Va-Yeira: How Hospitality Happens

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This past Shabbat at Ohev Shalom we dedicated our Saturday morning services to welcoming and honoring our new members. I would like to share with you my sermon from that service:

As you know, today is our New Member Shabbat. So what I thought I would do is show our new members how we approach Torah study here at Ohev Shalom. Right off the bat I’m going to tell you that the governing principal is to find relevance and meaning for today in the Biblical texts of our ancestors.

I wholeheartedly believe that we can find significant lessons in everything we read in the Bible. Sometimes through the stories themselves, sometimes through juxtaposing what we read with how society functions today, and sometimes by arguing and fighting with the text.

In other words, it’s not that we learn from Abraham, Moses, King David, and Esther how to live necessarily, that we should always follow their lead. Instead we see that reading the stories of their lives affords us the opportunity to examine our own lives. The most important message is: The Torah is inviting us to a dialogue. Engaging the Bible, and our ancestors, in conversation is a part of our heritage, and an essential part of our culture.

So let’s take a look. Today, in honor of our new members, I am going to focus on the issue of hospitality, and display for you two models of good hospitality and two models of bad hospitality. And I think we can learn just as much for our own lives from each of the four different stories.

We’ll start off with a model of good hospitality. Our Torah portion opens with Abraham sitting at the opening of his tent, and the commentators say that he was recuperating from having circumcised himself (and let me reiterate my personal comment on this from last week: yikes!). He sees three visitors approaching from afar, and he runs to greet them. It turns out that they are angels, but Abraham didn’t know that at the time. To him, they were just passing travelers, but he welcomed them into his home with open arms nonetheless.

He offers them food, he begs them to come and stay with him, and he and Sarah act as the perfect hosts. In fact, it’s such an impressive model to us that whenever a Jewish couple gets married, they do so under a chuppah, a wedding canopy, with openings on all four sides, which we say is symbolic of the tent of Abraham and Sarah, which was open to all. It’s a metaphor for welcoming in guests, for always having an open home to help others and share the warmth of our families with those less fortunate.

But it’s not just a model for our individual homes. It’s a model for our congregation as well. As a community, we should also be running to welcome visitors. We should have an open building so that new members, such as the ones sitting here today, will feel invited in, but also so that less fortunate individuals in our wider community will know that we are here for them as well.

And we are especially impressed with the hospitality of Sarah and Abraham when we juxtapose it with the model we see in the very next story. The angels proceed from the warmth of Abraham’s tent to the icy cold reception they receive when they visit Lot in Sodom. Sodom and Gomorrah, as we all know, are about to be destroyed, and seeing the way people behave in these cities, we understand why.

All the people of Sodom seem eager to hurt these visiting angels, without ever explaining why. But as jarring as this part of the story is, I find myself focusing on something else. When Lot tries to protect his guests, the people of the city yell back at him, “’Stand back! The fellow,’ they said (meaning Lot), ‘came here as an alien, and already he acts the ruler! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.’” (Gen. 19:9)

How sad it is that Lot, who has lived there for years, is derogatorily called “an alien.” Sometimes communities create a hierarchy, where those who have lived 50, 60, 70 or more years in the congregation perceive themselves as better than others. New people feel as though they aren’t welcome, or that they have to earn the respect of the community before they will be accepted. Such is not the case here at Ohe Shalom, where we try to welcome everyone, and there isn’t at all a sense of pecking order, of some people being “more” congregants than others.

Later on, after Sodom and Gomorrah received no bailout money and went bankrupt (to put it mildly), Abraham and Sarah travel through a land called Gerar. Abraham is worried that the people will not treat them well, and will kill him to get to his very attractive wife. So instead he has Sarah say that she is his sister. How many of us don’t face that same dilemma all the time??

But surprisingly, the people of Gerar are upset that Abraham didn’t trust them. King Avimelech quickly restores Sarah to Abraham, and gives him sheep, oxen, slaves, silver, and even says to him, “Here, my land is before you; settle wherever you please.” (Gen. 20:15) Sometimes we don’t know how we will be perceived when we move to a new place. But we have to give the locals the benefit of the doubt, they may surprise us! Abraham didn’t know what to expect, but it turns out the people of Gerar were more than happy to share their land with him, and welcome him in as a neighbor. And the same reception awaits our new members here at Ohev.

Our fourth story doesn’t paint Sarah or Abraham in a very generous light. After the birth of their son, Isaac, Sarah insists that Abraham kick out their servant Hagar, who has a son by Abraham, named Ishmael. Once again, we don’t learn how to act by following the example of our ancestors, but instead by challenging their decisions. We learn about hospitality by saying, “I might have played that differently.” We might have tried to make space for both wives and both sons, and we would have tried to carve out land and inheritance for both sides of the family.

But the most important lesson we learn here is; guys, don’t take two wives. It’s bad news. Nobody gets along, everybody fights, and all you do is create headache, heartache, and heartburn for yourself. We have the benefit of learning from Abraham’s mistakes, and this one is a biggy.

So once again, you’ve got your two models of good hospitality, Abraham and Sarah with the visiting angels and King Avimelech of Gerar, and your two models of less-than-ideal hospitality, the people of Sodom and Abraham and Sarah with Hagar. But ultimately, the message from all four stories is the same; you can learn a lot about your own life from the stories of the Bible. There are plenty of lessons, if we only take the time to investigate and let the Torah be our teacher.

Just looking at the four stories as a unit teaches us something, why are Abraham and Sarah in the good category AND the bad category? Because nobody’s perfect. Sometimes we’re on our best behavior, and sometimes we fall short. And I want to say the same to all our members here, new and... well, less new. We’re not going to be perfect as a community. We are going to be there for you, as a part of your lives and the lives of all your family members, but we may not always get it exactly right, or be there just on time. We hope that you will be understanding, patient, and sometimes even forgiving.

When I look at the stories in the Torah and compare them to what we try to achieve here at Ohev Shalom, I have to say that we measure up pretty well. We do hospitality quite well here. To all of our new members and our visitors here today, I want to say that you’ve come to a very warm and welcoming congregation. And just as the Torah invites us to dialogue with it’s stories, we invite you to join us on our journey, and help make Ohev Shalom an even more warm and friendly place.

I began by saying that Torah study for us is about finding meaning and relevance in the texts of our tradition. Right now, throughout the world around us, I see people searching everywhere for meaning and relevance. And what we learn is that the first clues to finding an answer lie in the words of the Torah, but the real solution is in the community we create.

The Bible helps us to examine our own lives and evaluate what we’ve created,

but only we can make meaning happen. Only we, when we come together as a congregation and extend that hospitality and warmth to everyone we meet, can achieve a life of fulfillment and value. And here at Ohev, we are already well on our way to creating that kind of community. Welcome to our journey, we are thrilled that you are joining us.

Shabbat Shalom!