Parashat Vayera | Rabbi Rebecca Weintraub | November 8, 2025

Shabbat Shalom to everyone.

Mazel tov to Leo and the entire family.

There's a Hasidic preacher.

Rabbi Chaim of the Ramshishac.

Who would open all of his talks

with the following story, which may sound familiar to some.

He used to say, I once ascended to the firmament.

First, I went to see hell.

And the sight was horrifying.

Row after row of tables piled high

with platters of the most delicious food you could ever imagine.

Yet the people were seated around the tables and they were pale.

They were emaciated.

They were moaning in their hunger.

As I came closer, I understood what was happening to them.

Each person held a spoon, but they had no elbows

so they couldn't bring the food to their own mouths.

The food was right there, and yet they starved.

I then went to heaven

and to my surprise, it looked exactly the same.

There were rows of tables

that were set with all of the most delicious food you could ever imagine.

But here the people were content and joyful.

And again, I saw that none of them had elbows.

So how were they all eating?

I watched as one person

would dip her spoon into the food that was stretched across the table,

and then would feed the person who was across from her.

The recipient would smile and then return the favor,

and then he would say, I understood.

Heaven and hell offer the same conditions.

The difference is how people treat one another.

And so I ran back to hell

to share the secret with the people who were there.

And I whispered to one of the starving men,

you can feed your neighbor, and he'll feed you.

But he snarled, feed him.

That person across from me.

I'd rather starve.

Our parsha,

Parsha Vira, opens with an incredible contrast.

It starts with Abraham and Sarah at their tent, which is open on all sides.

It's the very paradigm of hospitality.

And then it quickly shifts to the cities of Sturm and Amara,

defined by their cruelty and evil, to the point

that God wants to destroy them, which is what we'll see at the beginning.

Reading today.

What was so cruel and so evil about the two cities?

The Mishna in it describes that the attitude

of somebody from storm was somebody who says,

Shelly, Shelly, Vishal, harsh, Allah, what is mine is mine.

And what is yours is yours.

What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours.

At first, it doesn't actually feel so bad.

What's mine is mine, and yours is yours.

Rabbi

Ovadia of Barton Torah, one of the commentators on the Mishnah.

He explains what this could mean.

I don't want to give you anything.

And I'd appreciate it if you don't give me anything.

I don't need you. You don't need me.

It's the same mindset as those souls in the parable

of how they're starving with the food that they have that's in front of them.

It's in their hands and they can't.

And they won't reach across to one another.

It's the anti Abraham and Sarah attitude

at the start of the reading of our reading.

Abraham and Sarah.

Old and weary.

Run to welcome strangers to prepare a feast.

That is true hospitality.

The practice of opening our hearts in vulnerability.

Of saying all that is mine is yours.

Please come in.

Please let me care for you.

Let me share with you what I have.

We often think of hospitality as something we can offer

when we feel secure, when our homes and our minds feel clear.

When we feel put together.

When life feels stable.

When we have all that we need.

And often when we have even more than we could ever need.

But if we feel unsafe or unsettled, threatened or in danger,

how can we possibly tend to others or invite others

into our literal homes or even into our lives?

At a certain point,

we all have a bit of these in both of us,

and I think this is exactly what makes Abraham's hospitality

and the lack of hospitality in Storm in Amarah

even more profound, which we're going to look at.

The contrast between the two,

the Talmud and Sanhedrin,

paints a very vivid picture of storms cruelty.

What was so cruel, and why were they so not open to welcoming people in?

What were the things that they would do?

So here are just a few

that they're actually a couple of pages that share what it was like to be there.

They said, since there comes forth bread out of the earth

and it was the dust of gold, why should we tolerate travelers?

Welcome guests who come to us only to deplete our wealth.

Come, let us abolish the practice of lodging travelers in our land.

We don't want to share anything. We have.

They would have beds that they would say

if a guest was too long for the bed, or too short for the bed,

they would stretch the guest out, or they would cut them

or make them fit the bed perfectly so that it wasn't about the guest.

It was about you have to fit perfectly into this bed that we have.

If a poor man happened to come there, every resident would give him a dinar.

They would give him a coin and they would write their name on the coin.

And then, knowing that people had given this money

because this person was poor, any time the poor man would try

to buy something with these coins,

nobody would let him buy anything to the point where he would starve.

And then when he died, everybody would go and reclaim their dinar or their coin.

And finally, the last one, just the images of how much they didn't

want to give or care for or tend to other people.

A certain person, a certain woman, gave some bread to a poor man,

which she used to hide in a picture because they say it was illegal

to help other people.

It wasn't only about hospitality, it was about everybody who was around you.

When the matter became known,

they dabbed her with honey and they placed her on a wall,

and they allowed the bees to come and consume her.

And they say that this is actually the cry that we'll hear in the Paracha.

That this is her cry was the cry that reached up to God

that said this is a horrible place, and this is a place that no longer

can exist in our world.

It's pretty unbearable, and it's hard to read

without wondering, how did they become this way?

What happened to them that they became

so anti

helping others, so against what it is

to bring other people into what they had.

And of course,

at first I would say my mind went to a place of, and maybe many of us.

Was it fear.

Was it some kind of insecurity?

A sense of of a scarcity that they were feeling that there was something?

I think that that's part of the apologetic part of me.

As I was thinking about this, like, what is it that happened in their lives

that made it to the point that they felt that this is what they needed to do.

And this is where I was so surprised.

Going back into the text, because the Talmud

actually suggests that it was the opposite.

It was the complete opposite.

Storm was a land of abundance.

It tells us that it was actually

one of three cities that was so lush and so fertile

and so self-sufficient, all the way going back to the time of sheet

when the rivers were overflowing, that this was a part of that area.

It was even compared to Aden.

It was even compared to heaven on earth.

That's how much they had.

And they had it all.

And they even had more than they ever could have needed.

And that was what became the problem for them.

The Talmud says that they would say, we don't need anyone else.

We don't want to share this with anyone else.

And so it says they built walls and they set holes,

and they turned away any travelers who tried to come

because they knew what they had was good and great and Bountiful.

And the attitude spiraled not only to others

who were trying to come into their land, but it turned into the relationships

they had with one another and the people who were in their own city

caring only for themselves and their own needs.

Their evil began with a

need to not need other people.

And then we come back to Avraham.

We have this picture of Avraham and the rabbis.

Imagine him. This is the beginning of our parsha.

Again.

We see this before we even get to Sturm and Amara.

The rabbis imagine him sitting in the heat of the day.

He is old.

He's still recovering, potentially from his circumcision.

He's physically weak.

He's vulnerable. He's in pain.

And yet he runs to go greet

these strangers that he doesn't know from that place of vulnerability.

He reaches out.

We would assume he might just sit there.

He might actually not

even be sitting at the edge of his tent, but inside his tent to recover.

But he does the exact opposite.

Avraham reminds us that we need one another,

especially when it's hardest for us, when we feel the least secure,

or we feel the least strong or the least grounded.

And it's true for us as a community.

It's true for us as Jews, and it's true for us as human beings.

We need each other.

And of course,

of course, there's a part of me, and I think a part of us

that sometimes whispers, yeah, but what if others don't want me?

Or what

if others have made it very clear they don't want me and they don't want us?

That we've been rejected.

And it's a real pain.

An actual pain, a physical pain that we feel.

And it's a real fear that we live in.

It's also so hard to reach out when we are at our worst,

when all we want is for someone else to show up for us,

when we feel like we've been pushed aside or unseen or forgotten.

And it's really tempting to turn inward,

to protect ourselves, believing that we don't need anyone else.

But again, Avraham

teaches us to resist that urge to go inward, to reach out

precisely from those places of fear and of vulnerability.

And I think

after this week, after our election, and particularly

after years of such polarization in our community, in our nation,

across the world, that in many ways

we're like Storm and Amara, in some ways in our lives we have abundance.

We have what it is that we need.

We may even have more than we need.

And we feel that.

And in other ways, we feel like Avraham, individually and collectively,

tending to deep wounds, unmet dreams, fears

and fragile hopes for the future.

But Storm and Amira cautioned us against,

and what Abraham and Sarah call us toward is this very question

whether we find ourselves in

a place of fear and hope, fullness or emptiness.

Or, I think many of us often.

And what life brings us is finding ourselves somewhere right in

between or vacillating between the two,

is that we have to ask ourselves what might happen

if we pick up the spoon to feed the person

across from us, if we welcome the other, we embrace the stranger

and we step into the unknown together.

Shabbat Shalom.