactly where to go to answer this question. As the students looked on, I whipped out my cell phone and googled it! There were, I told the students, 304,805 letters in the Torah. In addition, there were 79,847 words in a Torah scroll. In fact, the Talmud tells us that the early Sages were called “soferim”, or “counters” because, so dear was the Torah to them, that they counted every letter and word. To this day, a person who writes a Torah is called a “sofer” – a counter – and not a “kotev” or writer.

A D’var Torah for Parashat Vayeira
By Rabbi Heidi Hoover (’11)

At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Vayeira, Abraham is sitting outside his tent at the hottest part of the day. God visits him. Our rabbis tell us that this is an act of compassion on God’s part. The reason Abraham is sitting isn’t just that it’s the hottest part of the day—too hot to work or do anything, really—but also because he’s recovering from having circumcised himself, as God had commanded him to do at the end of last week’s Torah portion.

This is where we derive the duty to visit the sick—we are emulating God, who visits Abraham when he is recovering from surgery. God, who is so much more important than Abraham, takes the time to come see him when he isn’t feeling well.

And look at the effect it has on Abraham, who must be toward the end of his Read More >

by Cantor Sandy Horowitz

“`Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run”
Bruce Springsteen

Parashat Vayera begins, “Vayisa einav vayar v’hinei shlosha anashim — And he [Abraham] lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold three men stood by him”; it continues, “And he saw them, and he ran (vayaratz) to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself to the ground” (Genesis 18:2).

These opening verses are often cited as a central example of the virtue of hospitality. The active verbs provide a reminder that being welcoming is not a passive, receptive experience but rather a course of action, as we read how Abraham then spoke to the strangers, offered them food and water and a place to rest, and then rushed to prepare the food, enlisting his wife Sarah in the endeavor.

In addition to the act itself of being welcoming, is Abraham’s willingness to run towards something unknown in order to perform an Read More >