Rabbi Natasha Mann

I have a problem with stuff. My main issue is that if I put something in a drawer, I immediately forget that it exists. I moved home in July, and I still have four unpacked boxes and - don’t judge me - I have no idea what’s in them.  Avram and Lot have a problem with stuff. It’s a different kind of problem to mine. In this week’s Torah portion, Lekh-L’kha, Avram responds to the call of the Divine and sets off on his journey - and he takes with him his wife, Sarai, his nephew, Lot (plus Lot’s family), and a bunch of stuff. And they continue to gain more - more riches, more people, more stuff. After leaving Egypt, Avram is described as being kaveid me’od with cattle, and silver, and gold - sometimes this gets translated as Avram being ‘very rich’, but it really means he was ‘very heavy’. He was heavy with his wealth. And Lot also had his own cattle and riches and people. And the land was not ‘big enough for the both of us’, as they say.  In more literal terms, our parashah (Gen...

This is not a Halloween sermon. I need to start that way, because there’s no way you would conclude otherwise if I didn’t. To be clear, I’m not a fan of Halloween. Nonetheless, completely separately to the events going on - or not going on - outside tonight, I want to talk about fear.  The world can be a scary place. We are probably all more intimately aware of that now than we were this time last year. I feel anxiety on the street just because people try to pass by me on the path. We are constantly doing risk assessment, worrying about catching this plague, watching the political scene as they decide our fates, watching numbers climb scarily high. And perhaps a result of spending more and more time in our own homes is that we have retreated to the small corner of the world that we can control - which makes walking into the uncontrollable outside even more concerning. And then, of course, there is a whole world scene outside of the pandemic that just never seems to stop for a breat...

After several weeks of setting the scene, in today’s Torah portion we finally meet the first of our avot , our fathers – Avram, soon-to-be-named Avraham. We see Avram uproot his life and follow God’s call into the wilderness; we get to see him cultivate this intense and intimate relationship with God, filled with hopes and promises and conversations under the stars. It’s something of an epic romance. But there’s someone who is conspicuously absent from much of this intimacy, someone for whom every hope and promise is terribly relevant – Avram’s wife, Sarai. You’ve probably read this week’s parasha following the main character, Avram, as the text encourages you to do. I’d like to pull back for a moment and tell Sarai’s story. This is what happened in this week’s parasha for Sarai: first, her husband was called to uproot his life and head out into the wilderness, and so Sarai went with him. Whatever her reasons were, they were not recorded. The next we hear from her, Sarai’s husban...