Ari Levisohn: Welcome to Into the Verse, the parsha podcast where we dive deep into the verses to share new and unexpected insights, illuminating the parsha like you’ve never seen before.

This is Ari Levisohn together with the one and only Rabbi David Fohrman to talk about Parshat Lech Lecha, when we begin the Abraham saga. Rabbi Fohrman, today I want to talk to you about something I've been waiting over two years to talk about.

Rabbi Fohrman: Oh boy, that sounds like you have been holding your breath for a while. Ari, I'm pleased to tell you, you can exhale.

Ari: So, I'll be honest, it's not something I've fully figured out yet, so this might be a little bit more of a behind-the-scenes process as we put all the pieces together. I'm really excited about it because, to me, it deals with one of the most perplexing, confusing pesukim (verses) in the entire Torah. That pasuk is actually not in this week's parsha. It's actually not in the Book of Genesis at all. It's actually in Leviticus, in the middle of the laws of the arayot; basically, all of the illicit relations that you're not allowed to have and what happens to you if you do. Not a very popular section of the Torah. It's kind of all that icky stuff, all of these incestual relationships that we don't really like to think about or talk much about. But there's this one pasuk here that, to me, is bizarre. It's confusing and hard to understand on its own, but it really opened up some fascinating stuff in this week's parsha which I’m looking forward to getting to.

Rabbi Fohrman: So if I understand correctly, we're going to be starting from Leviticus and working our way back to Genesis. So hit me with it, Ari. What is it in Leviticus that caught your eye?

One of the Torah’s Most Perplexing Verses

Ari Levisohn: Okay, so we're going to be jumping into Leviticus chapter 20, verse 17. It's the middle of this case law describing all of these illicit relationships. So it describes a case: This person sleeps with this person, and then the law, here's what happens to them.

So verse 17 starts off laying out the case: וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר־יִקַּח אֶת־אֲחֹתוֹ — A man who takes his sister. Now, right off the bat, just setting up the case, there's something that should jump out to us here. What verb would you have expected the Torah to use when it's describing this situation?

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, the word יִקַּח (vayikach) is a little bit strange, because יִקַּח in Hebrew, which means “take,” generally in this context would be associated with marriage, such as כִּי־יִקַּח אִישׁ אִשָּׁה — when a man would take a wife (Deuteronomy 24:5). You wouldn't use it for an illicit relationship. Normally, the language for illicit relationships would be יִשְׁכַּב (vayishkav), literally “to sleep with” or “to lie with.”

Ari Levisohn: Exactly, right. Why would the Torah be using this language, the language of יִקַּח, “to take,” which, when it's used between a man and a woman, means to marry?

So that's an initial question that I have, just immediately in the first few words of this verse. That's not what I think makes it the most perplexing, confusing verse in the entire Torah. This question, I think, requires careful reading to notice, but my next question, I think, really hits us over the head like a ton of bricks.

So let's keep reading this verse: וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר־יִקַּח אֶת־אֲחֹתוֹ – Someone who takes his sister, בַּת־אָבִיו אוֹ בַת־אִמּוֹ – whether it's the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother; also notable that it specifies either one, whether it's his from his mother or from his father. וְהִיא־תִרְאֶה אֶת־עֶרְוָתוֹ – So they both see each other's nakedness. Again, it seems like that should have been the main focus, that they sleep with each other; not that they seem to almost get married, which isn't even possible because you can't marry your sister.

But this next word, Rabbi Fohrman, if you want to read it, is what just kind of makes you scratch your eyes and say, “Am I reading this right?”

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, חֶסֶד הוּא (chesed hu). It's hard to figure out how to translate the word chesed in this context. Chesed usually means it's a “kindness,” but here, incest seems anything but kind, so the use of the word “kindness” at face value is pretty strange.

Ari Levisohn: Yeah, it's like, what is this word doing here? Chesed, kindness, is the last word you would expect in this verse talking about this incestual relationship between a brother and a sister — and the Torah is saying it’s chesed? So this leads some commentators to say, well, maybe it's not the chesed that we think is the word “kindness;” it's actually from an Aramaic word which has a totally different meaning. And all the commentators break their heads trying to figure out what this word could possibly be doing here, but it's just so confusing. 

The verse continues: וְנִכְרְתוּ לְעֵינֵי בְּנֵי עַמָּם — So they're cut off from amongst the people.

How This Connects to Parshat Lech Lecha

Rabbi Fohrman: Now, Ari, since this is a podcast that you're doing not on Parshat Kedoshim but on Parshat Lech Lecha, I kind of already see where you're going here. You're seeing all this strange stuff in 17. You're saying, “Funny, because all this strange stuff in 17 reminds me of some strange stuff in the Book of Genesis,” specifically in Parshat Lech Lecha. Because famously, Parshat Lech Lecha, you have a moment where the brother-sister relationship underlying Abraham's marriage to Sarah suddenly gets highlighted.

You get to this moment in Genesis where Avram is going down to Mitzrayim, is going down to Egypt, and all of a sudden he stops Sarai and says, “We've got to make some sort of plan, because I know that you're very beautiful.” And he's afraid that, if this woman is unattainable because she's married to me, then people who covet her beauty will have no choice but to do away with me if they want her, so that's a pretty dangerous situation.

So let me not present myself as her husband. If I say that I am her brother and that she's my sister, they're going to court me because I'm the man in her life, and they're going to give me gifts and do all sorts of stuff because they're going to want you. Instead of killing me, they are going to woo me, which is a lot better than getting killed, right? That's his point.

So she's taken into the house of Pharaoh, into his harem. And just as Avram suspected, he was going to be wooed with lots of gifts. Then God intercedes and visits these plagues upon Pharaoh. Pharaoh figures out something is going on and says, “What did you do to me? Why didn't you tell me it was your wife? לָמָה אָמַרְתָּ אֲחֹתִי הִוא? Here's your wife. Go take her and leave (Genesis 12:19).”

What's interesting is that you've got some of this language of וַתֻּקַּח, the language for the proposed marriage between Pharaoh and Sarai (Genesis 12:15). Actually, it's not vayishkav, he doesn't actually sleep with her. He takes her into his harem. Similar to this, אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר־יִקַּח אֶת־אֲחֹתוֹ, somebody takes his sister. 

Ari Levisohn: Right, exactly. So it's not just Pharaoh who takes her, but when he gives her back to Abraham, he also says: קַח וָלֵךְ — Take her, be married to her. She's your wife.

Funnily enough, this isn't the only time that Abraham gets himself into a situation like this, and it isn't the only parallel we see with this pasuk from Vayikra (Leviticus).

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes, that is true. As you go to the next story, it's another story in Genesis where this happens again, this time in chapter 20. This time, Abraham is going down to Avimelech, the melech (king) of Grar — Grar was an adjacent land to the land of Israel — and Avram is there for a while. Abraham says about Sarai, seemingly: אֲחֹתִי הִוא — She is my sister. Avimelech, the king, takes her. Avimelech calls Avram and says, “What did you do? Have I ever sinned to you that you would bring upon me and my kingdom this terrible sin? You didn't do right by me! Why did you tell me that she was your sister?” So Avraham then says, “There's no fear of God in this place. I was worried that if they thought I was Sarai's husband, they would kill me because of my wife.”

Here comes the verses that resonate with that section of Leviticus we were talking about. Abraham then makes an excuse and says, “By the way, it was sort of a white lie, what I said. It's not really the case that she's just my wife; she kind of is my sister. I'll tell you why. If you do the math, וְגַם־אׇמְנָה אֲחֹתִי בַת־אָבִי הִוא — she sort of is my sister; on my father's side, she's my sister. אַךְ לֹא בַת־אִמִּי — Just not on my mother's side. She's sort of like a half-sister” (Genesis 20:12).

Now, he doesn't even really mean that she's a sister. What he means is, I have a sister-like relationship with her. But he does make this point that she's related to my father's side, not my mother's side.

That language of בַת־אָבִי הִוא אַךְ לֹא בַת־אִמִּי shows up in spades in that verse that you quoted in Leviticus. If you come back to that verse, Leviticus 20, verse 17: אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר־יִקַּח אֶת־אֲחֹתוֹ — A man who would take his sister; of course, that's the language for Pharaoh taking Sarah, probably also Avimelech. Then that language — בַּת־אָבִיו אוֹ בַת־אִמּוֹ, the daughter of your father, the daughter of your mother — seems lifted right out of that Avimelech story.

Ari Levisohn: Right. If she was a sister on either side — if she was an actual, literal sister — that would not be okay.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. And by the way, that language of chesed which you were so perplexed about, shows up here also in Genesis 20, verse 12, in the Avimelech story.

Abraham continues and says, “Avimelech, we had this thing going. וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר הִתְעוּ אֹתִי אֱלֹקים מִבֵּית אָבִי — whenever God took me away from my father's house and I did all these wanderings in foreign lands like Grar, like your land, וָאֹמַר לָהּ — I would say to Sarah, זֶה חַסְדֵּךְ — “This is your kindness, אֲשֶׁר תַּעֲשִׂי עִמָּדִי — that you can do for me. אֶל כׇּל־הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר נָבוֹא שָׁמָּה — Wherever we go, אִמְרִי־לִי — please say about me,  אָחִי הוּא — that, ‘he is my brother’” (Genesis 20:13).

So that language over here of chesed hu— which is just such a strange thing to say, that it's an act of kindness to sleep with your sister — again seems to be pulled out of the Abraham story.

So I will grant you that there's a lot of Avraham resonances in Leviticus 20, verse 17.

Ari Levisohn: Right. We saw this really confusing verse that described this situation, but it turns out, here's the story of Avraham where you have not just two people who are described as being like siblings, but these people actually happen to be married to each other. This explains the language of yikach.

There's a discussion about being from the father's side or the mother's side, and this really confusing word of chesed, of kindness, is used to describe their relationship as siblings — or at least, their pretend relationship as siblings in the Avraham story.

Rabbi Fohrman: I will tell you, Ari, that I have no idea what the significance of this is, and I'm wondering if you do. In other words, sure, we've got three references in this single verse to the Abraham story, but what the nature is of the commentary that Leviticus 20 is giving us about the Abraham story seems mysterious to me.

Additional Illicit Relationships in the Abraham Story

Ari Levisohn: It seems really mysterious to me too, and I have some thoughts. Maybe we'll be able to figure something out together. Before we try to interpret it, though, I want to enter one more piece of evidence to the courtroom, because this isn't the only one of the illicit relationships described in Vayikra that seems to have resonances in the Avraham story. We’ll scroll down just a few verses. If you look at verse 21…

Rabbi Fohrman: Ari, this, by the way, is where we see the difference in age between you and me. You glibly say, “If we scroll down just a few verses...” Back when I was a young whippersnapper, we didn't scroll anything — we turned the pages. Just saying.

Ari Levisohn: You mean you weren't reading from a Sefer Torah where you had to roll the column?

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right, we had to roll the klaf, we had parchment.

So we're three verses later now, and we're looking at another one of the illicit relationships; Leviticus 20, verse 20.

Ari Levisohn: Actually, I want to look at verse 21 first. Here, it's describing the relationship between a man and his sister-in-law, his brother's sister: וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִקַּח אֶת־אֵשֶׁת אָחִיו —A man who takes the wife of his brother…again, you would expect it to say, “who sleeps with,” that’s the real issur (prohibition) here. If you think about it, why might the Torah be using the language of kach here? The idea of marrying your brother's sister, that's something we know a little bit about.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yibum (levirate marriage), is that what you're referring to? Later on in the Torah, that becomes a mitzvah in the case of the death of the brother. If the brother died and they didn't have children, there is a mitzvah to marry the surviving wife of your deceased brother who has no children (Deuteronomy 25:5).

Ari Levisohn: Right, so it makes sense then why I might actually use the language of “marrying,” because there is this idea of marrying your brother's wife. It's just that, if he's dead and has no children, it's a mitzvah. If he's alive or does have children, it's completely forbidden.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, and not only is it completely forbidden, but strangely, the verse goes on to say that as punishment they should remain childless (Leviticus 20:21).

Ari Levisohn: Right, isn't that interesting? So it says עֲרִירִים יִהְיוּ — they should be childless. Now, the Torah has a rather small tool belt of different kinds of punishments it can dole out for different things. You have the death penalty; you have karet, the spiritual excommunication thing; you could get lashes; or you might have to pay a fine to another person.

Rabbi Fohrman: This is an unusual punishment.

Ari Levisohn: Right, and pretty much all of the punishments that the Torah gives are basically one of those four things. But this one specifies this punishment that they're going to be childless.

Rabbi Fohrman: In contrast to the mitzvah side of this.

Ari Levisohn: Right. If the whole point of yibum is basically that you're supposed to selflessly help your brother have a child, this is kind of the anti-yibum because instead of selflessly helping a brother have a child, you are selfishly taking your brother's wife and basically stealing the ability to have children from him.

The punishment is that the very thing that you should have been trying to prevent from happening to your brother, that's actually going to happen to you. You're going to be the one who's going to be childless. You're going to have no one to carry on your name.

What's also interesting about that language of עֲרִירִי, childless, is that it's an extremely rare word in the Torah.

Rabbi Fohrman: One of the only other places it appears is actually in the Abraham story. In the Abraham story, right after the War of the Four Kings and the Five Kings, God famously comes to Abraham and introduces what becomes known as the Brit Bein Ha’Betarim (The Covenant Between the Parts) (Genesis 15:7-21).

The prelude to that is when God says: שְׂכָרְךָ הַרְבֵּה מְאֹד — Avraham, don't worry about a thing; your s’char (reward) is very great (Genesis 15:1). Avraham sort of can't contain himself and says: מַה־תִּתֶּן־לִי וְאָנֹכִי הוֹלֵךְ עֲרִירִי — What could You possibly give me when I don't have any kids? I’m an old man! What are You going to give me? A Cadillac? A Porsche? What am I going to do with it? Drive it around for a few years and then die? Who am I going to even give it to inherit that? Nobody is going to inherit me. If I don't have an heir, I have nothing.

God is silent. Then Abraham presses the point and says, “Look around. I’ve got nothing here. I'm down to Eliezer. He's the guy who's going to inherit me.” That, actually, is the moment where God comes out of the clouds and tells Abraham something He's never really told him before.

God has been cagey with Abraham and has promised him a great nation, but Abraham's never quite known exactly what that means. Maybe he's going to be George Washington, the father of a great nation. It doesn't mean George Washington was the biological father of America. He was a guy who inspired America, the first president. Maybe that's what God means about Abraham, that he’s going to inspire a nation. Maybe it'll be Lot, who's kind of related to Abraham. The notion that he would have biological children isn't something that Abraham had really even hoped for until God comes out of the clouds now and says: אֲשֶׁר יֵצֵא מִמֵּעֶיךָ הוּא יִירָשֶׁךָ — You're actually going to have biological children (Genesis 15:4).

Then there’s this issue: Is it just his own biological children? Is it also Sarah's biological children? Sarah seems to be not so sure. In the next chapter, she tells Abraham to take Hagar because she can't have children. This is a turning point in the story. It's the beginning of biological children.

It’s interesting that here, in the arayot, we've got this language of being an arir, being childless when you sleep with the wife of your brother. The question is, Ari, what would Sarah have to do with the “wife of your brother,” because Sarah wasn't the wife of anyone’s brother.

Ari Levisohn: Right, right. So those of you listening who have been around the block with Rabbi Fohrman might be noticing that the connection between the yibum-type of relationship and Avraham maybe is not so coincidental. Rabbi Fohrman, let's loop back to that in one second, because we were asking — what kind of relationship is she?

Rabbi Fohrman: Right.

Abraham and Sarah’s Struggle with Infertility

Ari Levisohn: I want to enter just one more piece of evidence here. What we just saw are two of the only three times in the Torah that the language of ariri, childless, is used.

The third and final time is actually one verse before what we just read, in Leviticus 20:20 which describes the relationship between a person and his aunt: וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁכַּב אֶת־דֹּדָתוֹ — Someone who sleeps with his aunt and reveals the nakedness of his uncle, חֶטְאָם יִשָּׂאוּ — they bare their sin, עֲרִירִים יָמֻתוּ — they'll die childless.

An interesting thing about this is that I believe it’s the only one of the arayot (illicit relationships) where, if you flip the genders, that alternative case is not mentioned. In other words, in any one of the forbidden relationships, if you could flip the genders around, that case will also be a forbidden relationship. But this one here, where it's talking about your aunt, if you flip it around and it would be talking about a woman and her uncle, that's actually not mentioned.

Rabbi Fohrman: What you're saying is that if there was an inversion of the story and you switched the genders, then legitimately they would be arir; legitimately, they would be childless. Here, you have a permitted relationship and yet they're childless anyway. God comes along and says, “Well, I can fix that. Pretty soon they won't be childless.”

But Avraham is looking at this and says, “I am arir,” in the language of Leviticus, “almost as if I've been involved in some sort of illicit relationship with Sarai, something that God didn't want to happen, and I've been punished for it by not having children. But in fact, it's a permitted relationship.”

Feeling Guilty for Being Childless

In other words, I guess the possibility I'm raising here is a possible interpretation of this along the lines of what you're saying. Namely, it is possible that what Leviticus is suggesting to us is some sort of rationale that might have been playing around at the edges of Abraham's mind. When Abraham is thinking about himself and is so convinced that he's never going to have children, and he's trying to understand why he never had children, maybe he's locating that in some sort of mistake. Maybe he feels like there was something wrong or illicit about him marrying Sarai that the Heavens themselves should say, “You have to be childless because it's not okay to marry your niece.” 

Again, Ari, this goes back to my theory that you sort of referenced before, so let's get to that theory. My theory is that the niece relationship of Sarah is not coincidental, but it may actually be one of the reasons why Abraham was chosen, because it's so yibum-like. The Torah later on will identify yibum as an act of chesed.

We talked about chesed hu, that there's another aspect of chesed. Later on, the Torah will talk about yibum as chesed, and the truth is that Abraham's whole relationship with Sarah is an act of chesed in a way, in as much as it is sort of a yibum-like relationship.

What do I mean by that? Well, the idea of yibum is that when your brother dies young and doesn't have any kids, there's a mitzvah upon you to marry someone who otherwise would be illicit, somebody who should be completely off limits to you, which is his wife. Now, it's almost like the regular laws get superseded. One way to see it is that what was forbidden now turns into a mitzvah. Another way to see it, almost in light of the arguments you're making now, Ari, is that it remains a somewhat illicit relationship, because it is an illicit relationship to marry the wife of your brother. It's just that, in the case of your brother who's dead, the overriding imperative is to somehow save his legacy from completely being destroyed. וְלֹא־יִמָּחֶה שְׁמוֹ מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל — Literally, his name is going to be wiped away from Israel (Deuteronomy 25:6). There's going to be nothing left of your brother.

It's like you're on the Titanic, and people are dying, and there aren’t enough lifeboats. This isn't the time to ask if I should be shomer negi’ah (refraining from physical contact) in taking this little nine-year-old girl and putting her in the lifeboat. You can tell me I'm doing a sin, but there are overriding considerations. I must save my brother.

It's almost like one way of seeing the yibum laws is that you override the illicit aspect of marrying your brother. It still is icky to marry your brother's wife, but you don't worry about ickiness when you have this overriding chesed to do, which is, literally, to save a life.

I wonder if Avraham himself, using these same words about Sarah, might've been saying the same thing. It's icky for me to suggest that you and I are married and you’re my sister. I get that that's icky, but we've got another issue, which is that I'm going to die. So when I'm going to die, chesed overrides that. Chesed means that sometimes you’ve got to do icky things. It's a chesed.

So this is what Abraham says: זֶה חַסְדֵּךְ אֲשֶׁר תַּעֲשִׂי עִמָּדִי — This is your chesed that you should do with me. Do this icky thing for me. Our whole marriage is based on something icky. Let's face it, you are my niece, right? That's icky. Well, it's sort of incestuous that you're the daughter of my brother. You know, what's that about?

The answer is, it's yibum, that's what it is. Charan died, and I needed to keep his legacy going. Okay, he had Lot, but somehow, that's not good enough. Lot, in the end, gets lost, right? Abraham and Nachor seem to feel that there's this imperative, maybe, to take care of the children. Somebody's got to marry them — they can't just be orphans, offered for no one — or, possibly, to keep the legacy alive by having children.

But maybe later on in life, after 10 years of not having children with Sarai, perhaps Abraham comes to question himself and wonders, was it the right thing to do? Maybe that's the gloss that Leviticus is giving on this. וְאָנֹכִי הוֹלֵךְ עֲרִירִי, Abraham says, which becomes language in Leviticus 20; “Maybe we were supposed to be arir. Maybe that's the plan. God, I'm stuck because you think I shouldn't have any children, so now what are you going to give me?”

At which point, God comes out of the clouds and says, “No, relax. You can have children.” But interestingly, at that point, Sarah even assumes that Abraham's going to have children, but she assumes that when God said, “Abraham, you're going to have children,” it can't mean that you're going to have children through her.

Possibly, maybe she and Abraham had already internalized this narrative they were telling themselves that they must have done the wrong thing. With how much God liked them, they shouldn't have done this. So Sarah says, “Take Hagar; for sure it can't be me,” and of course, that wasn't God's plan.

God's plan is, “No, it is you,” which becomes the structure of Leviticus 20; it is, in fact, okay for somebody to marry their niece. That's a perfectly fine relationship. That's the Abraham case that is, in fact, not problematic, which is the revelation that God makes in Genesis 15, possibly.

Ari Levisohn: Right, and each of the three cases we saw are almost like Avraham and Sarah but not quite. They're almost like brother and sister because they describe themselves that way, but they're not, in the yibum case. It's like yibum; it's almost a bad thing, but if you're doing it for the sake of yibum, then it's a positive thing. And it feels like what Avraham and Sarah actually did was like threading a needle between all of these questionable, illicit things.

I wonder if that confusion on Avraham's part, about who Sarah is to him, isn’t part of the picture here, too. I think this is something you argue in your extended course on Abraham and Abraham's Journey, right? Avraham is unsure of exactly what his relationship with Sarah is supposed to be.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes. In other words, one of the arguments I make there is that Abraham — at least in the Ramban's view — can be faulted for being a little bit too cavalier with letting Sarah be taken by Pharaoh, even if there's justification for it and even if he's worried about his life. He gets precious close to losing her, and the Ramban will really come down hard on Abraham for that.

My argument there is that, inasmuch as Sarah is sort of like his sister, there's this ambiguous relationship between Abraham and Sarah. On the one hand, she's his wife; on the other hand, she's his sister. How will he relate to her? If he abandons that idea of being his wife and only thinks about her as a sister, that is not okay. It leads him to abandon some of the responsibilities that he's taken on towards her. In order to really live up to those responsibilities, he has to remain fully in the role of Sarah's husband, even after all these years of being childless with her. He can't allow the mind games of “Maybe she's my sister” to take over.

Allowing Guilt To Invade the Relationship

Ari, you're adding a new wrinkle to that course: That he can't allow his husband-wife relationship to be invaded too much by the thought that she's his sister, to the extent that he would come to this conclusion about the nature of God's providence, saying, "God must have justifiably made us childless because of this.” His job is to do what he thinks is right, which is to take care of Sarai, take care of the legacy of her brother, and be a good husband to Sarai.

That's what he's got to do. He can't play the game, which is, “Okay, if I'm childless, it must be that I've done this terrible sin.” That's God coming out of the clouds in Genesis 15 and saying, “No, you're not going to be childless,” but it takes some getting used to for both Sarai and Abraham.

Maybe one of the lessons is, don't play those games, you know? A lot of times, we play those games in life. We feel guilty about things, and we surmise and say, “Well, gee, maybe God is punishing me for X, Y, and Z.” Typically, that's a distraction. That's not a game that you're supposed to play.

By the way, imagine how many childless couples are out there thinking, “I must have done something wrong. I must have done something wrong.” Abraham was that couple thinking, “I must have done something wrong,” and that's what he's saying to God, and God says, “No, that's not the way it works.”

I'll tell you a quick story about this, Ari. It’s a great little story, so put up with it for a second and you'll see right. Back in 2008, it was the financial crisis, and I was a scholar-in-residence at a Pesach program. Tvi Hersh Weinreb, the past executive vice president of the OU, was also a scholar-in-residence there, and we were both on an “Ask the Rabbi” panel.

I remember that the OU at the time, under Rabbi Weinreb's leadership, had created this jobs board, this way that they were helping people who were thrown out of jobs and had lost jobs find work, and they'd had a lot of success with it. 

Anyway, there's this woman in the back of the room who raised her hand and asked a question. She said, “Rabbi Weinreb, the economy is so terrible, there's so much pain, people are losing their jobs. What do you think it is that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is telling us? What is the message that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is telling us by this terrible downturn of the economy that's affecting so many lives? I just want to know, what's the message?”

He said, “The message, ma'am, is that he wants you to take action to help people who need jobs get jobs. Is your neighbor out of work? Help your neighbor find work. That's what God wants from you.” Then she says, “No, that wasn't what I was talking about. What I was talking about is, you know, what's the spiritual message? There's a spiritual message of yesurim (afflictions) come upon you, terrible things come upon you. God's speaking to us. What's he saying to us now? What's the message? What's he saying to us?” He says, “Ma'am, the message is that you're supposed to help your neighbors find jobs. That's your message.”

His point really was that sometimes what God wants from you is that there are sad and terrible things happening in the world, and people's jobs are to act in those cases and do what they can to make things better. That's what God wants from them more than anything else. If you play the game, saying, “What is God saying to me at this moment?” God is saying something obvious to you. God is saying, “What can you do with your human concept of good to actually change something and make the world better right now? That's what you should be doing.”

The other thing to do is to retreat into the self and then play this game called, “How guilty should I feel?” Then I can try to spin the bottle and figure out which of the 17 possible sins that I've been thinking about is most aligned with this. Then I can say, “Oh, God considers me a terrible person because of this sin.” How do you know? How do you know what sin? You have no way of knowing. What God's actually saying to you is, “Do something for someone else, rather than just navel-gaze at your own possible sins, that you have no idea what's going on.”

But it's a very human idea, because guilt is so much a part of our lives. We can look at these things happening in the world and then make this magical, puff-of-smoke prediction that, “Oh, it's because of this.” God seems to be saying to Abraham, “You can't play that game with being childless.”

Ari Levisohn: Maybe Leviticus is giving us this window into what Abraham must have been thinking then. If we're right, that he was getting all in his head and thinking “Maybe this relationship I have with Sarah is not okay. Maybe we're doing a bad thing. Maybe God is actually punishing me for marrying her in the first place,” all of a sudden, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if Avraham and Sarah think their marriage is wrong, if they think that they shouldn’t be together, then you can guarantee that they are going to be childless.

Rabbi Fohrman: Before you know it, you have Hagar, and think of what happens. Yishmael is born, there's strife in the family, there has to be divorce, and there has to be this child who's kicked out of that. It's a terrible situation, but it never should happen. At some level, it happens because both of them are questioning themselves when they shouldn't be.

Ari Levisohn: I wonder if that's why it takes not just this promise here, but the angels coming to Avraham and then to Sarah. It's like hitting him over the head with, “No, really, I mean it. You and Sarah are going to have children together.”

You wonder, why did God even need to tell Avraham about this? Maybe because without those promises, they wouldn't have been trying to have a kid anymore. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Interesting. It's speculative because we don't know that that's true, but you're sort of going along with that idea which I developed in Abraham's Journey. There’s this constant tension, and there are moments when Abraham will retreat from that husband-like relationship and see her as a sister. Then, with this new wrinkle from Leviticus, and maybe because of the fact that she kind of is his sister, there's this guilt about him thinking, “Should I really be married to her? Maybe I should just treat her as a sister.”

But in fact, his marriage to her has threaded the needle between all of these illicit, incestuous relationships into something which is wonderful, which is an older man taking care of his dead brother's daughter and legacy, and it's fine.

Not only is it fine, but it is an example of the kind of true chesed which is possibly one of the reasons why Abraham was chosen. Abraham will later on use that word, “chesed,” for Sarah covering up the truth of their relationship, but the irony is that the truth of their relationship is the great chesed that is possibly the backbone of the entire Abraham story.

Well, Ari, this is really fascinating. Thank you for hanging out with me and teaching me. Now that you've pointed out the parallels, they really jump out at you. In very good Aleph Beta fashion, they're the kind of thing I never would've seen unless you alerted me to them, so thank you so much for doing that.

Ari Levisohn: Thank you for coming on today. I think we uncovered some really cool stuff; definitely the beginning of some really interesting things. I invite everyone listening, if you have any other thoughts, drop us a voice note, click the link in the description, and until then, thank you for listening.

Credits

This episode was recorded by me, Ari Levisohn, together with Rabbi David Fohrman.

This episode was produced by Evan Weiner.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our production manager is Adina Blaustein.

Our senior editor is me, Ari Levisohn. 

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.