Meditation for Parashat Vayetze

 Click here to play the meditation.  (9 minutes long)

*special thanks to Lynnie Mirvis for meditation inspiration

A Meditation for Parashat Vayetze (Written Form)

Yaakov dreams of a ladder whose base is firmly planted in the ground and whose top reaches up to heaven.  And on the ladder, angels -- 

Vehineh malakhei Elokim olim veyordim bo.   And behold angels are going up and going down on it. 

We are going to take some time now to try to experience a little of this vision.  Get into a position that is comfortable and relaxed, and a posture that implies for you a sense of surrender.  Yaakov was asleep for this vision so try to mimic the feeling of relaxation just before sleep.  Close your eyes.  Let your thoughts slow down a little, settling, settling, like snowflakes in a snowglobe, coming to a rest after all their swirling.  Settling and slowing down.  Nothing to do but relax.  Let your shoulders fall back and your breathing slow down.  

Now bring your attention to your feet on the ground, or if you are sitting cross legged, to your whole torso and legs.     Bring your attention to whatever is supporting you, whether it is the chair or the floor, and feel how firmly planted you are in the ground.   You are like Yaakov’s ladder --- mutzav artzah  -- firmly planted in the ground.  You have a stable, rooted base in the earth, in this physical world that we live in.  Feel how physical it is, strong and supportive and real.   It holds you with firmness.   You are part of the earth.  

At the same time, your head reaches to the sky, like the top of Yaakov’s ladder, the rosh, the Torah calls it.   Feel how the top half of you  -- your head and your heart -- are reaching upwards, yearning for the heavens.    Feel your heart and your mind opening and the sudden flow upwards, like a whoosh of energy wanting to go up.      Flying upwards.   Reaching, yearning.  Or imagine a string going from the top of your head and reaching up to the sky, up to God above.   You are rooted in the ground below but you are also whooshing upwards, a part of something above, attached there, too.   Feel both of these pulls at once, the sense of groundedness, and the sense of yearning and reaching upwards.  The one is very strong and concrete and the other has a lighter more ethereal pull, like the tug of air.

Now the angels on the ladder.  The angels are the carriers of your life energy, your breath.  Bring your attention to your breath.   The inhale and the exhale are the angels going up and down inside you.   Notice how on the inhale your whole chest lifts up and on the exhale your whole chest goes down.   Imagine that your breath is being carried by angels inside you, filling and lifting you up, up, up and then letting go, down, down, down.   In and then out, filling and then letting go.  

In and then out.  The out part goes out of you and continues, extending way beyond you, out into the world and up into the heavens.  The angels fly on the wings of your breath up to heaven, with each breath returning you back to your source, back to God above, recharging, and coming back down again to you.    Feel the flow of divine energy flowing in and out of you, up to heaven and then back down again.   Divine energy, life force, your source, your origin.  With each breath you are connected and rejuvenated, recharged.   The angels send and receive, bring and take, in a neverending flow of connection to the divine.  

In and out, and up and down.  Olim veyordim.  The flow of charge moves back and forth between heaven and earth in a vibrating pulsing rhythm.   Back and forth, back and forth.  The prophet Yehezkel describes angelic movement as - Ratzo vashov.   Running forward and then back again.  Forward and back.  Forward toward God, reaching, wanting to get close, to disappear into the infinite, yearning for closeness, to become one, to become nothing, and then back down, away again, back down to earth, to this finite life, to this body.   Ratzo vashov.   Forward and back.  Feel how this is the movement of angels and the movement of the life force in everything.   Intimacy and retreat.   Connection and separation.  The waves of the ocean -- up and down, the trees and the grass swaying and breathing in and out as well, the world vibrating and pulsing in a universal life rhythm.   Feel the rhythm inside you -- your breath and your heart beating, pulsing, and then feel how the same rhythm is outside you.  Inside and outside -- the same back and forth of the angels, the same life force everywhere, connecting and letting go, giving and taking, going and coming back.  As you ride the waves of your own breath, you are also riding the waves of energy throughout the universe.  Everywhere the same universal rhythm of connection to the divine.  Inside you and outside you.   You are a part of it all, a part of this large vibrating divine energy flow.

You are connected to everything outside you and also again, to the heavens above.   The angels that carry your breath back and forth, giving you new life at each moment -- they are creating a ladder for you, a direct link to Your source above.   Heaven and earth have become one for you.  Feel the link with each breath, feel how noticing it strengthens the sense of connection.  With each breath, your connection to the Source gets stronger, the energy flow more intense, the light shining down brighter, and the line that connects you from self to God clearer and more visible.  There it is.  You have clarity about this link now.    You can feel the ladder. 

But the flow is not in one direction.   It isn’t just that God sends down energy and love and light to you.   You have something to send to God, too.  Actually you do it first.    Olim veyordim.  The angels go up and then they go down.  Feel the welling up of love and light and energy that you have inside you to send up to heaven.   There is an energy exchange here.  You send and receive, send and receive.   Feel how you are not just open to receiving from heaven but also ready and capable of giving something, of sending back.  Love is a two-directional flow.   You receive and you give and it just keeps increasing, the love keeps getting stronger.    Feel the strength of your own yearning and love, your own desire to connect above.  Let the angels take your yearning up to God and feel how they bring back down God’s yearning for you.     Back and forth goes the flow of love.  

Rest for a moment in the sense of connection and relationship and flow.     With each breath imagine the angels on the ladder going up and down, keeping the energy and love flowing between you and your Source.  

Now let go of attending so closely to the breath.  Allow it to recede into the background, still there, but not in the foreground of your attention.  You can trust that the link to heaven will continue to operate on its own .  It is there for you when you need it and you can return to it at any point.   But for now, allow the sense of connection to give you strength for whatever comes next in your life.   Yaakov awoke from this dream vision energized for the journey ahead.  The Torah says  Vayisa Yaakov raglav vayelakh.  Yaakov lifted his legs and went on his way.   His sense of connection with the divine strengthened, he continued on his journey with a new lilt to his gait.    The rock that covered the well he came to next was so large it normally took a whole group of people to lift, but Yaakov could now lift it on his own.    He had the divine flow of energy pulsing through him.  

You are like Yaakov.  Feel the divine energy flowing through you from above.  You, too, are ready to tackle whatever comes next.  

*special thanks to Lynnie Mirvis for meditation inspiration.

Parashat Toldot: On Divine Spaciousness

I want to focus on one word from our parsha --   Rehovot.   

Rehovot means “wide open spaces.”   It is the name that Yitzhak gives to the well that is not fought over after many of his earlier wells are contested.   He calls it Rehovot because he says -- Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu ufarinu ba’aretz.   “Now God has expanded space for us and we can be fruitful in the land” (26:22).    There is no longer any need to fight over water.  Now we can feel a sense of spaciousness and plenty.  

So much of the parsha deals with the opposite feeling -- a sense of constriction and scarcity and competition.  There are the other two wells -- when the shepherds come and say:  No!  That water is ours! -- one well named “Contention” and the other “Hatred.”  And there is the strife at home, the continuous squabble between Yaakov and Esav over the birthright.  The feeling behind all of these scenes is that there is not enough blessing to go around so that there is a need to fight tooth and nail and heel to get a piece of it.  

The Rehovot moment then is a tiny glimpse of spaciousness amidst general tightness, a hint at a possible answer to all this suffering, a glimmer of light in the pervasive darkness.

The sense of scarcity and tightness that they -- and we -- often feel is very real.  We do live in a world of limitation -- there is a limit to physical resources like water and food, and a limit, too, to our energy and time and emotional capacities as human beings.  

At the same time, on a different plane, the divine plane, we also have access to a world without limitations, a world of great spaciousness and abundance.  Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu.   Yitzhak recognizes that it is God that does the expanding for us.  When we can make contact with this other plane, suddenly it feels like there is plenty of room.  As the tradition goes concerning the crowded Temple on a holiday, even if the people were tightly packed standing up, they would somehow be able to bow down with plenty of room.  To enter God’s sanctuary -- the divine plane --  is to feel the expansion of space and to know that there is ample room for all.  .    

This divine spaciousness is the merhav Yah that we speak of in the phrase from Hallel -- min hametzar karati Yah, anani bamerhav Yah.   “Out of the narrow straits I cried out to you, O God; You answered me with divine expansiveness.”   Merhav (expansiveness) comes from the same root as Rehovot, only here it is in construct with God’s name, meaning that when we cry out in our human constriction, God answers us with divine spaciousness; we enter a different plane.  

I want to consider with you some of the ways that this divine spaciousness can work inside us.  We will go through each character in our story and see how we can help them with some spaciousness, and by helping them, also help ourselves.

Rivka is the first on the scene who needs help.  She is finally pregnant but suffering from some strange violent movements in her belly as the twins begin to fight inside her.   She cries out -- “If so”  -- if this is how pregnancy is going to be-- “why me?”  What am I doing this for?  All this pain is too much for me to bear.   

We know something of this feeling.  It is a loss of perspective.   We become so completely blended with the pain or the uncertainty or the crisis of this moment, that we can’t see past it or around it.  We just want it to be over; we want to quit in despair.  

A similar thing happens to Esav when he comes in from the field, famished.   Yaakov asks him to sell his birthright for the soup he has just made, and Esav says, in language similar to Rivka’s but the teenage boy version -- I’m about to die here, so who cares about the birthright?  Again, there is a loss of perspective.   The current predicament -- hunger -- looms so large that it excludes any other consideration.  He has become blind to anything but the current moment’s intense feeling.  

Rivka knows how to deal with such moments of intensity.  She seeks out God and is given some larger perspective of purpose and time-- in the future these babies will actually be two entire nations.   Set against this larger picture, Rivka can better bear the pregnancy.   

Esav, though, does not know how to do this, so we will do it for him.  Imagine for a moment yourself in such a moment of intense pain, physical or emotional.  The sharpness of it takes over your whole system, narrowing your vision so that you can think of nothing else.   Now imagine that there is, surrounding all this tightness and pain, some larger aura of spaciousness.   The hunger is real but you can see that it is a moment in a larger tapestry; it isn’t all of you.  There is air around it now and you can think clearer, breathe through the hunger..   Atah Hirhiv Hashem lanu.  Now God has expanded space for us.  

Next, Yaakov.  He needs a lot of help, which he will get next week directly from God in his ladder dream.  But for now, we will try to help him.   He comes into the world already worried about his place in it.   He has the sense that only the first born will really be loved and blessed, and so he struggles mightily to be first, reaching out to hold on to the heel of his brother.  Feel the tension in that grip on the heel -- the sense of life and death desperation; I can’t let go or it won’t work out; I won’t get what I need.   Such tightness.   And then, again, with the soup -- feel how tightly wound Yaakov is, always on the lookout to control things and make them go his way, waiting for that moment of his brother’s weakness and pouncing on it.  And again, when he tricks his father, feel here, the sadness of the situation, Yaakov’s belief that he needs to pretend to be someone else in order to be loved and blessed by his father, his sense of not enoughness.   There is an inner emptiness underneath all that tightness.   

So Yaakov, maybe more than all the others, really needs Rehovot, really needs this sense of spaciousness.    Let’s take his tight hold on the heel and see if it can relax a bit if we let him know that there is a love and a blessing that is beyond what either of his parents can give him and this love and blessing will come to him no matter what he does.    It is ok that he is tightly wound and controlling and energetic; we don’t want him to change all that; these are useful parts of him, but they can relax a little --  rest --  in the knowledge of the vastness of the blessing that is already his, in the sense of space that surrounds him -  yama vakedma tzafona vanegba, west and east and north and south, the directions that God shows him next week.   Yaakov’s competitive parts can relax, too, in the knowledge of this spaciousness, in the feeling of divine plenty, and the sense of enoughness and no scarcity.  There is enough to go around, for both him and his brother, and also, he is enough, little Yaakov, enough to deserve the blessing without manipulation.  You don’t have to be the best or the first; you don’t have to be someone else; just be yourself and know that you, as you are, have a place in God’s vast universe.  

Next is Yitzhak.   Yitzhak has seen a glimpse of the Rehovot expansiveness in his interaction over the wells, but he doesn’t always remember to apply it at home.    When Yaakov takes the first blessing and Esav shows up wanting one as well, Yitzhak actually thinks that there are no more blessings to give.  He is in his very human mindframe of limitation and scarcity.   Esav knows this isn’t right, asking habrachah ahat hi likha avi?   “Do you only have one blessing, my father?”  Yes, your father --  as a limited human being -- only has one blessing to give, but if he could get himself connected to that divine Rehovot plane, he would know that there is no limit; he could put some space and perspective around your pain, Esav, your sense of loss, helping you see that this is just one incident in a long span of history, that in fact you, too, will be blessed in many ways, that God has infinite ways of bestowing blessing even if your father does not. 

We don’t blame Yitzhak for not being able to bring Rehovot into every aspect of his life.   That is the way we are as humans.   We get glimpses of the truth; we know it somewhere inside us, but we don’t remember it at all times; in fact, often at the most important times -- in our moments of greatest stress --  we forget it, we are tight and constricted and can’t remember the truth of that spaciousness.  The only thing to do is to put a lot of space around this human frailty, too, to let it be ok for Yitzhak and all of us to forget, to rest even this forgetfulness in a sea of divine forgiveness.  .  

Putting all these examples together, we can see how a sense of divine spaciousness can help us to relax and even begin to heal in many difficult situations.   It is like taking whatever hurts and putting it inside a warm bath; the pain melts into the water that surrounds it.    Space is like that.  That’s why time heals.  Time is a kind of space, temporal space.  Esav wants to kill Yaakov at the end of this week’s parsha, but when they meet 21 years later, they make peace.   The space of time has softened the sharp edges, made each hurtful incident seem less significant, and allowed some healing to take place.   Consciously bringing a sense of divine spaciousness to mind can have that effect in a more immediate way.  The problem can relax into a bed of infinite love and be held; that is most of what we need anyway, simply to be held.  

This sense of spaciousness is actually our national cultural treasure.  Avraham -- who was exceptionally good at beholding vastness and could even see 400 years into the future -- was told repeatedly that his descendants would be like the sand of the sea and the stars of the sky.  Normally we understand these images to mean that his offspring would be numerous, but perhaps, in light of Rehovot, we can also interpret them -- the stars and the sand -- as symbols of spaciousness. The promise to Avraham, then, was not just that his descendants would be many, but also that they  -- we -- would carry this sense of divine expansiveness --  the vastness of the sky and sea -- inside us through life, that we would have the capacity, in moments of constriction, to open and turn toward the spaciousness, Rehovot, that is always dwelling inside us.  

As the parsha shows -- and our experience bears out --  more often than not, in this world of limitation and scarcity, we are not aware of this spaciousness.    Yitzhak gets only a glimpse of this other plane.  And yet that glimpse -- if we all keep adding our own tiny flashes -- may be enough to point us in a direction, a direction of redemption and healing and inner and outer peace.   Yitzhak says: Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu.    Now God has expanded space for us.   Yes, there was constriction and tightness, but now -- the eternal now, in this moment of the present, in this moment of presence, in this very moment, right now -- we can open up to the spaciousness and loosen that tightness.   What happens after this Rehovot experience is that Yitzhak makes a covenant of peace with those around him.    Knowledge of this divine spaciousness is what leads to peace inside us and outside us, and ultimately, to the final messianic peace, may it come speedily and in our day.  

Parashat Hayei Sarah: A Post-humous Celebration of Sarah

 I have never understood the Rashi at the beginning of this week’s parsha.   

Rashi is responding to theTorah’s lengthy way of telling us Sarah’s age at death --  vayeheyu hayei Sarah me’ah shanah ve’esrim shanah . . . .  ”Sarah’s lifetime was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years -- this was the span of Sarah’s life” (23:1). Why the repeated use of the word “years” and the extra phrase at the end?  Rashi explains these superfluities to mean that Sarah was a person who was, in terms of sinlessness and beauty, the same at age 100 and at age 20 and at age 7.  All her years were equal in their goodness -- kulan shavin letovah.  

So what bothers me is that we normally think the best way to be in the world is to grow and improve and always be striving and moving forward, not to remain the same throughout our lives.  In Hasidic terms, we are supposed to be more a mahalakh, a walker with two legs, than a malakh, an angel, who has only one leg and stands still; we are supposed to climb the ladder, rung after rung, to keep reaching and changing. 

Avraham is such a mover.  From the moment God instructs him to “go”  -- lekh lekha, he never stops moving, going up and down the land multiple times.    And this physical movement mirrors an intense time of growth for Avraham, as he moves through ten trials, the first of which -- leaving his home -- was far easier than the last -- sacrificing his son, showing that Avraham had indeed made immense progress in his spiritual journey.  

But Rashi seems to be telling us there is another way to be as well, another way that is equally praiseworthy -- to stay the same, not to try to alter what is already perfect from the start, but simply to remain who you already are at all times, perfect and beautiful and pure as you always have been since childhood.   Sarah represents this truth.  While Avraham is running around welcoming guests, hither and thither, so much to do, no time to do it, where is Sarah?  Inside the tent.   Staked and steadfast and unmoving, in the tent.   Things are already perfect.  She has nowhere to run.  

These two ways of being -- the one of movement and the other of staying put -- are not at odds with each other here, but perfect complements.    Sarah’s steadiness soothes Avraham’s restlessness, and his activity gives energy, actualization and purpose to her calm.   They are a team.   Avraham is the 6 workdays to Sarah’s shabbat.    

To take it one step further, Sarah seems to represent Presence, both human presence and divine Presence   -- the feminine Shekhinah -- in the life of the family.   The tent she is associated with comes up again in this week’s parsha, as Yitzhak brings Rivka, his new bride, into it and is comforted over his mother’s death.  Amidst the flurry of verbose words and activity in the story of the servant’s search for this wife for Yitzhak, this moment in the tent is one of intense presence.  It is as if the world stops for a moment, and it is just the two of them, Yitzhak and Rivka, present to each other in a loving, comforting way, an experience that Yitzhak probably hasn’t had since the loss of his mother.  

Now this tent itself -- Sarah’s tent -- has certain miraculous qualities associated with it; according to tradition, while Sarah was alive, a cloud hovered around it at all times, the Shabbat light lasted the entire week, and the bread dough was always “blessed,” successful and plentiful.   These qualities are reminiscent of another tent of divine presence, the mishkan (tabernacle), with its hovering cloud of glory,  the eternal light of the ner tamid , and the plentiful and everpresent showbread.  Read in this light, when Avraham tells the angels last week that Sarah is “in the tent,” it is a way of saying that she is with God, immersed in divine presence.   

While Avraham heard God’s voice speak to him many times, tradition has it that Sarah was actually the greater of the two in ruach hakadosh, prophetic insight (see Rashi on 21:12).  Indeed, according to one interpretation, Sarah’s other name, Yiskah, is related to sokhah, meaning “seeing,” because she was a “seer” from a young age.   

So Sarah and her tent and her connection to the divine presence must have been an important support for Avraham in his journey of faith.   As Rabbi Shlomo Riskin has pointed out, after Sarah dies, Avraham no longer hears directly from God or experiences any further divine trials; with the loss of Sarah, he has lost some of his access to the divine.  He turns now to more ordinary pursuits, like getting his son married, remarrying himself and having many more children, all born -- not, as with Sarah, through miraculous intervention -- but in the ordinary way. 

Circling back to the first Rashi of the parsha, the idea that Sarah lived a life not of change, but of sameness, seems more appealing now, a piece of the divine.   While it is true that the world we live in and each of us in it is broken and in dire need of healing and growing -- a truth that Avraham carried so well --  it is at the very same moment also true that the world is already perfect just as it is and no change is needed.   We are all already perfect, all born perfect and beautiful just as God wants us and none of that ever leaves us.    No matter how messed up we end up, there is still that perfect stillness inside us that needs no healing or change at all.  And so both the restless seeking and the peace are true, one on the human plane -- where we can see the mess and see the great improvements that are possible -- and the other on some higher plane, a place where we feel the perfection of this divinely created world so clearly that we cry out in praise “halleluyah!” despite the brokenness.   This feeling is the essence of Shabbat; on Shabbat, there are no problems that need solving; nothing needs to be changed at all; all is perfect just as it is and we can stand as still as Sarah did.

So we need this quality of Sarah’s, this sense of not changing.  But of course, Sarah alone would not have done much good in the world either.   She would have remained in her tent and the goodness would not have spread.   The combination is ideal, not just in couples, but also inside ourselves.   We each have both of these aspects.  We have a part of us that yearns to change and fix and improve ourselves, to be constantly moving forward; this part sees that so much is not yet right in our world and in ourselves and cannot rest.   This is a beautiful part, an honored part, an essential part.  But it cannot work alone.  It needs to also know the truth of Sarah; it needs to learn to rest in Sarah’s tent, to rest in the knowledge that in spite of the mess, everything is also already just right.   There is peace here, and from this place of peace, the part that yearns for change can act, not out of desperation and panic, but out of love and peace and presence.   

Meditation for Parashat Vayera

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Parashat Vayera: Inviting in Whoever Comes

When God appears to Avraham in the beginning of this week’s parsha, what is Avraham doing?   He is yoshev petah ha’ohel , “sitting in the opening of the tent,” ready to greet and welcome and honor whoever happens to come by.  He sits in a posture of openness towards the world; if war comes, if a command to leave his home comes, if a famine comes, if random people pass by -- they are welcomed and accepted as God’s agents.   This is a life posture, as is implied by the root yashav used here, which in addition to meaning “sit” also means “dwell.” This is how Avraham lived, not just at this moment, but in all moments, open to whatever and whoever comes, standing at the door, laughing and inviting them in.  

To such a one God appears; with such a one God chooses to dwell.  Or perhaps we should think of it this way -- Avraham was able to see that every guest that came his way -- whether it be an event or a person or a feeling -- was a messenger of God, and so Avraham’s life was filled with God’s appearances, filled with moments of receiving God’s presence and gifts and messages through everyone and everything around him.   

I am reminded of a Rumi poem, The Guest House:

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing, 

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, 

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Avraham’s tent was indeed a guest house, a symbol of the guest house that was his very being, sitting in a posture of radical openness toward the world, and welcoming each passerby.   In this case, in our story, the visitors are quite literally messengers from God, three angels each with a mission -- Compassion, Hope and Destruction.   

One is sent to help Avraham heal from his recent brit milah  (circumcision), to offer comfort and compassion and healing by visiting the sick.  Another comes with a message of Hope -- to inform the couple that in a year’s time they will have a baby.   And the third is sent to destroy the evil Sodom and its environs.  

These are three visitors we receive all the time, through other people and through our own fluctuating emotions; we are visited sometimes by a sense of healing and compassion, sometimes by hope and sometimes by despair and destruction -- the sense of irredeemable evil in the universe, hopelessness, and the impossibility of repair.   These feelings in us -- as for Avraham -- sometimes relate to ourselves or our families and sometimes to the broader world around us.   Avraham welcomes all three into his guest house, treating them all with great honor and hospitality, understanding that all are guides from beyond.   

I want to focus on the Hope messenger.   In this scene, Hope addresses itself primarily to Sarah.  Avraham has already received this message in last week’s parsha, so here, the messenger, about to deliver the news, asks first -- “Where is Sarah your wife?” making it clear that what he has to say is directed primarily at her.   Finding that she is in the tent, the visitor speaks near the entrance so that she can hear, and proclaims his message of hope -- next year at this time, Sarah will have a child.  

But messages of hope are not always easy to hear.  The Torah says that Sarah is listening at the petah ha’ohel, “the opening to the tent,” but also that there is something blocking her -- vehu aharav, and it, meaning the entrance, was behind him, the angel, as he spoke.   She was both open to the message and not open to it, both at the opening and yet also blocked by the back of the angel.  

Indeed her reaction (not unlike Avraham’s in last week’s parsha) to Hope is Doubt; she laughs to herself, saying, “Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment -- with my husband so old?”   This is what we do sometimes.  If we have been in a stuck place for a very long time -- as Sarah has -- we learn to protect ourselves from Hope with Doubt, to protect ourselves from the emotional ups and downs of wanting something so much and continually being disappointed with each new prospect.  It is better, we think, to just stay in this stable place of despair and not expect anything to change.   And so, when Hope shows up, we counter it with Doubt.  

What happens next is interesting. God reports Sarah’s doubt to Avraham, and she, Sarah, seeing that her doubting laughter has come to light, denies it.  Vatikahesh Sarah.   Sarah denied it, saying:  No, I didn’t laugh.   This is the opposite stance of sitting in the opening of our guest house, welcoming whoever comes.  Hope showed up and she only half let him in, pushing him away with Doubt.  And now Doubt shows up and she denies his existence, pushing him down inside her.  No, I didn’t laugh.  I don’t doubt.  There is no such visitor inside me.   

But God wants truth and openness -- it is the only real way to access Him -- and so He replies to her -- “No. You did laugh,” as if calling her to hold the Doubt, to welcome it in and own it.  Doubt is far more dangerous in hiding than it is in broad daylight, allowed its place inside us.   

You did laugh.  You did doubt.  And that is ok.  Doubt is a part of being human, one of the many guests from beyond that visit us occasionally.  And it, too, like all guests, once honored, has a certain power and goodness to it.   The flip side of doubt is amazement and awe and a letting go of knowing so that one can inhabit the unknown realm of the divine.    Sarah’s laughter symbolizes both sides of doubt -- the bitter hopelessness as well as the radical amazement.

To make clear how important each and every emotion is -- even doubt has a place in faith -- this laughter of doubt is not only outed, but also celebrated; it becomes the name of their son Yitzhak, born in circumstances that inspire both doubt -- according to the midrash, neighborhood women doubted that Sarah had given birth to him -- and amazement. 

This celebration of doubt-turned-amazement is a key aspect of this story.  The fact is there is no need for Avraham and Sarah to be told ahead of time that they will have a child in a year.  There is no need for Hope to come to them.    They could simply have had the child.  What this story does is to highlight the time before the birth, the time before knowledge, the time of uncertainty -- we know about such times -- the time where both Hope and Doubt play inside us.    In highlighting these guests and celebrating and honoring them, the Torah teaches us to sit, and to live, as Avraham did at the start of the parsha, in an open doorway, welcoming all who come our way.   Whoever they are, if we invite them in for a cup of tea, we can see that they are indeed guides from beyond.