Parashat Vayera: On Visitors and Hosts

Avraham’s hospitality is legendary. If you want to know how to do the mitzvah of hakhnasat orhim, learn from Avraham. He runs with eagerness and excitement toward three passers-by. He asks them to stay in a way that makes it seem like they are doing him a favor, and he (and his family) cook them an elaborate meal, much more than he had even promised. He then stands at attention, serving them, while they sit and enjoy.

But the story doesn’t start there. The parsha doesn’t start with Avraham and his hospitality. It starts with God. Vayera elav hashem. “And God appeared to him.”

Why does it start with this divine appearance? Because Avraham learned his kindness toward others from his relationship with God. God, too, was involved in a mitzvah that day, according to the midrash. Through His appearance to Avraham that day, God was doing bikur holim, visiting the sick, because Avraham was recovering from his circumcision (an event that happened in the immediately preceding verses, at the end of last week’s parsha).

So God was visiting the sick and Avraham was welcoming guests! How beautiful. The two mitzvot, the two good deeds, are mirror images of one another. In one it is the act of visiting which is the good deed, and in the other, it is the act of receiving visitors that is the good deed. How could both receiving visitors and being a visitor be acts of kindness? They are both acts of kindness when they are done in a way that focuses not on one’s own needs but on the needs of the other, either the needs of the sick other or the needs of the temporarily homeless traveling other. Taken together, the two mitzvot create a circle of care.

Avraham’s hospitality did not exist in a vacuum. It was part of a reciprocal relationship he had developed with God. You visit. I’ll receive guests. The sages say that mitzvah goreret mitzvah. One mitzvah leads to another. Usually that phrase is understood to refer to a single person’s actions. Once you start doing one good deed, it will lead you yourself to do another. But it is also true that there is a cycle of goodness in the world as a whole, that one person’s good deeds lead to another’s good deeds. Perhaps this explains why Lot could not exist in Sodom as a single person doing the good deed of hospitality -- because good deeds need to be done in a place where they can be returned and reinforced, where care and concern are reciprocated. Avraham and God together began such a cycle of goodness in the world.