Between Heaven and Earth: A Dialogue

In this week’s parasha, Abraham takes audacity to a new level. G-d informs him that he will destroy Sodom because of its wickedness and Abraham argues back! “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” (Bereishit 18:25). Abraham doesn’t let go. The argument goes back and forth. This is the first recorded argument for moral responsibility in human history – a veritable dialogue between heaven and earth.

Rabbi L-d Jonathan Sacks zt”l – whose yahrzeit falls this Monday evening – often described Torah as “the conversation between heaven and earth.” That phrase captured his life’s work. He believed that faith is not silence before mystery but participation in it – that G-d invites us into dialogue: through study, through prayer, through the moral decisions of daily life.

Rabbi Sacks’s genius was manifold: writing, lecturing, teaching, preaching, broadcasting. We now have the privilege of using the new Koren-Sacks Chumash with commentary drawn from Rabbi Sacks’s many essays on the parasha. The Chumash features his entirely new translation of the Torah. Perhaps it can be said that translation, in the broader sense, encapsulated all of Rabbi Sacks’s work – translating Torah into a moral language the world could hear, and translating modern experience back into the Torah’s vision of what a just and compassionate world should look like. He believed passionately in articulating holiness in the public square and bringing the questions of our age into conversation with eternal truth.

The parasha presents another example of Abraham’s radical relationship with G-d. Deep in conversation with the Almighty, he spies three travellers approaching in the desert heat. Astonishingly, he turns to the Divine Presence and says, “My L-d, if I have found favour in Your eyes, do not pass by Your servant” – asking G-d Himself to wait while he attended to the wayfarers. Perhaps the biblical equivalent of “could you hang on while I see to someone at the door?”

How could Abraham leave G-d to attend to mere mortals? Rabbi Sacks, following the Maharal of Prague, explained that Abraham did not abandon G-d at all. In appropriately welcoming another human being, you are acknowledging the divine presence that is in every one of us. In Rabbi Sacks’s words: Abraham taught us “to see the trace of G-d in the face of the stranger.” G-d’s presence enters precisely where human beings make space for one another. True faith is not only what happens in prayer or study, but also in acts of kindness, hospitality, and moral attention – the habit of truly seeing and responding to the divine image in others.

In a fractured world, Rabbi Sacks’s voice reminded us that words can heal, that conversation is sacred, and that faith need not fear reason. He showed that Judaism is not a retreat from the world but a way of engaging with it.

As we mark Rabbi Sacks’s yahrzeit this week, we strive to continue his calling: to keep the conversation between heaven and earth alive – faithful to Torah, open to humanity, and confident that, through dialogue, we can bring a little more of heaven down to earth.