12 Nov VAYERA: ANGELS & MUSTARD WHAT ANGELS DON’T UNDERSTAND ABOUT HOLINESS

Hospitality
The opening of this
week’s parsha,
Vayera, 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 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.