Parshat Vayera and the importance of faith training

It is difficult not to read the first line of Parshas Vayera without feeling a bit of envy at Avraham’s revelation. “וַיֵּרָ֤א אֵלָיו֙ יְקוָ֔ק” (and Gd appeared before him) – him being Avraham, who sits recovering from his recent circumcision at the end of Parshas Lech Lecha. No words are exchanged between them. They sit quietly, meditatively, enjoying each other’s company. We read this and perhaps think: if only we too were able to experience Gd so clearly before us. With such proof, we think that perhaps we too could dedicate ourselves fully and truly to Gd and truth.

The Parsha continues and soon the time of quiet revelation for Avraham ends and he again resumes his trials. These trials culminate in the Akedah, when Avraham is commanded to sacrifice his son, Yitzhak. It’s an enormous trial – Avraham must sacrifice not only his son, but his lineage, the promise Gd made to him that he will father a great nation (through whom will this happen if he sacrifices his son?), and the entirety of his life’s work. He will surely become the laughing stock of the land. But, even with these challenges, what real test is it if only pages before, Gd literally came to visit him? What doubt can Avraham have at all?

We of course are referring here to Avraham’s faith. The English/Christian idea of faith is to believe without proof. How does this then apply to Avraham, who had more proof of Gd’s existence and desires than anyone today? Avraham knew the truth with all his heart and all his soul. He had no need for faith. To truly understand Avraham’s struggle, we must understand the meaning of the hebrew word for faith, אמונה (emunah). Parshat Vayera is in many ways an exploration, not of faith, but of emunah.

Emunah, coming from the word am (אם), mother, refers to the act of manifesting belief into action. Just as a mother takes potential and brings it to life, emunah is belief brought to life. It is not enough to simply believe something with the mind and feel it with the body, it must be expressed in action. That is emunah. It is an essential part of all human life, even secular life. Emunah is the experiential truth that something is possible beyond today. We express emunah when we practice anything – the root of the word can be formulated to emun, which in hebrew means a skill, something that is practiced1. When we pick up a musical instrument or train our bodies, we practice emunah. We actualize our belief in that, although we do not fully understand how, if we do pushups everyday, they will become easier over time. We believe wholeheartedly that through daily practice, our fingers will magically begin to understand the flow of music through strings. Some days we wake up with emunah coursing through our veins and we throw ourselves at life with purpose. Other days, we lounge in bed, devoid of emunah, grappling with the question of why it’s even worth getting up at all.

Achieving what we want out of life requires emunah. We find our truth in our hearts and we manifest it in the world with our emunah. Judaism understands that what blocks our emunah as our ego, our yetzer hara (the evil inclination)2, which, represented by the snake in the Garden of Eden, is the most cunning of animals3 (וְהַנָּחָשׁ֙ הָיָ֣ה עָר֔וּם מִכֹּל֙ חַיַּ֣ת הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה). The yetzer hara is concerned only with our physicality, of maximizing our pleasure today. We become addicted to its advice, believing its promises to be the only thing that can bring us the feeling of being whole, happy, safe, and loved. It tells us that to obtain what we truly want we must pursue success, validation, pleasure – things dedicated towards our physical natures. These are lies. The strength of our emunah is the degree to which we do not believe the yetzer hara’s lies. It is the degree to which we allow ourselves to pursue truth and embrace our authentic selves, without fear, and with full trust that Gd (or the natural order of the world if you prefer), will give us exactly what we need. It is easy to think to ourselves, as we tuck ourselves into bed, ‘I will wake up early and go running.” We see such truth clearly. We know it will be good for us. We are connected. Yet, come morning, the cold and the tiredness has broken down our vision of truth and now the yezter hara slips in subtly. “Go back to sleep,” it whispers. It knows us well. It’s been with us our entire lives. It knows exactly what it needs to say. “No one else works as hard as you. Sleep in this morning.” It is here that we must draw upon our emunah. It is now, when truth is no longer so visible, that we rely upon emunah. It is only our ability to grasp onto the larger truth that allows us to laugh in the face of these voices. I do want to postface this by saying that we must all know our own limits. Sleeping in is OK at times, especially when we do it with intention and not simply because the chirp of the alarm clock feels too coarse one particular morning.

How clearly we see truth in the moment of trial does not necessarily determine our power of emunah. Even Sarah, whose level of prophecy was stronger than that of Avraham’s, has a moment of doubt in Gd during this parsha. We see this when Gd sends an angel (he sends three, but two serve other purposes) to tell Avraham that although he is almost 100 years old and his wife Sarah is 90, they will soon give birth to a son. The angel only tells this to Avraham because Sarah is already well aware of this fact. Her menstrual cycle has returned to her once more despite her age. She also again appears young, much to her astonishment. She says, in response to being that they will have a child, “after I have withered, I again have clear skin. And my husband is old!”4 Her laugh is a laugh of disbelief over Avraham’s ability to father a child. She has become young again; she can surely mother a child, but Avraham is still an old man. Avraham later admonishes her for her lack of emunah. Sarah assumed that Gd made her young once more so that she could give birth and thus, she assumes that Avraham must also be made young again if they are to bear children. According to the Midrash,5 the reality is that Sarah’s youthfulness is a PR stunt. Gd worries that people will doubt the miracle that is Yitzhak’s birth. Thus, Gd makes her appear young to ensure that no one will doubt that she is Yitzhak’s mother. As for Avraham, Gd makes Yitzhak’s face a striking copy of Avraham’s so that no one can doubt his fraternal lineage either. Despite Sarah’s level of prophecy, her lack of emunah came because she failed to see the bigger picture. Her yetzer hara convinced her in that moment that she understood the whole plan and that, since it didn’t fully make sense to her, it must not make sense at all. Avraham reminds her. While Sarah’s prophecy might be stronger than Avraham’s, it is Avraham’s emunah that is stronger.

Our yetzer hara only has power over us to the degree that we ascribe truth to it. As Avraham walks with Yitzhak to the altar, one can only imagine the level of cunning his yetzer hara adopted to subvert his clarity. It had plenty of ammunition to use: Avraham is about to sacrifice everything he has worked for, he is about to go against even the very words Gd commanded him earlier in his life about the evils of child sacrifice. The Midrash tells us that Satan comes to Avraham and whispers “maybe the voice which told you to kill your son came from the yetzer hara. Will you listen to it and destroy a human life?”6 All of us deal with this to a much smaller degree. We try to cut out bad habits knowing FULLY that they are bad for us. Yet what happens the next time we are confronted with [insert your vice - sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, somebody not doing what we tell them to do]? We suddenly doubt the truth of our conviction. “Maybe our yetzer hara is telling the truth. One drink won’t kill me. Besides, too much self control isn’t good, right? Right?”

We train our emunah by recognizing these voices for what they are. As we get better at labeling the yetzer hara or the ego as what it is, we limit its power over us. We cut the truth out from underneath it. We train our emunah by trusting ourselves and our convictions even when our yetzer hara/ego is screaming for pleasure, gratification, validation, etc – begging us, lying to us, manipulating us to have one more cigarette, to stay one more month in a job we hate, to say a sharp word to someone we love once again. The more we trust our emunah, the more we allow ourselves to become the person we want to be – the closer we come to Gd. The more we do this, the more we build our trust in ourselves. We often doubt ourselves because deep down we know we give too much weight to the words of our yetzer hara. We know our decisions are being made out of ego and are not contributing to our progress and fulfillment. The more we make decisions with our emunah, the more we see the positive results, and the more we feel we can trust ourselves. Through this process we also lessen our need for the validation of others. We fill up our tanks with emunah so that we can draw upon it during times of struggle, during times of darkness, during times of trial.

The power we ascribe to emunah and the energy we contribute to honing it determines how much we can draw from it during our times of test. If we have never practiced it, we will have no chance when our yetzer hara throws its entire might against our being – even if our lives depend on us resisting (i.e. we’re committed, married, etc). But if we hone our emunah – our belief that we can trust our inner truths, our belief that truth is our friend, our belief that Gd is our guide – then it will serve as our ark when the floods and hurricanes come. Our emunah will sustain us even when we are walking towards the mountain to sacrifice all that we’ve worked at the altar of truth, of doing the right thing, of righteousness. When the yetzer hara is throwing its entire weight against the doors of our temple, calling us to return to addictions we have long since conquered, to live by lies, we can turn to it and with the strength of our emunah, say: וַיֵּרָ֤א אֵלָיי יְקוָ֔ק – and Gd appeared before me...and I have not forgotten. As the Cherokee say, inside us all fight two wolves. The one who wins is the one we feed. May we all be like Avraham and feed our emunah well before the day we are truly tested.

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A thank you to Rabbi Gershenfeld and Rabbi Taub for their insightful and vibrant lessons on this week’s Parsha.