Parashat Vayeira — welcoming the stranger
Congregation Beth Sholom, Teaneck, Conservative
There is a powerful scene that plays out at the very beginning of this week’s Torah reading, Parashat Vayeira. The first few verses of Genesis 18 read as follows: “The Lord appeared to him [Abraham] by the terebinths of Mamre; he was sitting at the entrance of the tent as the day grew hot. Looking up, he saw three men standing near him. As soon as he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them, and, bowing to the ground, he said, ‘My lords, if it please you, do not go on past your servant.’”
The midrash teaches that at this moment, God was performing the mitzvah of bikur cholim, of visiting the sick. We understand that Abraham was recovering from his self-inflicted brit milah (ritual circumcision), and God, perhaps in admiration for the manner and speed with which Abraham proceeded with God’s command for himself and his household, was personally visiting him to wish him a refuah sh’leimah, a complete healing. That, in and of itself, is an extraordinary lesson for us to learn from these first few verses of the parasha. Put in the language of a kal vachomer argument (Talmudic reasoning that if A is true, then how much more so should B be true), if God can take the time to visit Abraham and perform the mitzvah of bikur cholim (visiting the sick), then how much more so must each one of us find the time to do so as well.
When dissecting these three verses, if this was all we learned, we could say “dayeinu! It was enough,” but there’s more. Not only do we learn about the mitzvah of bikur cholim from these verses, but we also learn about the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim, welcoming the guests into your home. Because what does Abraham do when he sees the strangers approaching? He not only welcomes them, but “he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them.” He illustrates for these guests (and for all future readers) that welcoming guests is a priority, something that we value, something that we should make a priority in our lives.
But there is the question that is gnawing at me. I understand that we can learn about the mitzvot of bikur cholim and hachnasat orchim from these verses, but how does the overall story work? How is it possible that Abraham was allowed to turn away from God (who was performing the mitzvah of bikur cholim) to greet human strangers (Abraham did not yet know that they actually weren’t human, but angels in human form; he will only learn this later in the chapter). Does it not seem rude to God, or disrespectful, to physically turn away from God to greet mere human beings?
The Talmud addresses this question directly in the tractate of Shabbat (127a) when it says the following, “Rav Yehudah said that Rav said — hospitality toward guests is greater than receiving the divine presence.” To prove their point, the Talmud continues by quoting from our parasha, as if that makes the answer perfectly clear.
What goes unsaid in our parasha and is implied in the section of Talmud quoted above, is that greeting guests is such an important activity, and a worthy activity to do INSTEAD of communing with God, because each human being is made in the image of God. So when we turn away from God to greet human beings, what we are actually doing is turning away from one manifestation of God to turn toward another manifestation of God (human beings).
To embrace this idea that turning toward human beings is just another way to turn toward God is to understand the radical responsibility we have, as human beings, toward each other. It would be so easy in our world to turn away from other people, to say that we don’t care about people who are different from us in one way or another (religion, nationality, race, political affiliation, regional identification, etc.), but these verses from Genesis, understood through the Talmud’s eyes, teach us that rushing to address the physical, spiritual, and communal needs of our fellow human beings needs to be understood as a religious duty no less severe or important than the life-altering experience of communing with God.
Placing this idea squarely into the complicated world of October 2026, what does it mean for us? I believe it teaches us that those who vote differently from us are not the enemy, that those who pray differently from us are equal in value, in religious terms, to us, and that while arguing and disagreeing over policies can actually be productive and helpful to guide us toward long-term solutions, we should never forget the humanity of those with whom we vehemently disagree. That will not necessarily make us friends or make the issues that divide us less challenging to overcome, but hopefully it will remind us that while we are all well aware of what divides us, we should also never lose sight of what unites us.
We are human beings, created by God, destined to live together on this planet. The least we can do is find a way to do that peacefully.