Abandon Hope: Va-Yera

I wanted to get this out before the results of the elections come out, which we know will take some time, while everyone is on edge, holding their breath. 

Following is a summary of all the insane things that happen in this week’s Torah reading. It would be an interesting exercise to find a parallel in today’s world for much of the story line (and I invite anyone out there reading this to do so if it strikes your fancy). 

Warning: the following contains disturbing images and a fair amount of violence.

1. Soon after Abraham has circumcised himself at 100 years old, he runs around (ouch) preparing a feast for some visitors in the heat of the day along with Sarah. The three men/angels that Abraham and Sarah are serving bring news that Sarah will give birth at 90. (How can that be a pretty picture?)

2. God decides that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are too evil and need to be destroyed. Abraham argues on their behalf, God sort of agrees, and destroys them anyway.  

3. Two men/messengers from God come to Lot’s house at his invitation and the townspeople attack the house with a threat of rape against the strangers.

4. Lot offers his daughters instead. (Nice move.)

5. The messengers tell Lot he must leave Sodom with his family because they are about to destroy the (twin?) cities. He informs his family, and they think he’s lost it and seem to ignore him. 

6. After stalling for a while, Lot flees with his family at the last moment before the destruction, and sees the cities consumed by fire. 

7. Lot’s wife looks back and turns into a pillar of salt. (A little traumatic.)

8. Lot’s daughters, bereft of all hope and believing their father is the only man left on earth, get him drunk so they can sleep with him and continue the family line and humanity.

9. Abraham pretends a second time that Sarah is not his wife, this time with King Abimelech.

10. Sarah casts Hagar out, also a second time, but this time with her baby Ishmael to die in the desert because she is afraid her son Isaac will have to share his inheritance. 

11. And the grand finale: Abraham almost sacrifices his son on an altar. 

This parsha reads like a terrible nightmare that you can’t wake up from. 

Maybe like the one we’ve been in, just a different version. 

Fear, it can be argued, fuels so much of what takes place, both in the biblical world and in ours. 

Hope, also, is figured into the lives of the biblical characters, as we are obsessively talking about our own hopes for the near and far future. 

According to Buddhist nun Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart, hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. 

Hope is described as robbing us of the present moment. It means we are thinking about the future and all that is wrong that needs to change. 

Whenever we start thinking about the future, we become afraid. 

And things definitely feel like they’re falling apart. 

We are pinned to the news, looking at election results moment by moment, even though we know it’s useless to do so. 

We are panicked and holding our breath, wondering what kind of plan we should have in place, just in case. Just like the messengers of God who pull Lot by the hand and force him to leave before Sodom and Gomorrah go up in smoke, should we be planning an exit strategy and pulling each other along...before it’s too late?

But there’s one particular detail that caught my eye in the parsha, aside from all the destruction, which occurs twice; Hagar and Abraham, in the worst possible moment, lift their eyes and open them to see something they hadn’t before: Hagar sees a well of water in the desert; Abraham sees an animal for sacrifice in place of his son. 

I was talking to my friend (and rabbi), Esther Azar, about this, trying to put into words what she was able to for me. 

The question: What is the significance of this looking up, having their eyes lifted and opened, amidst all this violence and violation? What’s the connection between the two? 

The answer: In their looking up, Hagar and Abraham are taken out of the cycle they are swept up in. 

To take that a step further, they are taken out of their story, and suddenly they see something they couldn’t before. 

In this time of upheaval, as we are swept up in American presidential politics and everything else that’s wrong in the world, holding our breath, afraid of what we will see going forward, frozen in time, like Lot’s wife, consumed by fear, we need to step out of this cycle and this story, and allow ourselves to see something we perhaps couldn’t see before. 

We don’t know what we’ll find if we do, but it might get us out of our cycle of hope and fear for just a moment.