About the episode
Parshat Lech Lecha 5787
Parshat Vayera 5787
Beresheet 18:1-22:24
Haftorah: Telling, Laura Hershey
Guest: Rabbi Lauren Tuchman
contemplativetorah.substack.com
This episode was primarily recorded on erev Tisha b’Av! If you catch a mournful vibe...
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Host: Rabbi Ariana Katz | arianakatz.com | @rabbiariana
hinenubaltimore.org | @hinenubaltimore
fortimessuchasthesebook.com | @fortimessuchasthesebook
Editing: Ev Bowen
Music: Gevurah by Molly Bajgot | mollybajgot.com | @mollybajgot
Art: Liora Ostroff | lioraostroff.com | @lioraostroff
Transcript
Ariana Katz: This week's parsha is Parshat Vayeira, Bereshit 18:1 through 22:24, and I am thrilled to be joined today by Rabbi Lauren Tuchman. Thanks for teaching us Torah, Lauren.
Lauren Tuchman: Thank you for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here
AK: So I'm gonna tell everybody else who you are, and then we'll jump in. Based in Washington DC area, Rabbi Lauren Tuchman teaches, consults, and leads workshops across North America on disability access and inclusion, bringing a deep commitment to radical inclusivity and the belief that anyone can take hold of Torah and contribute their unique insights.
An alum of the Svara Kollel and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality's Clergy Leadership Program, Rabbi Tuchman is a teacher in multiple Jewish mindfulness and meditation communities and is completing advanced training in Jewish contemplative practice. In 2024, she launched Disability Wisdom as Soul Care in partnership with Kirva, and she writes the Contemplative Torah Substack.
Do you say contemplative or contemplative?
LT: I usually say contemplative
AK: Okay. Okay, good. Rabbi Lauren Tuchman, I am so grateful that you are here to help us make sense of this week's parsha. Can you give us a quick rundown of what happens in Vayera, which is more challenging this week than perhaps in other weeks?
LT: Yes, absolutely. So Vayeira is one of those parshiyot that is action-packed. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give us the highlights. We start with the famous scene of Avraham and the angels, and they meet him at the heat of the day and tell him, "You're going to have a son next year." And the r- the famous response from Sarah around that. Then we move very quickly into the infamous, I guess we could call it, tale of Sdom and Amorah, but also known in English as Sodom and Gomorrah. We hear all about Lot. We hear about his daughters. We hear about his wife becoming a pillar of salt. We hear about some wells. We hear about some conflict with Avimelech. hear about some conflicts in the family, and we're gonna talk a lot about that today. And we end we have the portion in this parshah with Yishmael and Hagar being banished. Then we have, we end with the Akedat Yitzchak, the sacrifice of Isaac, or the near sacrifice we should say, of Isaac.
AK: Spoiler
LT: a lot happening in the parshah. And we will be focusing our time on the story of Sarah, Hagar, and Yishmael, and Avraham, and the way in which that family drama plays out. This text may be familiar to some as we read it on Rosh Hashanah in many synagogues around the Jewish world. This was read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.
And I've been quite puzzled for many years as to why the rabbis, when they, as they put the liturgy together, chose Genesis chaf alef, Genesis 21, as the text for the first day of Rosh Hashanah Something that I find so tremendously freeing about reading Bereshit, Genesis, year after year is that we encounter anew our very human, very flawed ancestors.
And we do so as different people every year. And even more, we do so as different people every day And what I mean by that specifically is that this year, we may have encountered this text in Rosh Hashanah one way. We may be encountering it very differently today as we're reading it as part of the cycle of Torah readings And I think that there's something exquisite about that, about the openness to shifting and changing, about the ability to ask ourselves profound questions that these texts invite They invite us to really do some deep introspection How many times have we found ourselves in situations like this, where it has felt easier to create an outcast, to literally banish someone from the only home they've ever known into the desert than to confront our own discomfort?
And while most of us, I would wager, have not engaged in such dramatic action in our own lives, the paradigm that we are invited into in this text really allows us to ask the question, "When has this arisen in our own experience?" And even more so, it allows us to ask the question, "How is this arising in our world today, and specifically in our own communities?"
How do we witness something so hard? How do we witness a system that is multi-layered, in which so many of the players are in a society in which their own social marginalization is not addressed, and in a world in which the hierarchy that exists, that is hurting everyone, means that people turn on one another and castigate one another and vilify one another?
What happens when we do that? What happens when laughter is misperceived as something sinister? What happens when jealousy, when resentment, when frustration around one's own social station in a human-created system of hierarchy based on arbitrariness means that that resentment gets turned on someone else, someone who has no social tie in the household that she has been forced to live in?
And what does it mean when the tradition subversively, as it does in last week's parasha of Hagar in Genesis 16, invites Hagar to name the divine, the one who sees me, the one who witnesses, the one who understands that I have been taken out of my home, that here I am in the desert, that I am struggling, and that I am profoundly downcast.
But the divine knows that, and it reminds me of what our beloved teacher, rabbi, friend, Dr. Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, often says about God on wheels. We often ask ourselves the question, "Where is God?" But what would happen if instead we asked ourselves the question, "How have I created a barrier to the divine?
In what way have I shut God out? In what way does this text do that? In what way do these human dynamics, these painful, devastating human dynamics result in the divine being shut out of this text? And how might we bring that divine presence back in?" How might we invite ourselves to examine this text and ask ourselves how we can bring the divine back in, how the divine can connect with each of the characters in the text?
But even more so, how, just as we witness the brokenness and the devastation of our family, so too does the divine. And may it give us the courage and the strength of conviction to trust so deeply that we can in fact write a new story, that these texts can teach us so much about the kind of a tradition we know is possible, and our own agency in its creation.
AK: I would love to to start by talking about Isaac and Ishmael. Their their relationship is core to what is covered in this parsha, and The conflict between them is just a legacy that we have inherited. The conflict that is perhaps manufactured between them is a legacy that we have inherited still to this day.
I was struck in chapter 21 by verse 11, "Vayira ha-devar meod ve'einei Avraham al odot bno," "The matter distressed Abraham greatly, for it concerned a son of his." So l- looking at chapter 21, we're jumping into the instruction from Sarah to banish Hagar and Ishmael, and this is Abraham's response. He's greatly distressed, and it, it mirrors and reminds me of the commentary on a verse in the next chapter when God is giving Abraham instruction to take his son to the mountain.
So the verse itself in chapter 22 says, "Kach et bincha et yachidcha asher ahavta et Yitzchak," "Take your son, your only son that you love, Yitzchak." And of course, the meforshim, the commentaries panic here, because why is it so repetitive? and I learned this from Rabbi Jacob Staub, the, there's a comment in Bereishit Rabbah 55:7 which says that the conversation actually, they imagine it going in its fullness in this way.
He, God said to Abraham, "Take, I pray you." And Abraham answers, "I beg you." And God says, "Your son." Abraham says, "Which son?" And God says, "Your only son." And Abraham says, "But each one is the only son of their mother." And God says, "Who you love." And Abraham says, "Is there a limit to the affections?" And God then says, "Isaac!"
But this unique love of Abraham to Ishmael is so often, in at least the ways that I have seen it taught contemporarily, de-emphasized, that Abraham's love of Ish- of Ishmael is is de-centered to emphasize how much Abraham loves Isaac. But both in this moment when he's told to banish his son and in this later moment when he's told he has only one son and he refuses to buy into that idea, he says, "No, I have two sons.
What do you mean?" He's in excruciating pain. He loves both of these children, and Ishmael is his firstborn son. And I'm just, I'm so struck by this devotion that Abraham has to his son and the despair of him being sent into the wilderness, and I'm curious, like this year, in this moment, in this time, what are you making not just of Isaac and Ishmael's relationship potentially to each other, but of Abraham's relationship to Ishmael?
I think it's so important that we spend time on this because the Torah and this midrash that is so beautiful make it abundantly clear, as you've just said, that Abraham is in incredible distress because Yishmael, his firstborn, is being banished, and how can he do that to his own son? And it's really quite difficult to imagine that the divine, who is infinite, and whose love for all creation is infinite, is somehow going to then say, you need to limit that."
And we need, I think, in our communities in this time now, in this moment, to reteach ourselves, if we've forgotten, that Avraham adores Yishmael,
And that's not in any way a diminishment a limiting of the love that Avraham holds for Yitzhak. certainly, we don't hear about this week, but it's certainly not a limitation on the love that Avraham holds for the many other children he has later
These are not his two only kids. So that is essential, that we have to remember this is excruciating. A father is being told by his to banish his child. Why? We don't actually know. The Torah just says, you know, "Yishmael was playing." And we don't even know what that... Like the Mashforim and lots of other commentators have a, quest, asked themselves, like, "What does that mean?" The Torah itself, the pshat of the text, doesn't tell us why. We have no inclination. You know, we can tell ourselves all kind of stories about, like, was Sarah jealous? Did she not want the inheritance of Isaac to be compromised? That seems to be the pshat of the text, that seems to be the
Main point of the text. But we've gotta really come and confront this directly, that this is part of our sacred story. And how do we reckon with that? And I think one of the ways we do is to recognize that Our father, Avraham, is also the father of Yishmael. These are our cousins. These are our blood. These are our family. He is in mourning and grave distress because of this. And what would it be for us to really try to hold that compassion and that empathy? I really wanna just encourage us this Shabbat, as we're reading this parsha, to take a minute and really just be with that human pain
as you're talking, I'm finding myself feeling angry. No shit you're sad. You're going to abandon your son to the wilderness? Abraham is an adult. He chose to do this. The... I don't know. I...
Sarah can say whatever she wants, Abraham can say whatever he wants. He is in distress, but he is also choosing to abandon his child, and I think for us as descendants of these ancestors we're of course, I think, tenderized, especially as Jews, to to see that the descendants of Ishmael that we understand as our Muslim or as our Arab cousins are we are from the same family, and this is a horrible moment that happens to our kin, therefore we should see any horrors that happen to Arab people as our kin who are being hurt, and how much more devastating that that we are witnessing that still happening now.
But we're also descendants of Abraham. We're descendants of a father that would, at the instruction of his wife, not an instruction of God, say, "Yeah, let me abandon my child." And I'm curious as a teacher of meditation and of compassion how am I, and maybe anyone who's listening who agrees with me in this moment, how are we supposed to relate to Abraham in this moment?
Like, yeah, of course you're distressed, but make a different choice.
I agree with you entirely, right? As they say in, as they say in Musar, you know, we have what's called the bechira point, the choice point. Avraham, as you said, as an adult, he is making this choice, right, ultimately. that's, I think, the other key thing. We live in a world where, and I think it's been part of human nature for a long time, we really don't want to take responsibility for our choices, right?
Or we really want to bypass,
And we want to be like, "But I was so sad. It was, you know, I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to abandon my own child to the wilderness. But my wife was really into it, and I was like, 'Ugh, I guess I got to go.'"
is that taking act-actual responsibility? It's not. So I mean, we can have compassion. I would say, you know, in this moment, the compassion that I feel is for Hagar and Yishmael.
Avraham.
Yeah
And what does it mean for us as our, as his descendants, I think that it's actually... You know, one of the things about the Book of Genesis in general that I think is often spoken about, but I don't think actually people really delve into what this means. But the Book of Genesis really presents our ancestors as the very flawed people that they are. And, you know, often we say, you know, self-congratulatorily, right, we're like, "Our tradition doesn't claim that our ancestors are, you know, saintly or perfect. We show them as they are." Really easy to say.
How many of us, you know, how many commentaries have we read who try to paper over, "Oh Avraham was just really stressed out. He didn't want to do it, but he felt like he had to, and he's still a r- You know, when he did all this other stuff with, Sdom and Amorah he begged God to save the righteous."
It's like, complicated. And, like, how much more free, freedom can We feel? How much more spaciousness we're like, "Yeah, this was a terrible, terrible choice"? It's, it's here in the Torah. is part of our kin's decisions. We don't have to continue that. We can make a choice, and especially in this moment, it seems like it's almost impossible, but it seems like it's absolutely essential. We can make a different choice. What way do we want to live out our Judaism? How do we want to be in relationship with our extended family, with our immediate, our chosen families?
Like, how do we want to be in right relationship? And what are the choices that we are making strain... I mean, who amongst us doesn't have a familial situation is strained, that is challenged, that is not as we'd like it to be? And what are the ways in which our choices really constrain us from fully taking responsibility?
Like, how do our limited perceptions, how does our fear especially, what was Avraham so afraid of? Is clearly his beloved firstborn son, has the name Yishmael, but God will hear him. He's got that divine connection. what is the fear here? Why is he making this choice? he makes it again with his other son in going on? I have more questions than I do answers, but what I implore us to do is invite the questions. And I think, and this is also important, I think, for me to say, is like when we own the challenge, we can also then tradition as well, because we can't pretend away the difficult. There's such a tendency, especially when we are feeling, or people in our communities, you know, whether we ourselves are feeling this way or not, when you feel, when you feel under some kind of threat, whether it's perceived or actual, right? And wheth-- like caught between a rock and a hard place, whether or not those of us in this moment share that feeling, there's the tendency to want to defend and circle the wagons.
you know, he had to be banished because da, da, da, da, da," whatever, whatever reason people will come up with, right? Out of that smallness, out of that fear-based, out of the, But, This is a good tradition and I know this thing happened." It, uh... can we hold two things at once? This is what practice teaches me. This is what I think our tradition actually teaches, although I'm afraid that we have forgotten this in the last few years. we hold like, this is terrible, and I'm gonna fully own that, I'm gonna fully take responsibility that this is in the ancestral tradition, and that then allows me to reengage with and honest
It feels impossible to read this text And not be thinking about the Israeli-perpetrated genocide against the Palestinian people and, um And that this is the text that we read on the morning of Rosh Hashanah. So for folks who were in shul over the last few weeks, you've heard this read aloud already, and being asked to figure out how to own your own distress in pursuit of focusing attention where it should be on the most impacted people.
Um, I think that, you know, that mirrors the, the process of teshuvah, right? Noticing your own self so that you can repair where there is harm, or in how Jewish people who are against the genocide are finding spaces to talk about our own moral injury and needing to do it in a way that re-centers attention on the genocide that's being done in our name.
And that, that tension and getting at in the right size, um, is, is necessary for our, for rigorous political practice, spiritual practice as if they were different things. In pursuit of that, let's talk about the people who are most hurt in this chapter. This is Hagar and Ishmael. So Bereshit 21:15-16, and I'll try to read it without crying.
"When the water that Hagar brought out into the wilderness was gone from the skin, she left the child under one of the bushes and went down and sat at a distance, a bow shot a bow shot away. For she thought, 'Let me not look on as the child dies.' And sitting far, she burst into tears." So I wonder if you can speak about just the horrors that Hagar and her son Ishmael are forced to endure in the wilderness, and then what you make of Hagar's relationship
to God.
and
what we should know about Hagar and Ishmael this year
I mean, I can't, I can't really hear it without crying either, been in shul in the last few weeks, you've heard it, and you've heard a sermon about it. Maybe you've spent a little time with it. it's always been interesting to me that this gets read on the morning of Rosh Hashanah, So hard to not just wanna cry.
I mean, the first thing I would honestly say is like, so often our tradition, you know, for our own safety, because it's portable, we go into our head space, right? it's like text is the portable homeland we carried on our backs. We've lost everything else. That's what we have to return to. So there's this tendency, right, when we read things like this, like, "Oh, let's go into the head immediately.
Let's go into the head. Let's try to explain it." I actually wanna invite us to the heart just to feel How awful for a mother to sit so far from her child so that she doesn't see the child die. How awful to be in this home that is not yours for so many and then to lose your child that you had on behalf of your enslaver And it's, and it brings me no joy say that, right?
This is not, you know, the reckoning is not a joyful... It's a painful, it's a heart-rending thing. And I think in that process of reckoning, as we've all had to do over the last few years, right, like, as we've all had to navigate the horrors in Gaza, the horrors in the West Bank, the horrors in this text, there's this tendency, I think, in a lot of our circles to then be like, oh, you know, to take it on, to personalize it, and be like, "We're bad.
Like, this is so bad. We're bad, we're bad." You know, this sort of self-punishing impulse, right? It's like, look at these horrors that are being perpetrated, what am I gonna do but turn it on myself because I have nowhere to go with the anger, I have nowhere to go with the anger. I have nowhere to go with the moral injury And maybe gives us the space to just, you know, without trying to answer any questions, to just face it directly.
Just be like, "Yeah, there were horrors in the wilderness. Hagar thought she was gonna lose her child. Thank God did not Thank God. Thank God. Thank God. This is also not, as we know, uh, uh, not the first banishment. And in the first banishment in Genesis sixteen, which is not part of this week's parasha, but I'm mentioning it just 'cause there, there's a through line, Hagar gives Hashem a name.
I think it's f-- it may be the first char-- the first, um, person Tanakh to do that. And Hagar refers to the divine the one who sees me, the one who knows me, the one who understands pain that I'm in. And I love the fact not only that Hagar refers to Hashem as the one who sees me, but also Yishmael's name is, as I said earlier, Yishmael.
will hear him. There is a sensory, a direct experience of the divine that they have access to. Hashem is not bound by all the stuff that into our minds. And, you know, that's one of the things that for me, my meditation practice has really helped open, is all of the stuff that is in the brain.
You know, all... Like when you're, when you're sitting in meditation and you're doing different practices and it is, like sometimes in the midst of that, you, you come directly panim el panim with your own scorn, your own anger, your own all of these mind states that we have. And we honor that they're there.
We're not bypassing any of them, right? But when we recognize that they're present, then we can turn towards. But I don't think it's so easy to do that, right? It's easy to say, "Turn towards your pain at reading this Great. Sure. How? How do I do that without becoming so consumed by it, right? Like, how do I...
You know, thinking about Tisha b'Av is this moment of communal wailing. You know, this text also is very, has been very present for me, this Tisha b'Av, or this past Tisha b'Av, right? As I thought about, all of this horror. But if we do that in isolation, it only makes our ability to move forward that much harder, which is why I think the tradition is so wise in its infl-- on community.
And I think that we just have to... I think the first step is honestly just to cry. And to recognize that Hashem, that there's no distinction between human beings in the divine's perspective Every one of us is beloved
And that Hagar, her connection with the One, makes that like, says like, "Yeah, this is it. This is who me." It reminds me actually a bit of what my beloved teacher and friend Rabbi Julia Watts Belser reminds me all the time, right? Of like that sense of what would it be if the divine knew the human experience from the inside out?
What if we really believed that was true? Maybe we as people can't know that directly. I mean, my own experience has taught me, as a disabled person, my own experience has taught me that like people are so limited by their own perspective and their own experience of the world. But the divine isn't. But we have to then emulate.
You know, the tradition teaches us to walk in the ways of Hashem, right? if Hashem is infinitely merciful, as we have n- now chanted many, many times on the high holidays, hopefully that's still ringing in our ears, right? As we've chanted, as Hashem is merciful, so too must you be merciful. That is the way of the children of Abraham.
So I pray that we take this opportunity to emulate the midot of Hashem.
Thank you And it it requires confrontation we have to confront Abraham's grief We have to confront the brutality of this this parent thinking that her her son will die of thirst and this child who may die of thirst That in order What I'm learning from you in this moment is in order to be able to be merciful and compassionate and act from that place we have to be able to witness right Like El Roi and and In order to be that
force of mercy we have to also be uh present and not bypass the
the pain
Yeah. And as part of that witnessing, you know, maybe this, this week as we are being with this parsha, one tangible thing we can do is think about how our resources are distributed, right? Maybe we've already done a little bit of that during the high holidays. Maybe we've given some tzedakah to organizations, working on behalf of Palestinians who've been impacted by the brutality of the war. maybe we do that. Maybe we have brave conversations That may be really hard to have. Maybe we write our own Torah commentary on this. 'Cause I think that that's another thing, right? We are links in a very long chain of Torah that's really sustained us, and I believe that part of the work of confrontation in this moment is meeting the tradition on its own terms. So we have all the meforshim and all of the previous sages Whose wisdom is our foundation, you know, and upon which we stand and rest and are. we also have wisdom. We also have experience. We also have knowledge in our bones. also have witnessed something that in my lifetime I never thought I would, and causes me immense grief know that I'm alive in this moment as this has arisen in my own tradition's name.
Mmhmm
It's absolutely heartbreaking. It doesn't have to be the end of our story either, we cannot go to the next chapter if we don't confront what's here right now And it's not gonna be an easy road. I don't even know if it's gonna happen in our, you know, in the time that we are on this planet together. I don't know what's gonna happen next. But what I do know is that what is the-- what can I... You know, in those moments when, as, um, my teacher, my beloved teacher, uh, Rabbi Bene Lape talks about, you know, those moments when you wanna go option two, which basically is, uh, shorthand for jump ship. outta here. You know, who amongst us hasn't had that feeling in the last Just, ah, get me out. Like, get me out of here. This is not my-- these are not my values. This is not who I wanna be in the world. Just get me out of here, right? Like, be real. Who hasn't had that thought, you know? But ultimately, as Rabbi Bene Lape teaches, that will inevitably crash, too, right?
So this is where we lean all the way into option three. Option three is acknowledgment. Option one, I should say, is the walls higher, pretend nothing's different. Option three is the hardest and the most generative because it says gotta confront what's happened. We've gotta do teshuvah ongoingly, not only during the high holiday season, but every day. And we can dream about a better tomorrow where this will never again Not to us, not to Palestine, not to anybody. But in order for that to be these texts that are so easy to just by because they're hard,
Mmhmm
we've gotta honor this is here. This is part of our real inherited
Uh, a member of our, of my congregation, Hinenu, who was raised in a, an Orthodox family and and educated in Yeshiva, we were studying this parsha together a couple of years ago, and this moment of Hagar.
saying, "I cannot "Look on as the child dies," is used in, a certain, a certain strain of thought to be used to condemn Hagar.
To say, "Look at this mother who wouldn't comfort her son as he died." To, to use to, to put distance between the pain. And this entire chapter can be read as a necessary evil to preserve the Jewish people. And I w- I, I, I'm still really shaken and disturbed at the idea that this moment of a, of a parent not knowing how to comfort her son through death is a condemnation of Hagar and of Ishmael, and of all of the descendants.
and I'm, I'm just very disturbed at what it means to have a sacred text that depending on what you value, you can, in some really key ways, interpret it however you want. We can impose our morality onto the Torah, and
Torah doesn't change, we do And so the Torah can take our bad takes, which is why we're allowed to have as many of them as possible, 'cause it's not gonna hurt the Torah if we interpret it wrong. But I just, I am so disturbed at the ways we can use this text that Jews have and do use, the story of Hagar and Ishmael, as a reason to perpetuate continued genocide or to, with a genocidal perspective, read this text and feel okay And besides just witnessing, like what is, what does it mean to option three our way through this chapter? I guess you said to work for a different version in the future, but just in sitting with this text this week
How am I supposed to
How am I supposed to read the same Torah that my neighbor a town over is reading with a completely different perspective?
Yeah That I think is one of the most important moral questions of our time, because as you said, Torah doesn't change, we do. And we impose, to, to use your language, our morality onto the text. And we use the text in the ways that meet our human needs so that the text is made in our image, right? And I'm thinking about the story that you just shared about your congregant's experience with this text, and I'm, you know, I've heard that interpretation before, and it doesn't disturb me any less any, every time I hear it, right? And I think, you know, something that I think is really helpful, and I find myself doing this quite a bit, is just honestly saying to people, religion is practiced by human beings who are so conditioned by prejudice, by racism, by violence, by ableism, by all of the things that the human mind. And they're gonna take that.
If it's not checked and examined, they will self-justify, right? Through using a text as self-justification. And it's... that moment, my only response Is to say, "I've gotta put my voice out there even more." And we have to, as liberal Jews especially, I think we have to get through our sense of imposter syndrome, our Torah isn't as rich, interpretations aren't as grounded, that we don't practice. 'Cause ultimately, you know, I'm very moved by something that I read by Jericho Vincent some weeks ago, in which they talk about that actually every... And I may get this wrong, so forgive me, I, this is just me remembering it now. But that actually every group within our family, right, if we think of the Jewish people as, like, a large family, going to take a part of the lineage and not the whole. Right?
And they're gonna take a part of the lineage, like, for all kinds of reasons that I am not here to justify, because I f- I find so much of Torah has been used to be so distressing and deeply out of alignment with my profound that Torah is in, can be a path of peace, as we say every time we put Torah away. But that's up to us. You know, as we learned recently, a couple of weeks ago, in, um, Para- in Parashat Nitzavim, what did we learn in Parashat Nitzavim a couple weeks ago? That lo bashamayim hi. And what did we learn in Gemara? That in fact, the Talmud this idea, it's not in heaven, it's very close to you, as a way where, God, in that beautiful text about Tanur Shel Achnai and the oven of Achnai, says, "My children have defeated me." It's up to us to not self-justify our own bigotry through Really. the end of the day, it is up to us, and it is up to us to learn how to question those in authority who claim of Torah, yet dis- incredibly disturbing... You know, I mean, the reality, I think also for us as a, as a community- So many of our neighbors, religious traditions, whether it's Christianity, of course everything's a work in progress right now, of course, but you know, lots of other traditions, Christianity, you know, many others, in one way or another, although ev- every, every community has many challenges, have gone through necessary religious reexamination And I think we have too many ways over the centuries,
Mm-hmm.
think we must continue that in the spirit of the sages of Yavne. Yochanan ben Zakkai was, w-was very wise. We are too at a Yavne moment
Can you articulate for our listeners who are not familiar with the story of Yavneh
Yeah. So when Yerushalayim was being destroyed, and there was a siege, and it ended in the of the Second Beit HaMikdash, this, the, the destruction of the Second Temple, Yochanan Zakai, I think, kinda got a sense of like, "What's going on? is not gonna end well. Give me Yavne and his sages," he proclaims. He puts, he gets put in a coffin. His students take him out of Yerushalayim. They take him north to the Galil, to the Galilee, to a place called Yavne, um, which I think is also interesting 'cause it means he will build. there he
Mm-hmm.
the yeshivot and the infrastructures us Rabbinic Judaism. We would not be here, although of course Rabbinic Judaism is not the only kind of Judaism that persisted, but it became the dominant expression. And I think it is fair to say that after the cataclysmic of the Temple and the, the ways in which that led to its own destruction of the inhabitants of the land, we would not be here it not for the forethought Rabban Yochanan ben Zakai and him saying, than our tradition worshiped through sacrifice in the Beit HaMikdash," which really was the center of everything, right?
It was the center of how the Jewish people understood ourselves in relationship to the, to the divine. And with that loss of that home, that, like, axis mundi, as the academics like to say, that axis mundi was lost- What we had was our text, and that text carried us through thousands of years. And not only that, but it changed fundamentally how our tradition is practiced. We began to pray. There were synagogues during the time of the Beit HaMikdash, but synagogue became what the Beit HaMikdash had been, a place of gathering and community and prayer and expression of devotion, words replaced sacrifice, and mitzvot acts of devotion in the temple. And so now, we, I believe, and I, I don't think I'm alone in this, and I don't even know what's next, but I think we are at that moment again. And I genuinely have no idea what that means, but I feel in my soul that we are at a moment of and discontinuity, just as Yavneh was continuity and discontinuity. In one way, it was discontinuity because it was the fashioning of an entirely new practice, was continuity because the rabbis claim Torah as their foundation, right?
Everything is rooted back in text. What if we do the same without getting rid of what's come before, saying, "Here we are in this rupture. We don't know the other side of it, what we do know is that we're living at a time where there are options that are emerging, that are inviting us into different practices, different understandings of who we are as a peoplehood, what Torah is.
But don't ask us to leave Torah behind, but ask us to thoroughly re-encounter, renew, and strengthen our own sevarah to guide us forward into whatever this next chapter," which by the time you hear this, we don't know what's transpired. We don't-- We're not gonna know what's next, but the tradition has been here before.
Rabbi, thank you so much for helping us find our way through just a little bit. I, I feel my, my own capacity to witness a little bit stronger because of your Torah. Thank you
Thank you
So before I let you go, we are on Left at Sinai building a haftarah that does not hinge on texts of conquest. And so I wonder what text would you add to our haftarah for this week's Torah portion?
I would add one of my favorite poems as our haftarah, called Telling by Laura Hershey. Zichrona levracha. One of my favorite poems. And Laura Hershey, may her memory be a blessing and revolution, a disability rights activist, spiritually informed, and a poet. And in this beautiful poem called The Telling. Um, she talks about why our stories are so important what happens the marginalized tell our story, what the risk is that we take. We bore them. We c-cause them to question who they think they are. And I'm, I'm finding it both excruciating and extremely important to hear the stories that I don't wanna hear.
I
Hmm.
we have to tell them, because as the poem ends, when we tell our stories, we give people that, that sense of possibility that they can do the same. Something can change. If our ears, if our neshamas, if our hearts are open, and if we have the container to process the grief, maybe we can move to transformation
Can you hear it some? Thank you so much for teaching us Torah
Thank you so much for having me
You know, we're in a culture right now where we are, know how to, speaking personally, we don't know how to deal with these big, big emotions. So
Mm-hmm.
this tendency to write from the head
as a way of kind of getting that out there, as a way of hoping and praying that maybe if I just write this one great analysis, will be okay tomorrow, Like, but we have no idea what's happening next. And ultimately, I pray with every fiber of my being that the inhabitants of the land of Israel-Palestine, all of them, in peace and security and wellbeing without violence, without destruction, without wanting destruction, where children can get an education, where people can have lives of dignity and prosperity and s-
and all of the things that are needed to thriving as human beings How are we served w- by all of this? And how does it affect us as a people and as a tradition? We want so much better. We can have so much better than this. And I also yearn, I, I wish with every fiber of my being that we as a people could do our own healing work.
There's so much trauma we're carrying. I feel it in my bones all the time. We as a people so need to spend time healing and working through it and crying and being with it, and it's 'cause it's present, and it's affecting how we're showing up in the diaspora. It's affecting the land in ways that I can't even contemplate.
It's affecting all of us. It's affecting the energetic field that we're in. We can do so much differently if we, if we can just hold ourselves with tenderness and hold each other with tenderness through this, this chapter that we're in, and here we are, you know? And
often, in practice, I often, in meditation practice, I often sit with phrases, and one of the phrases that I often will repeat to myself is, "As much as I wish things were than they are, things are as they are." Right? Like, that tendency in me to be like, "But I want... I don't want this. I don't want this to be."
Of course I don't want this to be. This is horrible. I don't want this. I don't want any of this. Like, if I just wave a wand, can I just get rid of it all and everything go back to the way it used to be? What does "used to be" mean,
You know? Like, what does any of that mean? I don't want any... But we're here in this moment.
but we can be here together, and we can, we can find strength in one another, and I truly believe we have to remember, as Rebbe Nachman of Breslov teaches, good points. We are-- We have neshamos that are pure. ourselves of that every day. We can come home to ourselves.
We have to trust in our goodness.
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode, Parshat Vayera, with Rabbi Lauren Tuchman. Your support for Left at Sinai allows us to put out episodes weekly for the coming year, and thank you so much to everyone who has already given so generously. We are halfway to funding the entire first book of Bereshit, the book of Genesis.
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