After boycott ride, Avraham shows way forward
How do we process what we saw in the news this past week?
On the eve of Kristallnacht — the anniversary of the November night in 1938 when synagogues burned across Germany and Austria and Jewish shop windows were shattered in the streets — activists in Philadelphia organized a “boycott ride” past Jewish- and Israeli-owned restaurants. Their flier declared, “These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!” So what is our response?
Last week’s parsha, Chayei Sarah, offers us three.
When Avraham Avinu comes before the children of Ches to buy a burial place for Sarah, he introduces himself with a puzzling phrase: “Ger v’toshav anochi imachem (I am a stranger and a resident among you)” (Bereishis 23:4). How can a person be both at once?
Rashi, drawing on the Midrash (Bereishis Rabbah 58:6), reads it as a quiet negotiation: If you are willing, I will be a stranger and buy the land. If not, I am a resident, and I will take it by right. Rav Soloveitchik saw in this verse the permanent double identity of the Jew who lives in a largely non-Jewish society (“Reflections of the Rav”). It describes exactly what it means to be a Jewish American.
We are toshav. We live here. We keep the law, pay our taxes, vote, serve and take pride in our civic duties. This is not merely good manners but a Torah obligation. The prophet Yirmiyahu told the exiles in Babylon to seek the peace of the city where they lived and to pray on its behalf, because in its peace they would find their own (Yirmiyahu 29:7). The Mishnah teaches us to pray for the welfare of the government (Avos 3:2).
And yet we are also ger. We are not in charge here. However comfortable our lives may be, we are still in galus. A week like this one reminds us of that, and it needs to be recognized honestly — not with bitterness or panic, but with clear eyes.
Those who forget that they are gerim will be shocked by every boycott ride. Those who forget that they are toshavim will withdraw from a society they have every right and every obligation to help shape. Avraham held both truths, and so must we.
• • •
The second response is hidden in the timing of Sarah’s passing. Just before her death, in the closing verses of Parshas Vayera, the Torah pauses to report a seemingly minor bit of family news: A girl named Rivka has been born (Bereishis 22:23). The Midrash explains why (Bereishis Rabbah 58:2). Before Hashem lets the sun of one righteous person set, He causes the sun of another to rise. Standing over Sarah, Avraham could see only loss. He could not yet see that the next mother of the Jewish people was already in the world.
The Ramchal gives this idea a framework. In “Daas Tevunos” he describes two systems through which Hashem governs creation. The first is hanhagas hamishpat, the governance of justice — the world of cause and effect, where human beings make real choices and live with their consequences. The second is hanhagas hayichud, the governance of Divine unity, in which Hashem moves history exactly where He intends it to go, toward its ultimate repair, no matter how things look on the surface.
An analogy from science may help. A single molecule of gas bounces unpredictably in every direction, yet trillions upon trillions of them together obey precise laws of pressure and temperature. From up close, the choices of more than eight billion human beings look like chaos. Zoom out and a pattern emerges. Both views are true at the same time.
So too with history. We live inside hanhagas hamishpat. Our choices matter, and we must act. But hanhagas hayichud is unfolding at the same time. That is no reason to be passive. It is a reason not to despair.
• • •
The third response is, to my mind, the most important. Last week I wrote in these pages about vayakam Avraham, how Avraham rose from before his dead and went on to build. This week I want to stay a moment longer with what came before he rose.
Avraham came “lispod l’Sarah v’livkosah (to eulogize Sarah and to weep for her)” (Bereishis 23:2). The man who had just come down from the Akeidah did not skip the tears. In the Torah scroll, the letter kaf in v’livkosah is written smaller than the letters around it.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch understood this to mean that Avraham kept his weeping private. Private is not the same as denied. His grief was real, but it did not take over the public work still in front of him.
That is the balance we need right now. When I was growing up, I never imagined seeing a ride through an American city declaring that Jewish establishments do not belong there. My children are growing up in a world where that happens. That is something to cry about, and we should not pretend otherwise. But tears that are acknowledged can be carried, while tears that are denied tend to harden into fear or anger.
So we cry over what this week revealed. We remember that we are both strangers and residents. And we hold on to the promise hidden in these verses, that the next sun is already rising. Like Avraham, we may be standing inside a moment of loss while the answer has already been born.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach. www.bachlongbeach.com.
