Rabbi's Message

This week’s Torah portion, Vayera, opens with the well-known story of God appearing to Abraham as he sits at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. The story gets complicated right away, as it appears that Abraham quickly leaves God to tend to three visitors who also appear at the entrance of his tent. He washes their feet and provides them food, water, and shelter, all while seemingly snubbing his most prominent guest, God.

How could Abraham put God on hold and run to greet his guests instead? The Talmud explains that this story teaches us a remarkable Jewish principle: welcoming guests (hakhnesat orkhim) is an even greater mitzvah than greeting the Divine presence. Even a conversation with God gets placed aside in order to perform such a virtuous deed of welcoming guests, and there are no greater teachers of this than Abraham and Sarah.

I think we can take this lesson even a step further and say: when we welcome people into our community and our homes through practicing kindness and generosity, we also welcome God into those spaces as well.  Yes, this is a lesson about the importance of hakhnesat orkhim, but perhaps most of all, it is a lesson about RESPECT.  

In a recent article published in The Times of Israel, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the well-known mother of Hersh, a hostage taken by Hamas into Gaza on October 7th, 2023, and found murdered in a tunnel at the end of August 2024, writes about the lost art of respectfulness.  In her great wisdom and fortitude, she writes that “the most decent thing we can do in this complex and loud world piled with confusion and brokenness…” is to treat others with care and respect.  And then she writes: “We seem to have lost this ability as a people. There is so much internal disagreement and strife in our Jewish world, and it has not served us well. I think our challenge as we limp forward toward the light… is relearning how to listen. We have to master how to give space and oxygen, allow the person with whom we disagree to share their ideas, and try to understand them. And then they, too, should allow me to do that.” 

As we continue to worry about our brothers and sisters in Israel, as we look out at our all-too-broken world, and as we reflect on last week’s election results and the political fracture of our country that is now abundantly clear, Rachel’s words resonate deep in my soul. We must summon respect as a leading virtue. And in doing so, we will hope it will be returned in kind, but even if not, we will stand behind this core Jewish value.  There will be difficult days ahead.  Challenges await us. However, as my youngest, Eliana, learned to say in our Eric B. Jacobs Early Education Center: “We can do hard things.”  As we all teach our children, we must remind ourselves that we must lead with respect. So, “let us work on the art of respectfulness.”