2025

Vayeira: The Measure of a Community

This week’s Torah portion, Vayeira, opens with a simple, unforgettable image:
Abraham, recovering from his circumcision, sits at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day when three strangers appear. Without hesitation, he runs to greet them, bows low, and offers food, shade, and rest.

It’s not a grand prophetic moment. It’s hospitality — the everyday kindness of seeing someone who might need you. And yet, in that moment, God appears.
Abraham meets the Divine not in revelation or ritual, but in relationship.

Later in the same portion, those same messengers arrive in Sodom. But there, the strangers are met not with kindness, but with violence and fear. The men of the city surround the house, demanding that the outsiders be handed over.
The Torah offers us a stark moral contrast: Abraham’s tent is open on all sides; Sodom’s gates are bolted shut. Abraham’s home is built on generosity and trust; Sodom’s on suspicion and cruelty.

The question is timeless: Do we meet the world with openness or with fear?

I once worked with a Bar Mitzvah student who learned this lesson firsthand. His family was living in Beijing, and though his portion was K’doshim — “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” — his experience was pure Vayeira.

He told me what it was like to be a foreigner: how some people took advantage of him, like cab drivers who doubled the fare when they heard his accent. But he also spoke about people who went out of their way to help him — strangers who smiled, shopkeepers who tried to learn a little English, friends who made sure he was never alone on holidays.
And when I went to Beijing to officiate his Bar Mitzvah, I saw it myself — a community of people who understood the holiness of hospitality, the spiritual power of making someone feel seen and safe.

He ended his d’var Torah with words I’ll never forget:

“Sometimes being a stranger shows you who people really are — and sometimes it shows you who you are.”

That truth has only grown louder in our own time.

We live in a country where suspicion has become almost automatic.
We assume the worst in those who vote differently, pray differently, speak differently, look differently.
We’re told that to open the door to the “other side” is to compromise our values — but in truth, it’s how we reclaim them.

Vayeira teaches that holiness is not found in purity or in being right; it’s found in how we treat the stranger at our door — whether that’s a person, an idea, or a neighbor we’ve stopped trying to understand.

Abraham’s greatness wasn’t just that he believed in one God. It was that he believed in the possibility of goodness in another human being. His tent was open on all sides because he refused to live within walls of fear.
Sodom, by contrast, is destroyed not because of one sin, but because it built its identity on suspicion and exclusion.

We have a choice in every generation — and in every conversation — which kind of community we want to be.
Do we meet one another as adversaries or as potential angels?
Do we slam the door or run to greet the visitor in the heat of the day?

The Torah’s vision is clear: our moral survival depends on our capacity to meet the stranger — and the neighbor — with generosity of spirit.
May we learn to open our tents, our minds, and our hearts.
May we resist the easy cynicism that divides us.
And may we, like Abraham, discover that when we welcome another person — even one we don’t understand — that is where true humanity begins.