Sermons

Shabbat Va-yeira 5786

You can watch Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below.

I wonder if the storytellers of the Bible knew, two and a half millennia ago, that they were creating stories, narratives, sagas, that would be read until the end of time? They must have been aware that they were crafting, weaving, a set of stories to give one people, the Hebrew people, the Israelite people, a tapestry of meaning, of identity, to wrap themselves inside, a verbal tallit woven out of words, words that gave their people a sense of belonging, a sense of continuity, a sense of being enveloped in an evolving story; and they may have glimpsed too how they were crafting texts where the readers, the listeners, would understand that they were inheritors of, and participants in, an unfolding holy drama that each generation was writing with their lives. But they couldn’t have known, surely, how long these narratives would last, how long their inspired verbal craftsmanship would remain part of the world’s literature and find an enduring place in human consciousness.

Of course we can’t know what they thought they were doing. And maybe it doesn’t matter what they thought they were doing. What matters more, perhaps, is what we think we are doing, faithfully reading and chanting these texts week after week, century after century, in an endless cycle of celebration, reverence, puzzlement – sometimes boredom - in a process like alchemy, where we take the ancient time-bound material and – hopefully - transform it, transmute it, into something living and sustaining, something that transcends its rootedness in a small, insignificant Middle Eastern tribe and becomes ours, something that nurtures the soul and fertilises the imagination, that speaks from what is far away and long gone and yet can touch us and speak to us here and now.

Va-yera – the name of the sedrah is taken from its first word (Genesis 18:1). We could spend all our time with this one word. ‘And there appeared’, ‘and there was seen’, ‘and there came into view’. It is like the start of a play: someone is sitting at the threshold of their home, their tent, their doorstep, their stoop, their front porch – we could be anywhere, in the desert, or the outback, or the Lower East Side, or a coastal town in Kent, or the leafy suburbs of any city; and three strangers appear. The drama is universal – strangers appearing in the heat of the day, ‘out of nowhere’ (as we like to say). Although of course they have always come from somewhere.

And our authors, our dramatists, our storytellers conjure up these strangers, these new arrivals, who appear on the doorstep of our hero – Abraham in our story - whose first response is the key to what follows. He ‘looks up’ (va’yar) ‘he sees’. Attuned to the rhythms of the Biblical narrators, we notice the repetition: ‘Va-yera … va-yar’, passive and active forms of the verb ‘to see’.

First comes the theology – Va-yera Adonai , ‘the Eternal One appeared’ , or just ‘the Eternal appeared’ - and we the readers, listeners, are let into the sacred dimension of the story, a story about how divinity reaches us through other human beings. Something appears over the horizon of our consciousness, something comes into view, Va-yera - and Abraham responds va-yar: ‘and he looked, he saw’. Does he ‘see into’ what was unfolding? Does he understand its deeper significance? The text doesn’t tell us.

What Abraham sees is three strangers and his response is instinctive: hospitality, generosity, food and shelter. And in the chapter we read today, chapter 19, Lot too – Abraham’s nephew – is sitting at the gates of the city, in the cool of the day, and two strangers appear and he too (the text emphasises it), he too va-yar, ‘and he looked, he saw’ (Genesis 19:1) and he invites them to spend the night in his home: hospitality, generosity, bowing low, deference, a deep identification with what it means to be strangers in a strange land. And we remember that he too, like Abraham, had been a stranger in a strange land – they were immigrants from Ur of the Chaldees, making a new home for themselves far from their original homeland.

Migration is the universal story, we are all guests on the planet: here the universal story of human migration over time, over generations, is refracted through the particular tale woven by the narrators of the Torah, weaving a story for their own people in which they intuited – or so I like to think - that hospitality and generosity would be foundational to collective human survival on the planet.

I do like to think this, it gives me pleasure to think this. That the Torah teaches what it means to be human through its storytelling. At times these texts feel inspired by an understanding of the most profound truths about the human condition – but not in a sentimental way, for as this text in

Genesis demonstrates, the Biblical texts speak about both the human capacity for kindness and the human capacity for savagery.

We see how Lot’s actions are contrasted in the story with the aggression of the inhabitants of Sodom, who want to grab these strangers and subject them to the humiliation of rape (19:5). Gang rape is as universal, our Torah narrators know, as hospitality and generosity to strangers. Read the daily news, look up from your cornflakes and see what’s been happening in Sudan. The benign and the brutal reside together in the human heart and the dividing line between the two might be thinner than we fondly imagine, or wish to know. You see it as this story progresses, when Lot refuses to surrender his guests to the mob, but instead offers them his two unwed daughters. And our modern sensibilities are outraged. The mob are not to brutalise the two strangers but they can do what they like, it seems, to the two young women (19:5-8).

But before we have time to absorb this act of desperation by Lot, before we have had time to label it and judge it as misogynistic and patriarchal and contemptible – which it is – our storytellers craft a verse which on the level of straightforward narrative storytelling is redundant but at a deeper level, emotional and moral, is a moment revealing their sensitivity to a timeless dynamic. “Stand back”, says the mob, “step aside…this guy [i.e. Lot] is an outsider come to live here and now he’s telling us what to do, let’s get him!” (19:9). I am translating colloquially because the Hebrew here becomes vivid, colourful, idiomatic; this is the language of populism at work. We know this dynamic only too well. This seemingly redundant verse shows how displacement works as the mob shift the focus of their anger from the strangers to Lot, the defender of the strangers. Again, watch the news, listen to the denigration of, the attacks on, not only immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees but on their defenders, the lawyers or parliamentarians or Church of England clergy or charities who advocate for those who arrive on our shores seeking refuge and protection.

The psychological depth of these texts continues to astonish me. As we listen in to, see into, the inner dynamics and moral complexities of the stories, we realise that the storytellers are not just talking to us, they are talking about us. And part of their giftedness seems to be how often they refuse to resolve the moral ambiguities of the lives they speak about.

They might signpost directions for us to pursue, but they often leave questions radically open, as for example in this story where we have Lot’s protectiveness towards the strangers juxtaposed with his callousness to his daughters.

But the narrative isn’t finished with these two women. Their honour remains intact as the mob turn their fury towards Lot. At this point the two strangers intervene - and the mob are temporarily blinded (19:11). What’s going on? As we read this, we too can’t see what is happening. Like the mob, we can’t find a way to get in: we stand outside the text, dazzled by a mystery. What is happening is blindingly unobvious (to coin a phrase). But the bottom line is that Lot is saved, along with his family - and this includes his two young unmarried daughters.

And so, as this tumultuous apocalyptic chapter ends, having fled the city, Lot finds himself without a wife, living in a cave with his daughters (19:30) – two young women who turn out not to be so innocent after all. In a bravura scene of compassionate and dispassionate storytelling, the women ply their father with wine, and over two nights each one lies with their father and is impregnated by him. The women know that the survival of the family, the continuity of the family – and for all they know after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the survival of the human race – depends on them. The young women prioritise life over death, the continuity of life over questions of conventional societal morality.

As so often in Biblical storytelling these women are anonymous, but their role in the story of their people – although far from unambiguous from a conventional moral perspective, as is Lot’s drunken activity in this scene – is nevertheless momentous. We might even allow ourselves to call it seminal. As our chapter ends, we note how the storytellers cast no aspersions on their characters or their taboo-breaking behaviours. It merely gives us the names of the children the women bear: Moab and Ben-Ammi, the progenitors of the Moabites and Ammonites. And that’s it: factual, unemotional, non-judgmental.

We readers, well versed in the texts of Torah, know that these tribes will become the traditional enemies of the Israelites. Which doesn’t sound like a great heritage for Lot’s daughters to be responsible for. Except that – and here’s the genius of the Biblical storytellers with their penchant for dazzling plot reversals and subversion of our expectations – we come to realize that one of the later consequences of what Lot’s daughters and Lot did is that a certain member of the Moabite people named Ruth enters the family of Israel, becoming part of the Hebrew people, and marrying Boaz; and the Book of Ruth lets us know that from this lineage comes royalty – no less a figure than King David. And later Biblical texts will suggest that through David’s line the Messiah, or the Messianic kingdom, will arise in the fullness of time.

From incest to Davidic royalty to Messianic hopefulness. These stories complicate and undermine our wish for moral certainty – they keep us alert to the messiness, the baffling unpredictability of life as it unfolds through us and within us. This is what makes them, for me, Torat Emet, as our Torah blessing says: a ‘Torah of truthfulness’.

But sometimes we glimpse what is true only in passing, out the corner of our eye. But still, we keep on looking.