Monthly Archives: November 2025

Toledot

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Parashat Toledot is the one time that we focus on the life of the adult Isaac. His parents, Abraham and Sarah are dead and buried. He is married to Rebecca, whom his father’s servant has brought back from their ancestral homeland for this purpose. He is in love with her and faithful to her and she is apparently barren. So Isaac entreats God on her behalf and she conceives his children Jacob and Esau, twins whose struggle begins even in the womb.  Isaac is set up to follow his father, and to become the Patriarch of the next generation – a man who speaks to God and is heard by God, who is the head of a large household and the father of sons. One would expect now that the stories of this new Patriarch would take us further into our history, give us new aspects to consider.  And this does happen, but in a somewhat unusual fashion.

Following the birth of the children and the parental choices that will forever mark the relationship of Esau and Jacob, Isaac and Rebecca go on to repeat the journey taken by Abraham and Sarah. They go to escape the effects of famine just as Abraham and Sarah did, but theirs is not simply a physical journey – by virtue of the repetition something extra happens and defines the process by which Isaac becomes himself.   Isaac and Rebecca have almost the exact same experience in the same city of Gerar as did his parents, Abraham and Sarah, and its effect creates something quite new.

The famine is described to us as being a famine Bilvad hara’av harishon asher haya bimei Avraham – not the same famine as before, that happened in the days of Abraham, so we are already conscious once more of the journey that Abraham took in his response to the famine. On this journey however, God appears and warns Isaac not to leave the land, not to follow his father’s example and go to Egypt.

          Isaac goes to Abimelech, the king of the philistines, in Gerar, according to tradition the very same Abimelech that Abraham and Sarah encountered all those years before.  There he tells king Abimelech that Rebecca is his sister and not his wife, just as Abraham had done with Sarah in Genesis, chapter 20. Of course this caused problems in both cases as the king was taken with  first Sarah and later Rebecca. Abimelech is very upset when he discovers that these women are none other than wives, not sisters. Can this really be the same king? one would have thought would have learned his lesson! But that is exactly what this week’s parasha is about. Lessons learned and lessons not learned; encountering the same thing again and again, and responding to it differently or not.

We see this story as a slightly weak repetition of the Abraham stories, and might be led into thinking of Isaac as somehow a weak and uncreative man. He is indeed often described as being the middle link, the son of a famous father and father of a famous son who himself has no claim to fame except as the link between the two. But we can look at this story in yet another way. We might see that Isaac, as patriarch of the next generation, must first walk in the footsteps of his father in order to make his journey grounded. He has to plumb the depths of his father’s experiences in order to move on and to make meaning for himself and his family, develop the traditions of his growing tribe. When confronted with similar moments in time, the choices that Isaac will make will not only shape him but shape generations to come. He has lessons to learn. Will Isaac learn from these lessons? Will he miss them and miss how they relate to incidents in his own life? And how will we, the readers, know?

Though Isaac may once have fled from a father he may have feared, (after the Akedah on the mountain top Isaac is not mentioned as returning with is father and we later see him come together with Ishmael to bury Abraham – neither of them seem to have had an adult experience with Abraham the patriarch), he now meets him in a different way, by re-living similar experiences.

We learn about our ancestors when we have to grapple with similar decisions and incidents. We gain valuable insights into who they were and their character. What we could not understand as children or earlier in our lives, we understand differently when placed in similar situations. It is often only when we become parents that we understand better the feelings our parents must have had toward us. Only when we have to bury a parent or care for a sick spouse that we truly understand what an earlier generation must have gone through.

This repetition of the story of Abimelech and the wives/sisters is a vital requirement for Isaac if he is to grow into being his own person, no longer overshadowed by his father.  By reliving some of the major events in the story of his father’s life, he will have to respond to many similar choices.

Isaac was almost sacrificed on the altar by his father in response to the command of God. His father apparently was fulfilling a divine call. Isaac will do the same to his son Esau when he gives Jacob the blessing even as he senses that Jacob is masquerading as Esau. And though Isaac won’t literally hold a knife over Esau’s head, he will sacrifice him and his future in a different way. Sometimes we repeat our parent’s mistakes; sometimes we are able to amend them. Sometimes we repeat our own mistakes, sometimes we are able to learn from them.

          The sedra concludes with Rebecca helping Jacob to receive the blessing by apparently deceiving the blind and dying Isaac. It is never clear quite whether she does so because she remembers the divine prophecy about the older child serving the younger when her pregnancy was so painful she too enquired of God; it is never clear if this prophecy was the reason she so favoured her son Jacob over her son Esau. But it is clear that she will act to achieve the succession for her favoured younger son Jacob, just as her mother in law Sarah acted in order to achieve the succession for her child, Abraham’s younger son Isaac.

With the help of the manipulation and skills of his mother, by the end of the sidra the focus is on Jacob, who has received the blessing of the heir from his father. Esau returns from his mission to get something special for his dying father and cries out in terrible pain “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too Father (27:36).  He receives a blessing from his father which is perhaps more than Ishmael ever did, but not the blessing he so craved.

When we look at these stories of Isaac acting out the life of his more colourful and confident and arrogant father we see that Isaac does indeed walk in his father’s footsteps, and not only as a pale shadow. We see that Isaac was his father’s son, able to understand more about his father than perhaps he realized, able to repair some of the mistakes at least a little.

As we read his story in Toledot, maybe it will cause us to reflect a bit about ourselves, for perhaps all of us walk in our parents’ footsteps more than we would like to acknowledge, and maybe we have a chance to repair some of the damage done, rather than pass it on to the next generation.

Chayei Sarah – the lives of Sarah the matriarch

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“V’hayu chayei Sara meah shanah vesrim shana v’sheva shanim, shenei hayei Sarah. Vatamot Sarah b’kiryat arbah hi Hevron b’eretz Canaan, v’yavo Avraham lispod l’sarah v’livkotah. Vayakom Avraham me’al pnei meito”

And the life of Sarah was a hundred years and twenty years and seven years; these were the years of the life of Sarah.  And Sarah died in Kiriat-arba–the same is Hebron–in the land of Canaan; and Abraham came to eulogise Sarah, and to weep for her. And Abraham rose up from before his dead, and spoke unto the children of Het”

Sarah, the first Jewish matriarch, is last seen in bible having given birth to Isaac through a divine intervention when both she is in her nineties and Abraham is a hundred. We see Isaac named – unusually – by his father, and circumcised at the age of 8 days old, as required by God. We hear Sarah say: ‘God has made me a laughing stock; every one that hears will laugh on account of me.’  And then: ‘Who would have said to Abraham, that Sarah should be able to feed a child? For I have borne him a son in his old age.’ And then on the day Isaac celebrates his weaning feast, Sarah, seeing Ishmael (the son born to Abraham through her own intervention in offering her Egyptian maid Hagar to him, in order to provide a child for Abraham so that God’s promise is fulfilled), recognised the threat Ishmael poses to his younger half brother, and tells Abraham’ Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac.’   Abraham is upset but does not speak to Sarah – instead he goes to God who tells him “Let it not be grievous in your sight because of the lad, and because of your bondwoman; in all that Sarah says to you listen to her voice; for through Isaac shall your descendants be called.”

After that, we never hear the voice of Sarah again. Instead we have the two terrible stories of Abraham sending off his older son Ishmael into the wilderness to what he must believe is likely death, and then taking his second son Isaac up a mountain, to what he must again believe is likely death. And then we have a genealogical list which takes us to Rebecca the daughter of Betuel the nephew of Abraham through his brother Nahor.  The next thing we hear is that Sarah is dead, that she has been living not at Beer Sheva with her husband but in Hevron, and that Abraham comes to eulogise her and to weep for her, before getting on with the practicalities of arranging a funeral.

            What happens to Sarah in between her arranging for the removal of Ishmael, the person she saw as a threat to the wellbeing of Isaac her son, and the death as reported in bible?  Where is the voice of the woman who has been a powerful presence up till now, a formidable partner for Abraham, a true incarnation of what the bible calls the ‘ezer k’negdo’ – a help who is equal and powerfully separate from her husband?  Was Sarah’s death somehow related to what nearly happened to Isaac? And was that related to the choice she forced on to Abraham to remove a much beloved son from his household?  Had she already removed herself from the household when Abraham went to offer Isaac on a mountain top?

We do know that Sarah is not herself party to what turns out to be the most important decision of her life. Abraham does not discuss with her the test he sees God as having set him. There is indeed a huge irony working in that once Abraham is told “in all that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice”, we never hear her voice again.  But what does her silence tell us? And what can we learn from the powerful absence we feel?

Sarah’s death is told us in the context of her life – indeed the Hebrew tells us clearly that her life was full and complex – the literal translation of the first verse would be “and the lives of Sarah were a hundred years, and twenty years and seven years, these are the years of the lives of Sarah.” And Jewish tradition takes from this the learning that a full life is made up of a number of separate strands, all of equal value though not all of equal length. So one might read this description as being that most of her adult life was as a barren woman, wife to a man who had been promised descendants. She then had a shorter period as a mother, and another short period living separately from her child.  Each of these lives helped to define her, each was a fully experienced era, and the fact they were of unequal length is irrelevant in terms of the value of each life she lived.

Sarah was clearly a formidable woman. Any view that women in the bible were somehow simply adjuncts to their menfolk cannot be sustained in the face of any of our matriarchs, but it is Sarah who sets the pattern.  She is named as an equal figure in the story of the travelling from Ur of the Chaldees with her husband – and from this text Sarah emerges in the Talmud and Midrash as an equal partner with her husband in God’s work, and a prophetess in her own right. She is described as someone who worked alongside Abraham to build up his wealth and “acquire souls” in Haran, where they stopped off before going to Canaan (Gen 12:5). She is the woman who intervened in order to bring what she thought was God’s promise to fulfilment – When she cannot have children, Sarah takes the initiative and gives her maid-servant, Hagar, to Abraham so that he can have children through Hagar on Sarah’s behalf. She is the woman who is taken – apparantly willingly – into the households of both Pharaoh and Abimelech in order to protect her husband, and then quickly released again untouched, and with compensatory wealth. Sarah acts independently on a number of occasions, taking the initiative to decide the future of her family, even against her husband’s wishes.

The modern scholar Tikvah Frymer-Kensky argues that although the Bible portrays a patriarchal social structure, it has a gender-neutral ideology.  The women in the Bible may be socially subordinate but not essentially inferior; they have strong, independent personalities, and they often act to guide the course of events.  So when Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham she is keeping ancient Near Eastern tradition. We have evidence of three ancient Near Eastern marriage contracts stating that if the wife remains barren after a specified number of years, she gives her husband her slave to have children on her behalf.  On her behalf note, not simply for him.

Another scholar Carol Meyers applied insights from sociology, anthropology, and archaeology to reconstruct the ordinary women’s place within Israelite society in various periods of biblical history. She argues that when agricultural work and childbearing, two spheres in which women played an active role, were central to biblical society, social and religious life in ancient Israel was relatively egalitarian. Only when the political state and the monarchy emerged, and religious life was institutionalized in the Temple cult and priestly bureaucracy (beginning in the tenth century B.C.E.), were women increasingly excluded from the public arena and lost access to communal authority.  Sarah then is from a period when women were able to be active in society and in determining how the family should operate, and we can see forcefully how she does this in a number of stories about her.

But however powerful she was in the prime of her life, in old age and with the added vulnerability of parenthood, Sarah found herself less able to voice her ideas.  With the birth of Isaac she gained a new role and meaning for herself, but she also became more aware of her own mortality and vulnerability.  So when God tests Abraham, seeming to require him to take the so beloved child of Abraham and Sarah and offer him on a mountain top. Is Sarah’s absence because she knows that this is happening and cannot stop it? Oris it a result of her shame at the treatment of Ishmael and desire to move away. Or is it something different – to do maybe with having now become a parent she no longer has the relationship with Abraham she once did. From being a tight unit they are now a family of three and having to adjust to the demands of another person in the relationship.

We cannot know what causes Sarah’s voice to fall quiet in the text. Whether it is protection of her that she does not have to be party to this most horrible test of faith or punishment for what happened to Ishmael. But what we can know is that in this final life of the lives of Sarah, she has struck out alone and left her husband behind. She is, once more a woman of strength, no appendage to her husband but living alone and with some status in Hebron.

When the last of Sarah’ lives are over and Abraham hears of her death, he comes to Hebron in order to fulfil the requirements of family and religion. And it is interesting what he does and the order in which he does them. He first come ‘lispod’ then liv’kotah and finally to buy a burial place and perform the funerary rites.

The first thing he does is “lispod” to give a Hesped – in effect a eulogy. He tells the stories of Sarah, who she was, what she did, how she lived her life in its many parts.

Only then does he mourn her through his weeping – livkotah. And then he gets up from before her dead body and takes on the practicalities of the living – to make a funeral for her, to perform the rites of burying the dead and then to go back into life. I can’t help wondering as I read this chapter whether the very first verse is indeed the hesped – that Abraham actually said “these are the lives of Sarah, who lived a hundred years and twenty years and seven years – three different and distinct lives all of which should be honoured, and which may have been of different lengths but are most certainly of equal and complete value.”

Vayera – we may not see the full picture, but that doesn’t mean we should not act on what we see.

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Parashat Vayera is packed with stories, a veritable smorgasbord of the founding myths of Judaism. Within it there is the story of Abraham and Sarah, now very elderly, still wondering exactly how the promise of God’s covenant with them is going to work out. The heir designate Lot had separated from them after a struggle over wealth and space with Abraham and his herdsmen, even though he had been with their household since the whole family were still in Ur Kasdim, after the death of his own father and the brother of Abram – Haran.

Sarah has organised for Ishmael to be born to Abraham via a surrogate, Hagar, but clearly that relationship is not one of ease and joy and it is not certain that Ishmael will indeed be the inheritor of the particular Abrahamic covenant. Now, Abraham having circumcised himself and his son Ishmael at the end of the sidra last week, we have the story of the mysterious visitors to Abraham and Sarah, and this elderly couple being told they will have a child within the year. Sarah in particular is clear that this prophecy is ridiculous – she is post menopausal and Abraham 99 years old. However Isaac IS born in this sidra, and then we have the story of the jealousy and anxiety of Sarah who tries to protect her son Isaac from the previous presumptive heir Ishmael. We have the story of Hagar and Ishmael being sent away to fend for themselves. We have the story of Sodom and Gomorrah being destroyed after the bartering of Abraham for the city to be saved does not go low enough for God to have to save it.  And we have the story of the binding of Isaac and the grim reality that the relationship between father and son is broken forever.

So many stories, so many themes and threads.  The most important maybe is the creating of the links in order to allow continuation of the covenant; then there is the theme of the treatment of women – Abraham using Sarah as a shield once again to save his own life, and claiming that she is his sister rather than his wife.  And Hagar, used to supply a child and then once that child is seen as unwanted and maybe even a threat, sent off to probable death in the wilderness.  And finally the women surrounding Lot, in particular his two unmarried daughters who are offered to the angry mob at door of the family home, in place of the visitors who have come to his house. Lot seems prepared to sacrifice his children, as of course Abraham appears to be prepared to do in relation to both his sons.

All these themes and threads fill the sidra, but there is one theme that we find resonates in modern life more than most.

Vayera also deals with challenging authority — not just authority in general, but the ultimate authority – that of God. And it also deals with what happens when authority is NOT challenged, when people just go along with what is happening.

The most famous example of the challenge to authority is the bartering that Abraham engages with God, who, when God decided he should include Abraham in his plans to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah since Abraham is designated the one in whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, is appalled that the “innocent would be swept away with the wicked” and asks “shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?”

Much is made of Abraham’s challenging God’s authority, negotiating from 50 righteous people, five at a time, until he gets down to ten – a minyan – and God seems to quickly retreat at this point. Abraham, who has so much to lose if he loses God’s favour, still stands up for his values – justice and mercy, righteousness and decency. We model ourselves on his willingness to take on even the divine creator, seeing ourselves as Abraham’s descendants, who are willing to make a stand for morality, no matter who is the adversary.  We do not see ourselves as people who submit thoughtlessly, but who need to have reason and rationale in order to follow a particular ruling or expectation. Faith without reason or understanding is not a stable Jewish position, even if we are willing to take on something as a matter of faith ab initio – famously we quote the descendants of Abraham at Sinai – na’aseh v’nishma – we will do it, and then we will gain understanding.

We also find Abraham challenging Sarah’s imperative that he must get rid of Hagar and Ishmael – that they cannot be allowed to be near her son as he grows up. Abraham here does not challenge Sarah, but he does go and challenge her demand to God. And God’s answer is clear. What Sarah tells him to do, he must do. And so, without further ado, though clearly with a heavy heart, Abraham gets up early in the morning, gives Hagar and Ishmael provisions, and sends them into the wilderness with no clear destination.

And so we slide into the time when Abraham offers no challenge to authority at all – when God tells him to take his son, his only son, the one he loves, and offer him on a mountain some days journey away.  The Akedah can be read as either seeing Abraham as being a lonely man of total faith, upon whose full obedience to even the most dreadful demands of God we see ourselves provided with a powerful role model and also the zechut, the reward, of the religious Jew. Or else we can read it as a terrible failure of Abraham to challenge the divinity that looks to him to provide a balance in the relationship between Creator and created – a man who having started out challenging God on behalf of the moral imperative of protecting the vulnerable and innocent, whoever they may be – somehow lost his nerve when it came to protecting his own son, after his protest on behalf of Ishmael was brushed aside.

We see other instances here in this sidra about people not challenging the prevailing authority. Hagar for instance is not recorded as protesting at all at her treatment, though one could read through the text in order to hear her protest to God. Ishmael is not recorded as protesting his treatment, though God – as predicted by his name – in fact hears the boy.  Lot does not seem to protest at either the appalling behaviour of the mob when they find he has guests in his house – indeed he panders to them by offering his unmarried daughters to placate them. And he does not protest when his wife challenges the authority by looking back at the city where they have left their older children and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot takes his lack of protest even further by abdicating from responsibility at all – he simply gets so drunk he is unaware of the rather unorthodox actions of his younger daughters in order to repopulate the world, and seems unaware too of the people who are the results of these drunken encounters.  Only Isaac shows some desire to challenge when, walking up the mountain with firewood and knife, he asks his father about the whereabouts of the sacrifice they will presumably be making. The answer he gets – “God will provide, my son”, is ambiguous but also unanswerable. How is the young boy going to challenge his father’s apparently certain faith?  One feels for the boy whose question could have provided his father with a platform for dissidence against an unfair test, but instead is used to close down just such an activity.

With the hugely powerful example of Abraham arguing with God, not just once but repeatedly, and God gently ceding to Abraham’s argument, why then do we have so many other examples of either half hearted or simply non existent challenge to authority?  Is bible warning us that it may feel too hard to challenge? or is it reminding us that even Abraham fell prey to the uncertainty and self doubt that can undermine us all?  Is it warning us what happens if we do not challenge unfair dictats from those in authority, having reminded us that such a challenge is actually welcomed by God?

What we know is that all those who do not take it upon themselves to challenge immoral and unacceptable behaviours do not ultimately profit. Sarah, having disposed of Hagar’s son, finds her own son in the firing line. Lot offering his daughters to a mob ends up in an incestuous union with them, bringing about the historic enemies of Israel, Moab and Ammonites.  Abraham, not challenging God about Isaac, never speaks to either of them again. Isaac, having half-tried, remains somehow personally maimed in his own confidence and leadership skills.

The word “Vayera” with which the sedra begins means “And he appeared” – We are told clearly that God appeared to Abraham, though immediately we look through Abraham’s eyes and we see not God, but three strangers visiting.  Appearances may be deceptive, may not be the full picture. But they are all we have, and we must respond to them.  The truth may be more complex than we see, but that is no excuse to plead ignorance and to not react.

In our world we see only a partial view, yet even that must be responded to with immediacy rather than delay. We see great deal that is immoral, that is improper, that is unacceptable. Vulnerable people of all kinds are taken advantage of or left to survive without proper resources.  Our environment is plundered and damaged. Racism is on the march once more, xenophobia is evolving a new framework and vocabulary. 

We must act whole-heartedly to challenge the abuses of power that we can see. and stand up and challenge them however frightening that may feel, or however we might undermine ourselves with the sense that we can’t know the whole story, that we should wait for some imagined clarity to explain what we see. Then maybe we too will become part of the narrative for good, fighting for the moral virtues of justice and righteousness, of mercy and compassion. And the one thing we know is that God, when challenged, responds positively. There is nothing to wait for, as Hillel said, “if not now, when?”