A rabbi who surprises by saying “Yes!”

Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber

Gabrielquotes

Blog posts

Eliezer and the love test: Chayyei Sarah [5786] GKW Serm 8

Gabrielquotes's avatar by Leave a comment

Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 15 November 20251 — Zachary’s bar mitzvah

  1. The story of Rebekah offering water to Eliezer’s camels is very often understood as a story about kindness to animals.2 The servant, we’re told, was looking for a woman with an innate sensitivity to the beasts’ thirst, because only such a person would be a suitable wife for Isaac.
  2. But one commentator – just one – comes up with a totally different explanation, which I find persuasive and also kind of hilarious. The Beit ha-Levi, writing in the 19th century, suggests3 that Eliezer’s test was nothing to do with kindness animals. Instead, he was looking for three qualities: helpfulness, common sense, and tact. He tested her helpfulness by asking for a drink of water. An unhelpful or standoffish woman would simply refuse. Then, he watched to see what she did after he’d taken a sip from her pot. If she took the remaining water back for the other members of her household, אינה בהשכלה, she lacked common sense, because for all she knew Eliezer might have cooties. Yes, really, that’s what the Beit ha-Levi says: “Who knows … whether his mouth is clean from disease!” Then, the final test was whether she had tact. Perhaps she would save her family from his cooties by simply emptying the pot onto the ground. But that would be rude: it would humiliate Eliezer. She passed this test by coming up with a face-saving way out of the dilemma – offering it to the camels, who, we presume, would be fine sharing water with their master.
  3. This is a fascinating re-rendering of the text. And, as I said, I find it very persuasive. Kindness to animals is great, but it’s not exactly the be-all and end-all of being a good person. Helpfulness, common sense and tact are, perhaps, a better range of indicators of decency.
  4. Of course, identifying someone as decent doesn’t mean that they’ll be a good fit romantically. Dr Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist who has spent her career putting people who are in love under a brain scanner.4 That sounds fun. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, she ended up having to concede that “the thoughts, emotions and motivations associated with romantic love may be so varied … that the full set of dynamic, parallel neural systems involved may be impossible to record”.5 And the conclusion to her essay drops the science-talk altogether, and ends with the words: “Everywhere people sing for love, pray for love, work for love, live for love, kill for love and die for love … Nothing will extinguish the human drive to love.”6
  5. Zachary, in the run-up to today, I asked you what becoming bar mitzvah meant to you. And you said: “It means I have more religious responsibilities. I am not sure what they are but I know I am meant to have them.”
  6. I think that means you’ve passed another test of being a good person, one that Eliezer never even thought of, and that’s honesty. I’m really pleased that you felt able to tell me you’re a bit uncertain about what comes next… and actually that’s probably the right answer. When it comes to anything connected with Judaism, ‘I don’t know’ is always a good bet!
  7. Indeed, when it comes to anything not connected with Judaism, ‘I don’t know’ is also a good bet. That’s where Dr Helen Fisher went with her musings on the neurological basis of love. And, really, that’s where Eliezer should have gone with the ridiculous mission on which he was sent to find a wife for someone who wasn’t him. How was he supposed to manage that?!
  8. Technically, Zachary, this morning you came of age according to Jewish law. That means that all of the duties, and privileges, of Jewish adults are now yours. Of course, just as we don’t expect you to know and understand all of them right away, we don’t expect you to do all of them right away: not least the getting married bit.
  9. But, when you get round to enjoying all that Jewish adulthood has to offer, the skills, traits and characteristics you’ve shown throughout the process of becoming bar mitzvah will be lifelong assets: your honesty, your hard work and perseverance, and, of course, your willingness to play a sheep at every opportunity that’s been offered to you.
  10. You’ve done yourself and your family proud this morning, and we wish you מזל טוב.

Comments are welcome at the bottom of the page. Please note that they are premoderated and anything abusive simply won’t be published.

Remember that all of my sermons, handouts and so on can be found here.

Shavua tov!

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to you by email:

Notes

  1. Genesis 24:10-20 ↩︎
  2. See eg Kli Yakar to Genesis 24:14, who links the root of the Hebrew word ‘camel’, ג־מ־ל, with the word גמילות, ‘lovingkindness’, based on this episode; Eva Landman, A Kindergarten Manual for Jewish Religious Schools (Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1918): 85-89; JPS Torah Commentary to Genesis 24:14; John D Rayner, “Judaism and animal welfare: overview and some questions”, lecture 591 (18 March 2000). ↩︎
  3. Beit ha-Levi to Genesis 24:14 ↩︎
  4. Helen Fisher, “The drive to love: the neural mechanism for mate selection” in Robert J Sternberg and Karin Weis (eds), The New Psychology of Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 87-115: 91ff. ↩︎
  5. Ibid: 99. ↩︎
  6. Ibid: 107. ↩︎

Poppy rage: Lech L’cha [5786] GKW Serm 7

Gabrielquotes's avatar by Leave a comment

Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 18 October 20251

  1. The first ten days of November is one of my favourite times of year. Why? Two words: poppy rage. This is the time of year when I can kick back, relax, and watch with amusement as people work themselves into apoplexy over which politicians aren’t wearing poppies. 2025 I think set the record, because it was only the 19th of October when the first such article appeared in the press: “Fury as woke council ruins town’s … poppy display.”2
  2. The comedian Mark Steel has said that this is the time of year when “Good Morning Britain will feature a retired security guard who’s had a kidney removed and replaced with a poppy.” And, he adds: “The Sun will feature a family from Swansea who chopped their neighbour’s tree down because an apple fell off it and thumped on the ground during the two minutes’ silence. ‘How dare it insult our war heroes?’ they’ll say. ‘If it wasn’t for them, that tree would be German.’”3
  3. To be clear, I have nothing against poppy-wearing as a way of commemorating those who lost their lives defending this country. That is a perfectly creditable thing to do.
  4. What I find objectionable is the use of the poppy as a purity test. Those who set themselves a reminder for the 1st of November to dust off their binoculars, check that Sadiq Khan is wearing a poppy 24/7, and screech if he isn’t, aren’t doing so in remembrance of those who lost their lives in the two world wars. They’re using the war dead as a pretext for puerile political point-scoring. These people are prone to start sentences: ‘Did our forefathers lay down their lives just so…’ – well, did our forefathers lay down their lives just so people can bully each other into wearing paper flowers? I think not.
  5. Of course, the act of remembering war dead isn’t simple either. It has many nuances.
  6. In this morning’s Torah portion, Abram put on his steel helmet and went to battle himself in what’s snappily known as the War of the Four Kings Against the Five Kings. At the end, after his victory, the King of Sodom, on whose side Abram had been fighting, offered him all of the spoils. He refused to take anything, even a thread or a sandal-strap,4 because – and this is the important bit – לֹא תֹאמַר אֲנִי הֶעֱשַׁרְתִּי אֶת־אַבְרָם: So that you will not be able to say: ‘I was the one who made Abram rich.’5
  7. The Maharil Diskin, a 19th-century commentator, elaborates6 that the done thing, after a battle, was for the winner to recoup their expenses from the loser. But this was no ordinary battle: it was “not by natural means at all – [Abram] suffered no damage and lost nothing, neither life nor property”. The War of the Four Kings Against the Five Kings was won solely because of God’s intervention, and Abram wanted to make clear that there was only one message that should come out of it, that message being the glory of the Eternal One. It was imperative for Abram, the Maharil Diskin explains, that nobody would be able to misuse the story to burnish their own reputation: לֹא תֹאמַר אֲנִי הֶעֱשַׁרְתִּי אֶת־אַבְרָם, do not say: ‘I was the one who made Abram rich.’
  8. Dr Amanda Chisholm, an academic in the War Studies department at King’s College London, points out that the act of remembrance associated with the poppy is subjective, selective and suspect:7 “[There is] a lot that we fail[] to remember. We [fail] to remember the vast amount of colonial armies who fought in brutal battles on behalf of the British Empire. We fail[] to remember the comfort women and prostitutes who continue to feature in military operations. Perhaps most importantly, we fail[] to [realise] how such practices of remembering also sustain … practices of military nostalgia – which in its various guises and practices has been proved to be terrible for women and the vast majority of men. Remembering Remembrance Day this way reinforces an everyday militarism in us all which … results in marginalising any voice or claim to knowledge that is not rooted in a masculine … military authority. It allows for military spending as necessary while welfare services continue to wither away. It enables particular military operations to continue despite the growing mental costs to the soldiers and their families […M]ilitarisation … depends upon these performative acts of remembering.”
  9. I suspect Dr Chisholm would approve of Abram’s approach to controlling the narrative around his own war, which was to eschew any suggestion that material gain was an acceptable benefit from the battlefield, to eschew any glorification of violence, any stellification of military might.
  10. As we approach Remembrance Sunday 2025, let us be sure to remember both wars in all their facets: the soldiers who died, the women, the colonial conscripts, the conscientious objectors who were shot by their own side, everyone who was caught up in such hellish circumstances. Let us remember that, while we owe our freedom to the sacrifice of soldiers in years gone by, we also owe our freedom to the absence of war around us. Giving thanks for those who laid down their lives does not mean we stand in awe of bloodshed. Taking pride in the medals in our family history does not mean indifference to the military horrors of the modern day.
  11. And above all, let us remember that red paper flowers are not the be-all and end-all of being a good person. Remembrance is about people, not about poppies.

Comments are welcome at the bottom of the page. Please note that they are premoderated and anything abusive simply won’t be published.

Remember that all of my sermons, handouts and so on can be found here.

Shavua tov!

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to you by email:

Notes

  1. Genesis 14:14-24 ↩︎
  2. Ryan Parry, “Poppy scandal: fury as woke council ruins town’s Remembrance Day poppy display after row over flying of Union flags” The Sun (19 October 2025). ↩︎
  3. Mark Steel, “I called my kids Somme, Trench and Mustard Gas so I’ll never forget the war dead. What did you do?”, The Independent (1 November 2018). ↩︎
  4. Genesis 14:23 ↩︎
  5. Ibid. ↩︎
  6. Maharil Diskin ad loc ↩︎
  7. Amanda Chisholm, “Remembrance Day and the poppy: reflections from a militarised feminist”, London School of Economics (16 November 2015). ↩︎