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Our Rabbi's Message
October 26nd 2007
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelThe Torah portion, which we read this Shabbat is about medicine, and in fact, it is about doctoring. Three angels appeared at the gate of Abraham's tent for three different purposes. The first told Sarah that she would give birth to a son. The second warned Abraham about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. The third came to heal Abraham from the self-performed circumcision, which made Abraham a Jew.
According to Rashi, the preeminent Jewish exegete around the time of the First Crusade, that third angel came to help heal Abraham. This is the first time that someone acts as a doctor in the Bible. (According to tradition no one would become sick until Jacob prayed for illness so that he would know when death was impending and would have time to put his affairs in order) However Abraham was hurting and needed someone to alleviate the pain he was undergoing.
We do not know what the angel did. We do not even know if the angel was just a man who was given the honorific title of angel because he did God's work; he helped people recover from the surgeon's knife. In any case, we do know that the first title given that first doctor was 'angel'. And we do know that whatever his ministrations were, they worked.
How fitting that we celebrate the first Bar or Bat Mitzvah in the Buckley family for a daughter whose mother and whose father are both physicians. Of course the title we give them today is neither doctor nor angel, but mother and father.
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