Avraham rushed to the angels to serve them. He offered them bread, but instead served them a lavish meal. His wife Sarah and son Yishmael were both involved in cooking and serving the food.
This is a terrific week in general to invite guests, and to involve the whole family in getting involved in the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim (welcoming guests). And you could do as Avraham did, invite them for “a bite to eat”, and then serve a gourmet dinner.
Bereishit 18:7 says that Avraham took a “calf, tender and good” and prepared it for the angels. Rashi reads each word “calf”, “tender” and “good” separately and says that it means that Avraham slaughtered 3 head of cattle in order to give each of the angels a tongue cooked with mustard.
This really emphasises how generous Avraham was. A tongue each is already an enormous amount of food. Not to mention the rest of the animal, which could not be refrigerated, but would have needed to be salted in order to be preserved in those days. Or maybe Avraham give that away as well, I am not aware of a source.
Serve tongue with mustard. This is what I did last year. But I only made 2 tongues, and it easily served 9 people. I was also struck by the fact that I could go into the kosher section of the supermarket and buy the tongue all ready to cook in a plastic bag. Avraham, on the other hand, needed to catch the calf, shecht it, salt it, cut it up, and then cook it.
This really gives you some idea of how generous Avraham was. The main idea is to serve lots of yummy food to lots of people this week. And I would add that many people cannot stomach even the idea of eating tongue, so it would be a good idea to have other things available as well.
Rabbi Rosenberg in his MP3 series Chumash and Rashi Explained offers a wonderful insight into how generous a person should be as a host. He says that every guest has a problem when they are being served. If they eat every morsel on their plate, it might look like the host did not serve them enough. But if they leave some of the food, it may appear to the host that they do not like the food. Rabbi Rosenberg says that we learn from Avraham how to solve this problem. A host should give SO MUCH FOOD that it is OBVIOUS to the guest that they are not supposed to eat it all. This is what Avraham did when he served his guests.
My dear husband added that as this week’s Parsha is the main one to feature Avraham’s nephew Lot, this would be a good week to have Lots of food!
Bereishit 18:7-8 describes how Avraham takes a calf and milk and serves it to the angels. It is unclear from the posukim whether Avraham served the meat first, or the milk first, and many explanations are given as to how/why this happened. But the Malbim (1809-1879), says something very interesting. Bereishit 18:8 says that Avraham took the calf “which he had made”. The Malbim says that this means that Avraham took the Sefer HaYezirah and found out how to CREATE the calves. Because they were created beings, they did not have the din of basar, they were not halachically regarded as meat. It was therefore not a problem to serve them with milk and cream.
So it seems from the Malbim that Avraham made the first ever pareve meat. Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat is an article about how people are trying to grow meat without an actual animal, in a dish in a laboratory.
We don’t normally pasken from the Malbim (!?!), and I am obviously no Rabbi, but I wonder if they ever start grown meat without an animal, whether, based on this sort of idea, it would be considered pareve?
As “grown meat” is not available yet, I think the best way to “eat the Malbim’s opinion” is to serve tofu. You could serve cream and milk together with tofu or textured vegetable protein. As this does sound like a bit of a crazy idea, I Googled a recipe:
Serve with mustard, just as Avraham did.
Again I would add that a lot of people don’t like tofu, so it would be a good idea to have other food available as well.
Lot and his wife were fleeing Sdom. Hashem told them not to look back to see the destruction of Sdom. But Lot’s wife look back and turned into a pillar of salt.
We thought salty pretzels, you know, the sort that have the large salt crystals stuck to them, big ones that you can actually see, would be a good reminder of this story. If you don’t like pretzels, you could use potato crisps. Or serve baked potato wedges with a mound of salt next to them for dipping in.
The parsha ends with the very famous story of the binding of Yitzchak. This is where Avraham is told by Hashem to take his beloved son Yitzchak up to Har HaMoriah and offer him up as a sacrifice. In the end Hashem provides a ram to be slaughtered, and Avraham and Yitzchak come back down from the mountain and return home.
The term “Akeidat Yitzchak” is often translated as “the sacrifice of Isaac.” However, this is not a accurate translation. A more precise translation would be “the binding of Isaac.” The term ‘Akeidah’ refers tying a persons arms and legs behind them, so they cannot move.
Serve roast lamb shoulder, or lamb chops
And of course, there always needs to be a way to incorporate lollies or candy into the food preparation. So this week one of the kids came up with the idea that we could use liquorice straps to represent the straps that Avraham used to bind Yitzchak’s arms and legs at the time of the Akeidah. This child also eagerly added that if you couldn’t get liquorice, you could use jelly (ie gummy) snakes for the same purpose (as he prefers them!!!).
