After twenty difficult years in Lavan’s household, Yaakov finally confronts his father-in-law and contrasts Lavan’s deception with his own unwavering honesty: “These twenty years I have been with you, your ewes and she-goats never miscarried, nor did I eat rams of your flock. That which was mangled I never brought you – I myself would bear the loss, from me you would exact it whether it was stolen by day or stolen by night. This is how I was: By day scorching heat consumed me

At the end of this week’s parsha, Yitzchak and Rivkah send Yaakov to Lavan to find a wife. When Esav sees this, he finally realizes that his parents did not want their children to marry Canaanite women—a standard he himself had ignored when he married two Canaanite wives. In response, Esav decides to take a third wife, this time from a different family: “Esav perceived that the daughters of Canaan were evil in the eyes of Issac, his father. So Esav went to Ishmael and took Ma

In this week’s parsha, Avraham sends his trusted servant Eliezer to Charan to find a wife for Yitzchak. Bereishis  chapter 24 recounts in detail how Eliezer arrived at the well, prayed for success, and immediately encountered Rivka, who fulfilled the exact signs of kindness he had asked from Hashem. After meeting Rivka and being invited to her home, Eliezer retold the entire sequence of events to her brother Lavan and her father Bethuel. When he finished, they responded: “T

In this week’s parsha, Avraham poses a remarkable and challenging question to G-d : “Will you also stamp out the righteous along with the wicked? What if there should be fifty righteous people in the midst of the city? Would you still stamp it out rather than spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people within it?” (Beraishis 18:23-24) Avraham was pleading with G-d to spare the people of Sodom. But this raises a difficult question: Why would Avraham do so? The p