31 Oct VAYEIRA: ANGELS & MUSTARD WHAT ANGELS DON’T UNDERSTAND ABOUT HOLINESS

Hospitality
The opening of this
week’s parsha,
Vayeira, relates the
tale of Avraham
sitting during a hot
day at the entrance of his tent and observing
three men standing nearby. He ran toward
them and insisted they come to relax in his
tent.
Avraham was very specific: “Let some
water be brought and wash your feet, and
recline beneath the tree. I will fetch a morsel
of bread so that you may sustain yourself.”
The three men consent and accept
Avraham’s invitation.
At this point, the Torah gives us a detailed
account of what transpired during the
following moments:
“Avraham rushed to the tent to Sarah [his
wife] and said, ‘Hurry! Three measures of
the finest flour! Knead it and make rolls!
Then Avraham ran to the cattle, took a calf,
tender and good, and gave it to the young
man who rushed to prepare it.
“He took cottage cheese and milk and the
calf which he had prepared, and placed
these before them; he stood over them as
they ate under the tree.”
“They asked him, ‘Where is Sarah your
wife? And he said, ‘Behold — in the tent!’”
“’I will return to you this time next year,’
said [one of the men], ‘and your wife Sarah
will have a son.’”
The continuation of the narrative makes it
clear that these three visitors were no simple
men, but rather spiritual energies, or angels,
manifested in the bodies and the guise of
men. These angels were sent to carry out
three monumental tasks described in the
continuation of the story: A) to inform
Avraham that Sarah would give birth to a
child; B) to overturn the evil city of Sodom
and, finally, C) to rescue Avraham’s nephew
Lot and his family who lived in Sodom.
Three Questions
The commentators raise a few questions.
1) Since two of the three angels came to
carry out tasks unrelated to Avraham, why
did these two angels come to Avraham’s
home first?
2) Why does the Torah find it necessary to
inform us of the exact words and tasks of
Avraham upon greeting the guests, including
the exact menu of what he served them? If
the Torah wished to teach us about his

extraordinary hospitality, couldn’t it have
simply stated that Avraham took care of all
their needs?
3) The question the men asked Avraham —
“Where is Sarah your wife?” — seems
amiss, since after Avraham told them where
she was, they did not proceed to address her,
and continued speaking to Avraham. Why
did they ask this question?
Visiting A Rebbe
The Chassidic masters offer a moving
homiletical interpretation of this biblical
episode.
According to Jewish tradition, there exists
in each generation a tzaddik, a great
moral giant, who serves as the spiritual
foundation of the world, as a bridge between
heaven and earth. This is a human being
who carries the burden of history on his
shoulders and always has his finger on the
pulse of the generation. While others plan
their vacations and retirements, this person
cannot sleep at night as long as there is one
soul in G-d’s universe hurting.
In his times, Avraham served as this
tzaddik, the Rebbe (spiritual master) of the
world. When three angels were dispatched
to pay a visit to planet Earth, they were
determined to visit this extraordinary human
being. They longed to be touched by his
soul, inspired by his spirituality, and ignited
by his passion. The angels craved to
encounter the majesty of holiness at its
peak.
When the three angels approached
Avraham’s tent, they expected to discover a
soul burning with a sacred flame, steeped in
heavenly meditation, melting away in
infinite ecstasy. They expected to find a
spirit dancing with the Divine, free of any
trace of the mundane, suspended above the
crassness of the physical universe and its
materialistic trappings.
The Shocking Moment
What was the reality the angels actually
encountered?
“Let some water be brought and wash your
feet, and recline beneath the tree,” the great
Rebbe, Avraham, declared. “I will fetch a
morsel of bread so that you may sustain
yourself,” were the words that came out of
G-d’s ambassador to planet earth.
“Avraham rushed to the tent to Sarah [his
wife] and said, ‘Hurry! Three measures of
the finest flour! Knead it and make rolls!
Then Avraham ran to the cattle, took a calf,
tender and good, and gave it to the young
man who rushed to prepare it. He took

cottage cheese
and milk and the
calf which he had
prepared, and
placed these
before them; he
stood over them
as they ate under
the tree.”
A man of infinite
ecstasy? No. A
good chef who
knows how to run
a smooth kitchen
— that is what they saw in Avraham.
“We thought we were coming to a Rebbe,”
they must have thought to themselves.
“Instead, we ended up at a butcher.”
In lieu of finding the light of the divine
radiating from Avraham’s tent, they
discovered an old man running around,
tongue and mustard in his hands! “We must
have come to the wrong location,” the
angels mused.
What About The Wife?
Then a thought came to their mind that
perhaps when they heard in heaven that
Avraham was the tzaddik of the generation,
it was actually referring not to him but to his
counterpart, Sarah. She might be the real
master of the generation and Avraham
merely her attendant.
So the narrative continues: “They asked
him, ‘Where is Sarah your wife?” Perhaps
we can get a glimpse of your wife and we
will finally encounter the presence of
authentic holiness.
“And he said, ‘Behold — in the tent!’”
What Avraham was telling the angels is that
if they did not ‘get it’ henceforth, seeing
Sarah wouldn’t do the job either, for she is
even more concealed than Avraham. She is
concealed in the tent. Her true identity is not
easily appreciated.
Angels Enlightened
At that moment, for the first time, the
angels realized how deeply they had erred.
In their longing to encounter holiness, they
missed the ultimate point: that the authentic
majesty of human holiness consists of a
person’s daily acts of love, selflessness, and
graciousness performed amid the stress and
lowliness of physical existence. The angels
failed to recognize that the genuine
experience of serving G-d means not to soar
to the heavens searching for angels, but to
be there for another human being in a very
real and pragmatic way.

“Hurry! Three measures of the finest flour!
Knead it and make rolls!” In this simple,
mundane behavior, Avraham constructed a
fragment of heaven on earth.
What Life Is Really Like
“I will return to you this time next year,
and your wife Sarah will have a son,” came
the response of the angel. This was not
merely a communication of G-d’s earlier
promise to Avraham; it was also a response
of an angel in awe of the revolution that
Avraham introduced to the world, in which
a human being in his ordinary daily behavior
can build a home for G-d. Avraham’s
revolution, the angel insisted, must have a
future in the form of a family, and,
ultimately, a people, charged with the
mission to teach the world how to fuse
heaven and earth.
The angels never forgot that visit. Avraham
gave them not only a sobering lesson in
what real life is like but also a lesson of
what it meant to be authentically spiritual.
True spirituality, Avraham was
communicating to the angels, lies not in
man’s attempt to escape the trappings of the
world, but rather in his commitment to
drawing down light and beauty into the
darkness of life.
Above the Angels
This explains an enigmatic change in the
language of the text. In the beginning of the
narrative detailing the visit of the angels, we
read: “vehinei shlosha anoshim nitzavim
aluv,” meaning that the angels were standing
over him. Later, when the guests are being
served by Avraham, we read: “vehu omed
aleihem,” meaning that Avraham stood over
them.
It was through this act of hospitality that
Avraham rose far and beyond the angels; he
was now standing over and above them.
Through simple human kindness practiced
on earth that the human being reaches far
beyond the most spiritual angels.