D’var Torah: Vayera 2025/5786 וירא
Rabbi Rebecca Weinstein, Associate Rav Beit Sefer, Schechter Parent
Last July, while driving, I listened to an NPR interview with cellist Maya Beiser. Her haunting reflections on the story of Lot’s wife stayed with me long after the program ended, and I knew then that I wanted to dig deeper into Parashat Vayera. In the conversation, Beiser shared:
“Of the many stories I learned as a child, one haunted me for months, and eventually for years and decades, the story of Lot’s wife. The woman, unnamed in the biblical tale, is turned into a pillar of salt for eternity after disobeying divine command and looking back at the destruction of Sodom.
I kept thinking, why was she punished? Why was she not supposed to look back? The idea that she was turned into salt for eternity as this sort of punishment for all to see always felt really cruel and unjust to me.”
Beiser centered her latest album around this jarring moment in Vayera, tracing what she calls “an arc of female longing and defiance through the centuries.” For her, it also tells “the story of what it means to be a woman…this idea of bearing witness across millennia, and that we women need to support each other, to acknowledge that we are allowed to feel, to grieve, and to love.”
This last line of Beiser’s captured me. I, too, have always been fascinated by this parasha. What it meant for Lot’s wife, often named Idit in Midrash, to show what I have always seen as deep emotional humanity and connection in her gaze backward to a place where everyone else seems to have moved on—to a place deemed devoid of empathy.
Midrash, too, explains her in this light, explaining that as she was walking away, behind Lot, she turned backwards to see if her married daughters were following. In that moment, she caught a glimpse of the Shechinah (God’s divine presence) and for that reason was turned into a pillar of salt. Idit, like any mother, worried. Filled with fear, she turned around and in the process saw something she should not have and was punished.
Parashat Vayera seems to be filled with women who quietly, in solitude, experience their emotions. At the start of our parasha, Sarah laughs to herself in disbelief that she will have a child (B’reishit 18:12). We then encounter Hagar’s pain in the wilderness as she says, “Let me not look on as the child dies” (B’reishit 21:16). These women who exist quietly in the background are essential to shaping the architecture of our parasha. They feel deeply, see clearly, and yet are often not given ample space in our text.
As Judith Plaskow (American theologian and author) teaches in Standing Again at Sinai, for generations women have stood at Sinai and not been heard; our task is not only to retell the story, but to reimagine who is speaking. “Hearing silence,” Plaskow writes, “is not easy”.
Perhaps Vayera invites us to do just that, to listen closely and to give space—to Sarah’s laughter, Hagar’s tears, and Idit’s backward glance. Each moment reminds us that holiness lives not in turning away from pain, but in meeting it with compassion. To bear witness to the laughter, the tears, and the backward glance. And perhaps, as Beiser and Plaskow teach in different ways, the work of our generation is to keep listening. Listening to those voices that we overpower and do not invite to the table can teach us so much that may not always be visible right in front of our eyes.
