In the Heat of the Day
It is easy to think the problems and challenges right now are all consuming and of paramount importance. We want that to be true because then our choices take on a magnified importance that appeals to our ego. Maimonides, the great Spanish / Egyptian Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages teaches a challenging counter narrative when he says “the news of the day negates Torah.”
For Maimonides, when we get (overly?) concerned with news, politics, or work we are blocked from the kind of spiritual and ethical growth that matters. Maimonides wants us focused on the kinds of questions and behaviors that will be significant in 10, 50, 100 years. If you saved your favorite news source and looked at it decades later, how much of it would still matter to you?
Abraham sits in the heat of day, away from the pressures of life. He is in communion with God because he has separated himself from all the drives, concerns and fears of his moment. His spiritual strength was the capacity to let go of all the quotidian details and turn his mind towards ultimate meaning.
It was in that place that three strange visitors came to see him. They at first are men and then come to be revealed as divine visitors. From that place of vision, Abraham reacts and cares for the needs of his guests. He realizes the first and most essential question is: how do I treat the stranger in front of me? An encounter with another person IS an encounter with the Divine. ReaLizing that I am responsible to the other I realize I am in connection with God.
Only then, only after Abraham prepares a meal for these guests with his own hands is he ready to see the larger needs that call to us beyond the immediate relation. God includes Abraham in the divine calculus of Sodom and Gomorrah because Abraham has already shown that he cares more for his fellow human than his own ego or self-importance.
God shows Abraham his plan to destroy the cities of the plain and Abraham responds. He has shown the moral and spiritual growth that makes him ready to focus on a larger human issue without being distracted. In the heat of the day, in the presence of God, he sees the tragedy were God to kill the righteous alongside the wicked.
Torah is here to remind us who we want to be. We want to be kind, loving, filled with a sense of responsibility to the people right around us and through them slowly to learn how we can bring that kindness to the world as a whole. This is the teaching we need when the world threatens to overwhelm us.
The example of Abraham, the teaching of Maimonides, reminds us that especially in challenging overwhelming times we need to leave ourselves time to sit, to reflect and breathe so that when we arise to act we can see fully the needs, the deep ethical call, of the other to which we yearn to understand and respond.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Booth
