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Vayera
"“God appeared to Abraham in Elonei Mamrei, as he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day.”"
The eighteenth chapter of Bereishith is structurally difficult to understand. It can be divided into three parts:
1. G-d appears to Abraham as he is sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day (verse 1).
2. Abraham looks up, sees three men and invites them to rest and have a meal. They are reluctant, but Abraham prevails on them and they eat. During the course of the meal, they tell Abraham that within a year Sarah will have a child. Sarah, overhearing, laughs, but G-d assures Abraham that it will be so (verses 2-15).
3. The men depart to go to Sodom, and the dialogue between G-d and Abraham on the fate of the city takes place (verses 16-33).
In scenes 1 and 3 the participants are G-d and Abraham, in scene 2 they are Abraham and the three visitors. The structural question is therefore: what is the connection between the three scenes? Are they three distinct episodes, or two, or one? What is the narrative logic of the passage as a whole? In particular, how are we to understand the first verse? It is unusual, even unique. G-d “appears” to Abraham but there is no apparent content to this appearance: no words, no speech, no substance. What is the connection between it and the verses that follow?
Rashi offers one interpretation. G-d’s appearance in the first verse is “to visit the sick.” Although Rashi is citing a midrash, his reason for doing so – for believing that it represents the plain sense of the verse – is twofold. The first is contextual. The previous chapter has told of Abraham’s circumcision at the age of 99. Painful at any age, this was an operation that made Abraham frail and weak (in Bereishith 34 we read of how Shimon and Levi persuaded the men of Shechem to be circumcised; they were so weak three days later that the two brothers were able to conquer the entire town). Following the midrashic assumption that G-d’s conduct is a model for ours, Rashi infers that the first verse teaches us, by Divine example, the mitzvah of visiting the sick. The second reason is substantive. It explains why G-d “appeared” without saying anything. Normally, a Divine appearance is a prelude to an act of communication, but there are times – visiting the sick – when mere presence is enough. Rashi thus brilliantly solves the problem of verse 1. The structure of the chapter, according to this reading, is that verse 1 is a scene on its own. G-d visits, and thereby brings comfort to, Abraham ailing after his brit milah.
Rambam offers a radically different explanation (Guide for the Perplexed II: 42). “The general statement that the Lord appeared to Abraham is followed by the description of the way in which that appearance of the Lord took place, namely that Abraham first saw three men; he ran and spoke to them.” According to Maimonides, the first verse of our chapter is not the description of an episode at all: it is a chapter heading, a summary, in advance, of the rest of the chapter. First the Torah states, in general terms, that G-d appeared to Abraham, then it describes how, namely in a vision of three men. (It was this latter point – that the entire sequence of events narrated in chapter 18 occurred in a prophetic vision – that evoked a passionate objection from Ramban, who held that it was absurd. If the three men of chapter 18 were a mere vision, what of chapter 19, where two of them leave Abraham and visit Lot? Were they also a vision? Was Lot a prophet? Were the people of Sodom prophets when they surrounded Lot’s house and demanded that the men be brought out? Was the entire destruction of the cities of the plain also a vision? “Such words” says Ramban of Maimonides, “contradict Scripture. It is forbidden to listen to them, all the more so to believe them!”). Whatever view we take of Maimonides’ interpretation of the concept of Divine “appearance”, the structural point remains. Verse 1 is a superscription to the chapter as a whole, not a separate incident.
There is, however, a third interpretation, by far the most radical. According to this, there were two events: G-d’s appearance to Abraham and the visit of the three men. However, the second interrupts the first. G-d appeared to Abraham, but before He could say what He intended to say, three men passed by. Abraham interrupted G-d, asking Him to wait while he attends to the needs of his visitors. He then runs to meet them, persuades them to rest awhile, prepares food, serves them while they eat, then accompanies them on their way. Only then does the encounter between G-d and Abraham resume.
The point of difference between this reading and the others turns on the interpretation of verse 3:
He [Abraham] said, “If I have found favour in your eyes, my lords/O Lord, do not pass your servant by.”
There are two possibilities:
1. Abraham is talking to the three visitors (“my lords”). He is asking them not to pass by but to stay, rest and eat. The sentence shifts between singular and plural (plural “my lords”, singular “do not pass by”) because Abraham is addressing the men collectively, but specifically directing his words to the one he takes to be their leader or senior.
2. Abraham is speaking, not to the men but to G-d, saying: “Please G-d, do not leave. Stay while I serve the visitors.”
The difference between the two turns on a single vowel. If we follow the first interpretation, the nun of the word A-D-N-Y carries a patach; if the second, a kametz. This is halahkically significant. In the first case, the word simply means “my lords,” but according to the second it represents the name of G-d and must therefore be treated with special sanctity. Tradition chose the second route. The word A-D-N-Y in 18:3 was deemed to be holy and to refer to G-d (unlike its occurrence in 19:2 when Lot is speaking to the angels, where it was judged to mean “my lords” and is therefore vowelled with a patach).
This is an extraordinary fact. Halakhic tradition ruled in accordance with the most radical reading, according to which Abraham interrupted his encounter with G-d in order to welcome passers-by. This is the basis of the rule – no mere figure of speech but meant categorically – that gedolah hachnassat orchim mi-kabbalat pnei ha-Shekinah, “Greater is hospitality than welcoming the Divine presence.” One of the Hassidic masters put it beautifully. When Abraham first saw his visitors they were “standing above him” (nitzavim alav). They were angels; he was a human being. When he served them with food and drink, however, he “stood above them” (omed alehem). Kindness to strangers lifts us higher even than the angels (Degel Machaneh Ephraim).
With this interpretation of the narrative structure of Genesis 18, Jewish tradition expressed one of its most majestic ideas. There is G-d as we meet Him in a vision, an epiphany, a mystical encounter in the depths of the soul. But there is also G-d as we see His trace in another person, even a stranger, a passer-by; in Abraham’s case, three Arab travellers in the heat of the day. Someone else might have given them no further thought, but Abraham ran to meet them and bring them rest, shelter, food and drink. Greater is the person who sees G-d in the face of a stranger than one who sees G-d as G-d in a vision of transcendence, for the Jewish task since the days of Abraham is not to ascend to heaven but to bring heaven down to earth in simple deeds of kindness and hospitality.
What empowered the sages to reach so daring a conclusion? Quite simply, the continuation of the narrative. When told of the impending destruction of the cities of the plain, Abraham, calling himself mere “dust and ashes,” rises to challenge G-d Himself:
Then Abraham came forward and said:
“Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?
What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?
Will You really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?
Far be it from You to do such a thing – to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from You!
Will not the judge of all the earth do right?”
There is no precedent, nothing in the history of civilization, to prepare us for this remarkable confrontation whose echoes reverberate through Jewish history: the argument with Heaven, against Heaven, for the sake of Heaven, the covenantal dialogue between G-d and man, the protest against suffering in the name of justice.
What understanding of the human condition, what religious sensibility, empowers an Abraham to challenge G-d? One that sees the Divine presence in human lives more powerfully even than in a prophetic vision. Abraham looked at three strangers and treated them as if they were angels, to the point of breaking off a conversation with G-d Himself to attend to their needs. Only such a man can challenge the verdict of Heaven. Only such a faith can bring the Divine presence into the finite world of humanity.
What then is Morality?
What then is morality? I want to suggest that moral systems are our languages of relationship, and that an insight into language helps us understand morality. John Locke, one of the key figures in the development of political liberalism, was also a pioneer in the study of language. He believed that the mind of a child is a blank sheet of paper, on which over the course of time it paints pictures by reflecting on experience. The child learns words by generalising from what it perceives. It is not difficult to see, in this charming portrait of the child as a kind of miniature scientist working alone in the laboratory of the sensations, some of the key themes of the Enlightenment: the solitary individual, the rejection of anything beyond sense-experience and reason, and the use of inductive science as the model of knowledge.
We now know, thanks to the work of Wittgenstein, Chomsky and others, that this account is false. Language is a social phenomenon, based not on private experiences but on shared understandings and rules. Though there are many languages, underlying them all is a universal grammar which we seem genetically conditioned to acquire. It is, so to speak, part of our computer hardware, or what Steven Pinker calls our 'language instinct'. Without this we cannot account for the speed and consistency with which children learn languages. They simply could not do it the way Locke thought they did, by unaided inference from the available data.
This suggests an old-new insight into the nature of morality. We do not learn how to behave by private reflection on the basis of experience. We do so by acquiring socially constituted rules, from our first faltering conversations with our parents, to our ever-widening dialogue with others. Just as there are many languages, so there are many moral systems, and we can no more move between them than we can learn a new language without painstaking effort. None the less there is a deep structural similarity between the great moral traditions, akin to Chomsky's universal grammar. The difference between moralities led some people to regard them as relative. The similarities between them led others to think of them as universal. We can now see that both are half-truths.
Particular forms of moral life - specific codes and virtues, traditions and institutions - are as varied as the forms of human speech. Nevertheless, we do not think of our language as 'relative'. Instead we regard it as our essential vehicle of self-expression. It is true that we can adopt another language, but only at the cost of becoming part of another culture, a different form of life. Moralities also share certain universals - those already mentioned, such as the prohibition against murder, theft and dishonesty - but this is only at a high level of generality. In the real world of moral experience, universals are translated into codes and customs, our moral language as Britons or Americans in the late twentieth century. It was the mistake of the Enlightenment to concentrate on universals while failing to understand the critical importance of particulars - the actual ways of life of families, communities and traditions. But a grammar without a language is not yet speech. The result, as Charles Taylor rightly calls it, has been an 'ethics of inarticulacy'.
Morality is like a language: subtle, complex, but with its own distinct coherence, its rules of syntax and semantics, its grammar and vocabulary. Within a language there is an open-ended variety of things' we can say, and each of us makes sentences that have never been said before. But as individuals we do not make the language. We learn it. We inherit it. We enter its unique yet universal configuration of virtues. We become part of its history, extending it into the future, developing it perhaps, but also participating in its continuity. In the West we are heirs to a moral heritage, Judaeo-Christian in origin, but amplified and enlarged by a host of other influences, the way English has grown from its Anglo-Saxon roots, borrowing in the process words, phrases and constructions from other tongues. It is part of our culture; consciously or unconsciously it shapes who we are. Like language we learn morality through a series of conversations and encounters, most -markedly in early childhood, but in a sense throughout our lives. The idea that we invent it - making it through our choices or by reasoned reflection on private experience - is as incoherent as Locke's theory of the way we learn words. No language could be acquired that way.
(From The Politics of Hope Random House 1997 – pages 217- 219)