October 18, 2013 Vayera

Please do not adjust your set, reality is at fault.

"And he (Avraham) was sitting at the entrance of the tent…" (18:1)

The elderly lady was sitting in the parking lot. She was obviously very distressed. "Mrs. Cohen," I said, "What’s the matter?" She replied trembling, "I don’t know where it is! I don’t know where it is!" "You don’t know where what is?" I asked. "I don’t know where my car is! I’m sure I left it here, and it’s not here now. Maybe I’m going senile. Maybe I don’t know where things are anymore. Maybe I shouldn’t drive anymore!"

I thought for a moment.

"Maybe your car has been stolen, Mrs. Cohen."

Her eyes widened. "Do you think so? Oh, I do hope so!"

We called the police, and sure enough her car had been found, stripped to the chassis, in a town on the West Bank.

Sometimes things aren’t the way they seem.

"…and he (Avraham) was sitting at the entrance of the tent…"

The Midrash reveals to us that Avraham wanted to stand up when G-d appeared to him. G-d said to him, "You sit, and I will stand…"

When you go see your bank manager to try to get a loan, you stand and he sits. The one who stands is dependent on the one sits.

When Avraham wanted to stand, G-d told him to sit. In other words, G-d was telling Avraham, "I depend on you; everything depends on you, not the other way around."

How can this be? How can G-d depend on any creation?

If you look at this world it seems that above us is only the sky. You would be hard pushed to see the existence of many, many worlds above this one. And yet they exist. Millions of worlds, and of all of them, ours is the lowest. And yet, G-d decided that the whole of creation would be governed by what we do in this lowest of the worlds, down here at the bottom of the pile.

When we perform an act of kindness it reverberates all the way up to the highest of the highest worlds, and that causes G-d to radiate an influx of blessing back down to this world.

In other words, a kind word may stop an earthquake, or a train collision, or a war.

This is the how we can understand the verse in Psalms, "Give strength to G-d." Man has been given the role of strengthening the creation through his actions, or, G-d forbid, the reverse.

You’d never believe it to be so, but sometimes things are not the way they seem.

• Sources: based on Da’at Torah and a story heard from Rabbi Mordechai Moshe Epstein