Torah Posting: וירא
Oh god, here we go.
This parashah is what it all comes down to, if you ask me. My middle name is Yitzhaq, so I have really had to work with this story, and — spoiler alert — my take is this: There is, actually, an original sin in the Torah. It’s not the heritage of all of humanity, though, but rather — like the Torah itself — the heritage of a particular lineage, the children of Yisrael.
Yisrael’s father, Yitzhaq, is imprinted with it in this week’s parashah by his father, Avraham, who has been wrongly praised for it by those as blinded by zeal as he was.
Even God is horrified.
In the sense that Avraham’s insane thesis causes Yitzhaq’s mundane antithesis, allowing Yisrael (né Yaakov) to create a spiritual synthesis, it was “good” in the sense of being necessary.
In the sense that it terrifies God into a change of tactics, it is perhaps even morally “good.”
But it is a sin.
That’s just according to me, though. I don’t know very many Jewish authorities who would allow me to remain in the room after saying something like that.
But I know a few.
Anyway, let’s get into it.
Avraham is in his tent in the heat of the day, and he sees God in the form of three men. The text says “וישא עיניו וירא” — “and he lifted up his eyes and saw” — that catch phrase is how you know someone in the Torah is having a holy vision.
He runs to meet them and begs them to let him serve them, and they assent. He does so lavishly. In fact, he serves them dairy and meat at the same time, isn’t that interesting?
In return for Avraham’s charity, the men bless his wife, Sarah, that she will have a son next year, as God promised Avraham she would. Sarah, overhearing, cackles with laughter, because the two are so aged. The text even says, slightly euphemistically, that she had gone through menopause.
God, hearing this laughter, is offended. He speaks to Avraham, not her, and muses, “היפלא מיהוה דבר” — “Is anything too miraculous for יהוה?”
Sarah cuts in, addressing God directly, to say, “I didn’t laugh.” It says she does this because she’s afraid, yet here she is interrupting the God who will only talk about her to the man to speak with God herself.
If this strikes you as a funny folktale moment that belies the typical rigid patriarchal interpretation that has accrued down the generations, it’s okay with me to assume that that’s because it is one.
God says, “Yes huh,” and then the men rise and look off toward the city of Sedom.
Avraham gets up and goes with them to guide them along the way, and then God gets worried and starts talking to Godself. We know from foreshadowing that Sedom is a wicked place, but God has not revealed God’s intentions even to us. But now God is muttering about how righteous Avraham is, and how he will raise whole nations in God’s ways, and God is wondering whether God should traumatize this man by revealing God’s terrible intent to him.
But God decides to go for it. Oh well.
We know God has developed a conscience about wiping out the whole world after the Noach incident, but God has heard some awful things about two cities in particular, Sedom and ‘Amorah, and so God wants to send his men-angel-messenger guys to investigate to see if it’s really as bad as God has heard. God doesn’t say God will destroy the cities, but Avraham intuits it, and he protests. Avraham bargains God down to 10 righteous innocents. If 10 can be found, the cities will be spared.
That evening, two angels arrive at Sedom. Tradition has it that these are the same beings Avraham encountered as “men,” but to Avraham’s lesser relation, Lot, they appear in their glorious form as מלאכים, Divine Messengers. Lot greets them and does his own version of Avraham’s hospitality routine, but they decline, preferring to hang out in the streets and get a feel for the city. He convinces them with a feast, and they stay with him.
Sacred hospitality is the theme of the parashah so far.
Before they even get to bed, the men of the city surround the house and demand Lot produce his guests, whose Divine countenances they cannot even see; to them they are just “men” again. “ונדעה אתם,” they want to “know” them, biblically.
Lot is horrified, instead offering his virgin daughters — you know, his property — so that they won’t do something wicked, like rape a guest under his roof. That’s the reason Lot gives, that they are his guests. Not that they’re “male” (they’re angels).
The daughter thing doesn’t work, don’t worry; that’s not the point. The point is, everybody who believes the “sin of Sedom” is homosexuality has the reading comprehension of… well, someone who is completely obsessed with homosexuality but also does not understand what they’re reading.
That part is incidental to this story. It’s bizarrely out of context to mention it. This entire parashah has been about how righteous people treat guests like royalty. These city folk want to rape them instead. You want to be like Avraham’s family? You feed and clothe and bathe and honor your guests. You want your city to be leveled by God? Sexually assault people who come to stay there.
If you are looking for explicit condemnations of homosexual acts in the Torah, or other instances of laws of sexual morality you want to use against people, we’ll get to those, and you’ll contend with them in their context.
You want to read them into the story of Sedom? Make sure you aren’t missing anything way more important about how to be a good person that the story might actually be about. Just saying.
(P.S. If you don’t buy my interpretation, perhaps you’d find the one in the Bible more convincing.)
Anyway, the angels have seen quite enough. They blind all the sex pests, and then they encourage Lot to evacuate his entire family from this godforsaken place. They tell him it’s going to be so bad that they shouldn’t even look back at the evil place, or they’ll be consumed. Get out of the valley entirely. Go up the mountain.
But Lot is too scared to go up the mountain. He asks, please, can we just go to this other little city? It’s just a little one. The angels roll their eyes and say fine.
Once Lot’s family reaches the little city, God absolutely nukes Sedom and ‘Amorah, and it’s so wild that Lot’s wife looks back, and she is instantly dehydrated into a pillar of salt.
After this, Lot is too scared to even stay in the little city, so he flees with his daughters to live in a cave. Then a truly awful sex scene takes place with no condemnation whatsoever, almost as though the text wants you to conclude that sex is not the moral issue in the Sedom and ‘Amorah story.
Lot’s daughters, apparently, feel bad for him being all alone now or something, so they get their father so drunk that he is literally unaware of them, and they have sex with him and get pregnant.
Now the message here is not that this is okay. Obviously, it’s disgusting. This is the way the lesser family line is transmitted, in awfulness and squalor.
It’s just like, when the Torah wants to show a horrible sex act, it does. In the city, that’s not what happened.
Okay, enough of that. The iniquities of the plain are clearly just meant to contrast with the holiness of Avraham in the mountains.
Avraham and Sarah stay with another guy, and they have to do the “that’s my sister” trick again, and the identical thing happens. Traveling around and being a prophet is just risky like that, I guess. But it results in magical healing and many riches for everyone. Avraham’s prophet reputation continues to spread throughout the land.
At last, God visits Sarah as promised, she conceives a son, they name him Yitzhaq, and they circumcise him at eight days old, the first chance to really do it properly. They have a bris, they have a feast, and Hagar gets jealous because her son, Yishmael, is clearly being replaced. Sarah gets defensive and demands Avraham cast her out. Avraham doesn’t want to; Yishmael is his son, too, after all. But God tells him to listen to her, and that Yishmael will be a great nation, too.
Avraham provisions them for the journey, though. So far, in this story, his character is that of a supremely caring and providing guy.
Hagar and Yishmael still get lost and run out of water, though, and she fears he’s going to die, but God saves him, speaking directly to her of his great destiny, and she receives a vision of a (real) well, which saves their lives. Theirs is a bit more wild and wooly of a story, but there is no question God cares about the destiny of Yishmael’s line, too.
Avraham, now rich from all his many “she’s my sister” gambits and resulting fortunes, makes a land deal with a local to settle some disputes. They make a good, honest deal, Avraham and the Pelishtim. (Please say that word slowly and carefully once or twice.) Some land’s his, some land’s theirs, it’s a covenant. “And Avraham sojourned in the land of the Pelishtim many days.”
I’m not saying this is any kind of legally valid historical agreement or anything, I just find it poignant.
Okay. Whew. Here we go.
One day, God decides to test (נסה) Avraham.
God calls out to him. Unlike Adam in the garden, Avraham answers forthrightly: “הנני” — “Here I am.”
God tells Avraham to take his son — his dearest, beloved son — out into the wilderness, and burn him as an offering on a mountaintop.
And Avraham just gets up and the morning, saddles his ass, gathers his servants and his firewood, and does as he is told.
On the third day, “וישא אברהם את–עיניו”, he lifts up his eyes and sees the place from afar.
Avraham tells the servants to stay behind. One wonders what he plans to tell them when he gets back. He and Yitzhaq set off up the mountain; Avraham makes Yitzhaq carry the wood. Yitzhaq says, “Dad?” Avraham says “הנני” again. Yitzhaq asks Avraham where the lamb is that they are offering. Avraham LIES TO HIM.
This is an important point. I know Christians do some horrific things with this part, to which I say, get your own pretext for your messiah, and get your hands off my family tragedy.
Avraham says, “God will see to the lamb for the offering, my son.”
The simplistic take is, this isn’t a lie. This is a demonstration that Avraham has perfect faith that this is what will happen, and he knows he won’t have to kill his son.
The problem, as Christian theologians who think this is some kind of Dan Brown Da Vinci Code foreshadowing for their foreign future-religion point out, is that the animal that eventually shows up IS NOT A LAMB. (Obviously, Jesus is a lamb. But also a guy.)
Why don’t we just… read the actual story in its native culture and language for now, okay?
Avraham has just lied to his son. He intends to murder his son, and he lied to him about it, so Yitzhaq won’t freak out. And we know we can read it this way because later Yitzhaq is saved by a ram, not a lamb, and he knows that, and thus he finds out that his father — who was about to attempt to murder him — had no fucking idea what he was talking about.
They get to the spot, and Avraham stacks the wood, then ties Yitzhaq up and puts him on the pile.
An entire verse is spent describing Avraham stretching out his arm, raising the knife, and intending to murder his son.
Then God’s messenger stops him. Avraham has passed the test. He has not withheld his dear son from God, the God whose creation thus far is a world in which God’s favorite family is ancestrally traumatized by devastating violence at their Creator’s hand for religious reasons.
Avraham lifts up his eyes again, and sees again, and behold, there is a ram, not a lamb. Obviously, Yitzhaq saw that, too.
Avraham and God then have a wonderful time together, much exceeding blessing is conferred, the servants are retrieved, and Avraham’s family proliferates some more. End of parashah.
Yitzhaq is not even mentioned again, much less do they speak to each other.
Did Avraham pass the test? His visions of God say so.
Let’s find out in coming weeks how it went for Yitzhaq.
🐏
