What Hashem left out

After welcoming guests and preparing a lavish lunch for them, Sarah overhears her visitors promise a son to her and Avraham, and she laughs. “After I have withered, shall I have smooth skin? And my husband is old!” (Genesis 18:12). Soon afterwards, Hashem reports the laugh to Avraham, but leaves out a crucial detail (18:13). In the version that Avraham hears, the reason Sarah finds the promise implausible is “I am old”. Avraham’s age has vanished from the sentence. 

Rashi, based on the Midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 48:18), says the Torah altered her words for the sake of peace, and the Gemara (Yevamot 65b) makes the same point. In other words, rather than telling Avraham that Sarah was weighing up two compounding factors (her own age as well as Avraham’s), Hashem gave Avraham the impression that it was Sarah’s age alone that made this such a miracle. Why for the sake of peace? Because even when you know that you are an old man, you don’t like hearing that your spouse thinks of you in that way! 

But even though there is a good reason, we are seeing that Hashem Himself, whose “seal is truth” (Shabbat 55a), is willing to bend the truth in this instance. What interests me here is that we like to believe that the right values, properly ordered, will spare us from choosing. They won’t. Truth, peace, dignity, and loyalty pull against each other in an ordinary marriage, an ordinary staffroom, an ordinary family dinner. And we don’t receive a revelation from Heaven guiding us in all situations. Beit Hillel called every bride beautiful, and Beit Shammai refused (Ketubot 16b–17a). It seems that the answer depends on the disposition of the person and the call of the hour. 

In every situation where two important values do not align, we have to make the call, and the call has a price. Avraham is spared a stinging remark, but he receives a false picture of Sarah’s thoughts. Hashem shows us that this is not free. The person who says everything pays in damaged relationships, and the person who smooths everything over pays in closeness that is never quite real. 

One of my favourite prayers is the Serenity Prayer, in which Reinhold Niebuhr asks for the courage to change the things he can, the serenity to accept the things he cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference. We often think of that second clause as comfort: to easily accept what we can’t change. But to me it is really about making peace with the price that we have to pay, sometimes unfairly, and often against our will. 

May Hashem bless us to make the right call. To say less than everything when everything would only hurt. To say all of it when silence would corrode. To live with the choices we make, and to ask for blessing in the way forward. 

• Rabbi Sam Thurgood Head of Jewish Life and Learning, United Herzlia Schools