Genesis 2015 Vayera

Vayera  (rewritten)

Sometimes it’s one thing after the next. Things happen so fast that we can barely keep up.  Not only is the  community on the move... there’s a decision to empower our hold on God with a new  kind of covenant. There’s an epiphany, perhaps important visitors, healing, messages,  absolute evil raging just over the mountain, fire, war, incest, inner destruction, accusation, jealousy, childbirth and sibling rivalry.

Ah….let’s bring this to today. Well...there’s absolute evil raging just over the mountain of our hearts, fire, war, incest, inner destruction, jealousy, childbirth and sibling rivalry.

We keep trying to swim through it all…the change in job perhaps, the move, the  visitors, the honoring of God, the honoring of the angels among us, the healing, the birth of our new baby, the love for our first baby, the (past) lover and the wife or the husband, the pain, more pain, more joy, our relations with foreigners on whose land we happen to live whether Americans or Canaanites.

  

In fact, the world is spinning so fast that time stops being linear. In Vayera, when Abraham  says, please let a little water be taken  Rashi connects this comment with the taking of water from the rock (by Moses) centuries later.  The same Hebrew imperative is used: yakach. 

This means we can't even depend on time!. Not even the linear chronological flow of time! Events from the future weave into those of today. Events from the past remain within our thumb prints.  There’s a promise of the return of a messenger the following year…There’s the idea of a baby being born after a woman reaches menopause.

Then, while it all seems really strange, with caves and daughters seducing fathers and a wife turning into salt…when  it all seems like out of a Goya painting or a Scorsese film or a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez…outlandish with wells popping up from dry earth and compassion-less decisions on the part of our matriarch…when Torah feels filled with some of the dizzying cruel actions and speech we know so well today…a normal occurrence happens.

It’s normal for Abraham at least.

He’s told to sacrifice his son.

This was the way of the people back then. We today don’t like it.  We don't like it at all.

The truth is though it’s the only run of the mill thing that happens in the parasha. It’s a relief for that time. And even if Abraham is dying for relief, for normalcy, for a breath, for the same old actions in the same old place, for anything comfortable and regular, for the norm, for the same mizbach,  the same ways to honor the same God, something so he can stop, get off the mad train of change, grip onto something foundational to his ancestry…he  rejects  the norm.

He rejects it because he loves his son and because he knows that his love for God (according to Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook)  can reach beyond the pagan rites of his ancestors.

Ahhhhh…yes….what if we could perform that kind of radical change today despite the on-rushing charge of communications, the fiery flashing of our I phones, the soccer games and meetings we must attend, the dinners we must make and the rules we feel we must follow? What if we could apply that process of norm-changing and norm-adaptation to our very rabbinic texts? To our process of cultivating the earth? To each other no matter race or religion? 

What if despite our yearning to embrace the same literal interpretations, the same prayer books, the same rules in a society seemingly galloping wildly and violently into a distant sunset…What if we re-structured a few rites and regulations as does Abraham for the survival of our children?

The mystic of the 18^th century, the Sfat Emet, says that every moment is an opportunity to bring sparks of light to the mundane.  Can this opportunity become our foundation in an ever-changing world?…. Can it grant us the breath we need and the strength so that desperate and fast times won’t mean gripping blindly to dated destructive habits? Can this vision...and the vision of Abraham in the Binding of Isaac... be our new recyclable energy when we are running on empty and can this vision become the absolute norm when we yearn for  the comfort of sameness?

Of course it can. It was this for Abraham.