SAN DIEGO — In this week’s Torah parshah we meet Abram and Sarai. (We’ll discover, in a bit, they are really Abraham and Sarah, our first Jewish ancestors.) God tells Abram to take his wife and family and move to a new place far away.
During this journey, God tells Abram he will be the father of a new land, a “promised land.” But they have no children and they are very old by the time this promise is made. Abram laughs at the thought of having children, but Sarai tries to help fulfil God’s promise. In Biblical times, it was okay for a man to have more than one wife, so Sarah brings her handmaid, Hagar, to be Abram’s other wife. When Hagar gives birth to Ishmael. God tells her that this son will be the father of many generations of children. Then God repeats the promise to Abram that he will be the father of many nations. God changes his name to Abraham and renames Sarai, calling her Sarah. God then assures Abraham that Sarah will give birth to a son. Abraham laughs because he is one hundred years old and Sarah is ninety. Abraham asks God to favor Ishmael but God tells Abraham that the son he and Sarah have will be the one who will father the nations to come.
What this means: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Isaac’s son) are considered to be the forefathers of the Jewish people, meaning they are the ones who came before and established the nations that followed. Their wives, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel are considered the foremothers. All of these “before” people were asked by God to do many things that might have sounded very strange. Abraham, for example, was asked to pack up and leave his home, to go… someplace God would show him. That is putting a lot of trust in something when you have no way of really knowing the outcome. This is the beginning of a group of people doing something because they have faith that the outcome will be good. It is the start of the Jewish religion, beginning with Abraham, then changing and growing until it blossomed into what we have today.
What you can do: The Torah talks a lot about God, a big concept that can sometimes be very confusing. But faith is something everyone can share. Faith that the sun will come up in the morning, that the rain will stop eventually, that a newborn baby, or a beautiful flower, is a miracle of some kind. Look around and think about all the wonderful things in the world. Sharing this beauty is something positive we all can do.
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Marcia Berneger is a retired elementary school teacher as well as a teacher at Torah school. She is the author of such children’s books as Buster the Little Garbage Truck, and A Dreidel in Time.