Lech Lecha: 5783 - Rabbi Shimon Zonnenfeld with a short insight for Parshas Lech Lecha: "So that it may go well for me because of you, and my soul will live on account of you" - Rashi: Avraham Avinu told Sarah, 'On condition that I receive…

00:00 Speaker 1 Please. On another point in the same vein, it says: “So that it will go well with me because of you, and my life will be spared on your account.” Rashi says there: “So that they will give him gifts.” That’s hard to understand. Avraham Avinu would give up his wife so that they would give him gifts? What does “so that it will go well with me because of you” mean—just so they would give him gifts? But that is what Rashi says. Now, the Midrash Rabbah says, in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak—and the Ohr Hachaim brings this as well—that Avraham Avinu had devised a kind of plan here, a kind of trick. We know from the passage about the sotah that when a woman secludes herself with another man after her husband has warned her, the Torah says that if she has not become defiled, “she is pure, and she shall be cleared and conceive children.” Rashi says there that if she had no children, she would have children; and if she had difficulty giving birth, she would give birth easily. If she bore dark-skinned children, she would bear fair-skinned children. So here it is as though Avraham Avinu devised a plan: Sarah would be secluded, and he would have warned her. Since the Torah promises that “she shall be cleared and conceive children,” he would therefore have children. That was Avraham Avinu’s intention, and that is what “and my life will be spared on your account” means. It is not about material gifts; rather, through this whole episode, Hakadosh Boruch Hu would give him children.

01:37 Speaker 2 Good.