A D’var Torah for Parshat Vayera by Rabbi Steve Greenberg
Three tired and hungry travelers are accosted by an old man. He is running, actually limping toward them. He beseeches them to come back with him and to take some nourishment, some food and drink, to rest their feet for a bit in his home. He prepares for them not a snack, but a feast.
This story of welcome in Parshat Vayera is in our people’s DNA. Abraham sits at the door of his tent. God appears to Abraham, but then does not say much about that appearance. Abraham makes out the shapes of three travelers in the distance. He runs to greet them and invite them in for food and drink. Of course we know the story: they turn out to be three angels sent to him and to Sarah to announce the birth of Isaac and to respond to the cry of Sodom.
It is important to recognize what the text is doing with this juxtaposition. Abraham and Sarah’s tent is set in contrast to the city of Sodom. The two environments are polar opposites. Our parents’ tent, open on four sides, is a welcoming oasis — the city of Sodom is a locked fortress. In Sodom, the sages tell us, there are rules designed to keep out undesirables. Itinerant travelers, vagrants, homeless folks are zoned out. Sodom was something like the first gated community. Only Lot, a nephew of Abraham, is willing to break the law and welcome in guests.
Abraham and Sarah’s tent is a different world. In Sodom, other people’s needs are experienced as an immediate loss. The outsider will make you vulnerable, the hungry will deprive you of what is rightfully yours. In one way or another, you will lose. In Abraham and Sarah’s tent, while there is no opulence, there is plenty. Other people’s needs are the contexts by which we share God’s gifts and bring down blessing upon all. Culturally speaking, welcoming in the stranger is a defining quality of Abraham and Sarah, our first father and mother. It is who we are.
However, as defining of covenantal identity as welcome is, it is among the most difficult demands made of us as Jews and as people.
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First, it challenges us to shift priorities.
Let’s go back to the primal scene of Abraham and the angels. “The ETERNAL appeared to him in the plains of Mamre” (Genesis 18:1). The easiest way to read this line is as an introduction, a chapter title, or headline of sorts. Then when the angels appear in the next verse, we understand that they clarify how God appeared to Abraham — that is, in the form of three angels. While some medievals, like the Rashbam (Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, grandson of Rashi) read the text in this straightforward way, this is not the choice of the rabbis of the Talmud.
They instead suggest that this verse tells us that, immediately after Abraham circumcised himself and his household, God independently appeared to him in a marvelous revelation of Presence. While in the midst of an other-worldly, divine-sick visit, Abraham notices, far beyond his tent, three moving figures, strangers on the road. He wants the ecstasy of the divine visitation to continue but feels pulled toward the traveling wayfarers. Maybe they are tired, thirsty, hungry? It is in this tension between spiritual fulfillment and a stranger’s physical needs that Abraham is tested. The Talmud suggests that this moment of conflict can teach us something important about the power of welcoming guests:
Rav Judah said in Rav’s name: Hospitality to wayfarers is greater than welcoming the presence of the Shechinah, for it is written, And he said, My lord, if now I have found favor in thy sight, please do not leave….Rabbi Eleazar said: Come and observe how the conduct of the Holy Blessed One is not like that of mortals. The conduct of mortals is such that an inferior person cannot say to a greater man, “Wait for me until I return.”
(Talmud Shabbat 127a)
Abraham’s plea, “please don’t leave,” is not spoken to the three men, but to God. He sees the travelers and requests divine patience while he takes care of the human beings. The conflict and its resolution in the minds of the sages becomes a paradigm: greater is welcoming in guests than receiving the Divine Presence. The rabbis are not presuming regular Shechinah visitations, but they are telling us that people often put their own spiritual needs ahead of taking care of other people’s physical needs. It is clear at least for this text, that this is the wrong order of priorities.
Second, welcoming guests challenges our notion of how far that welcome should extend. In Maimonides’ description of the many duties of loving kindness (gemilut chesed), he first lists all the ways people help each other, and he includes the welcoming of guests. However, in the very next passage, he cites our text, not only in regard to the welcome itself but in regard to completing the welcome by accompanying the traveler a bit on their way. Here are his words:
Rambam Yad, Laws of Mourning, Chapter 14, Law 14:1
It is a positive commandment of the sages to visit the sick, comfort the mourners, carry out the dead, accompany guests on their way, organize the burial of the dead, carry the bier on one’s shoulder, to walk before the casket, to eulogize, dig the plot and burry the dead and likewise, to gladden the bride and groom, and to help them put together their new home. All these are gemilut hasadim accomplished by one’s body and there is no limit to this. Even though all over these specifics are defined by the sages, they are all under the rubric of “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Find more commentaries on Parshat Vayera.
Taking in guests is one of the rabbinic enactments, like dowering a bride and burying the dead. They are not independent mitzvot in the Torah, but each of them is a fulfillment of the biblical command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Whatever we would wish done for us, we must do for others. Maimonides, however, adds that taking in guests, and especially accompanying them for a bit of their journey, is the greatest mitzvah of all.
Law 14:2
The reward of accompanying (the guest on their journey) is greater than the rest. It is the law that Abraham, our father, established and it is the way of kindness that he practiced—to feed travelers and give them drink and accompany them on their journey. Greater is receiving guests than receiving the Presence of the Shechinah, as it says, “And he looked up, and behold, there were three men.” And accompanying them is greater than receiving them. Our sages said: All who do not accompany (the stranger who is your guest) it is as if you spilled blood.
Why should this application of “love your neighbor” be greater than the rest? Could it be that hachnassat orhim, the welcoming of guests, is the greatest fulfillment of gemilut hasadim because it is identified with Abraham and so a sign of covenantal identity?
At the very end of this law 14:2, Maimonides adds that accompanying the wayfarer for a portion of their journey is even greater. Why? Might this suggest that there is a need for direction or protection that visitors could require? This must be a circumstance of some threat or danger for Maimonides to say that failure to accompany a guest is akin to spilling blood!
Welcome, it appears, does not end at the door. It is a commitment to walk with vulnerable guests as they emerge from the protection of our homes and enter the public square. Accompaniment announces: “This person I have sheltered continues to be under my protection even now.” Allies accept a measure of personal risk when they walk in public with a feared or hated outsider. This sort of courage protects the stranger and, in time, it can transform communities.
In schools today all over America, young people are forming gay-straight alliances. It is a way for friends to rally behind the LGBTQ kids in school and serve as a shield of sorts. Since every student organization has a teacher who serves as an advisor, students are aware of at least one adult in the administration in whom they can confide. The members of a GSA include allies which can help young people find a supportive social environment even before they are ready to come out of the closet. It is both a protected sanctuary and a courage-building context for creating allied support in the halls, the lunchroom, and the playground.
At the end of this week’s portion, Abraham plants a flowering tamarisk, an eshel tree, to signal to distant travelers where refuge can be found. The mitzvah of hachnassat orhim and its fearless fulfillment is a mark of our covenantal identity and the fullest expression of the commandment to love. It reminds us that our attention to other people’s physical needs rates higher than our own spiritual achievements. And like so many moral achievements, it begins at home, b’shivticha beveitecha, as we share meals with new friends and it expands boldly, b’lechtecha baderech, as we walk by the way together, into the public square.
Rabbi Greenberg offers this coda for anyone interested in a short Talmudic tale, “On the Satan’s Lesson of Welcome,” that extends the lesson.
Rabbi Steven Greenberg is the author of Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (University of Wisconsin Press), for which he won the Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought in 2005. Rabbi Greenberg is presently the Founding Director of Eshel, an Orthodox LGBTQ+ community support, education and advocacy organization.
Eshel is named for the flowering tamarisk tree that Abraham plants near his tent at the close of Parshat VaYera to signal refuge and welcome to travelers. For more information about Eshel, and our efforts to expand the mitzvah of welcome, click here.
