Two Minute Torah Podcast

Vayera 5771 by Rabbi Jack Moline

(Genesis 11:7) ...v'ek'kha pat lechem v'sa'adu libkhem... (Abraham shows his divine visitors hospitality and offers ) ...let me fetch a bit of bread so that you may refresh yourselves...

The word for "heart" appears in this verse, though an accurate translation nonetheless omits it. The heart is a peculiar organ, though not for its medical function, which is clearly essential. Rather, it has a folk function as being the center of human being (that is, as the center of any one person's existence). I think you can tell what a society most values by what the culture attributes as the primary resident of the heart.

In America, it is obviously love. For us, the symbol of the heart has become synonymous with love. And what we mean by love is commonly understood as a form of desire. (Hence, the English idiom "my heart's desire," that which the source of my love itself loves.)

In the Bible and through the Rabbinic period, the heart was considered to have the functions of what we now know to be the brain. Knowledge, skill and most emotion were co-located in the human heart. Like the brain, the heart was presumed to have two interconnected parts with separate roles. The right chamber of the heart contained the inclination to goodness, and the left chamber the inclination to wickedness. All of human activity resulted from the admixture and conflicts between these two impulses.

Our sages read the Bible very closely. Especially the disciples of Rabbi Akiva believed that nothing was superfluous in the Torah; every letter had a reason to be present and a meaning to be understood. So it did not escape notice that sometimes the word for heart was levav and sometimes it was lev. The doubling of the letter vet seemed ripe for interpretation, and indeed one of its most prominent examples Ð in the first paragraph of the Sh'ma: b'khol l'vav'kha, with all your heart Ð is understood to mean that we must love God with both our inclination to goodness and our inclination to wickedness.

But Abraham's visitors, messengers from God, are understood to be angels. Angels, being mostly divine, are not afflicted with free choice. They can make no moral judgments and therefore have a heart with only one chamber, filled with the good impulse to fulfill the mission for which they were created. In our Torah verse, Abraham says, "v'sa'adu libkhem," literally, "feast your heart." Here, the word has only one vet.

I wouldn't want to be an angel; even those who are a permanent part of the divine entourage gain direct knowledge of God at the expense of the glorious challenges of human potential and limitation. But I admire the ability of the angel to be single-hearted when it comes to God's wisdom, knowing that love and hate, Jew and non-Jew, old and young, yesterday and tomorrow are not so much opposites as they are complements. Single-heartedness keeps us true to the one-ness of God by not tempting us to divide the divine nature into segments.

Later in this portion, Abraham takes his son to a mountain in single-hearted dedication to God. We are rightly horrified. Yet, it is a lesson to Abraham the man and to the rest of us the readers that such unmitigated devotion is not always as angelic as one might think.