We have become adept at investing in Jewish institutions.
We attend fundraisers for day schools, send children to camps, and convene conferences on Jewish education. We give and volunteer – and rightly so.
But there is another subject we discuss far less: God. It is easier to debate curriculum than to respond when our child asks what we believe about the Divine. It’s simpler to fund a building campaign than to decide what should happen at our dinner tables. We invest readily in institutions because they feel manageable; our homes, however, feel small, private, uncertain.
In this week's parsha, Vayera, Abraham sits at his tent's entrance in direct communion with God. The Divine Presence is manifest. Three strangers appear, and Abraham must choose: remain in this transcendent encounter or run toward three unknown travelers in need of water and shade.
He runs.
Jewish tradition fashioned this into a principle: "Greater is hospitality than receiving the Divine Presence." Rabbi Sacks returned to this idea often – not for its poetry, but because it redefines the geography of the sacred. "It is easy to receive the Divine Presence when God appears as God," he wrote. "What is difficult is to sense the Divine Presence when it comes disguised as three anonymous passers-by."
Consider the implication. We find God readily at peak moments: High Holidays, life-cycle celebrations, stirring sermons. What’s harder is sensing the Divine in the ordinary: the stranger at our door, the neighbor we might invite for Shabbat, the person across from us at breakfast. Abraham shows that we connect to God by recognizing His image in others. That sacred work begins at home, around tables, in doorways.
Now notice something remarkable. Later in Vayera, when angels come to rescue Abraham’s nephew Lot from Sodom’s destruction, Lot offers them a meal. The text notes that he served matzah – unleavened bread. On its own, this seems unremarkable: unexpected guests arrived, and matzah is simply what emerges when bread is baked in haste.
But Rashi offers an explanation that seems to defy logic: it was Passover. We eat matzah on Passover, the Torah tells us, because our ancestors’ dough did not have time to rise when they fled Egypt after years of slavery – slavery that had not yet occurred when Lot served his guests. What, then, is Rashi trying to say?
The following explanation is theologically audacious, but perhaps Rashi is inviting us to notice a hidden link between the redemption from Sodom and the redemption from Egypt – two stories woven from the same redemptive pattern.
Both stories unfold at night. Both strike the oppressors with divine darkness. Both center on a home whose door marks the boundary between chaos outside and covenant inside. Both involve an urgent departure. In each, redemption begins not in palaces or public squares, but in private homes – where doors are marked, hospitality is offered, and the vulnerable find shelter. Strong homes that welcome strangers and protect the innocent are where salvation begins.
This upends our spiritual geography. We imagine synagogues as sacred and homes as merely… home. Jewish learning happens in school; home is for homework. Identity forms at camp; home is where we unwind. But this parsha insists otherwise: Jewish identity is not forged in palaces or temples, but in homes and around tables.
Jewish identity formation is complex. As Dr. David Graham of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research notes, “communities often chase the next big programme,” yet “Jewish identity is woven from many threads, and the most enduring are those spun at home.”
Many factors shape whether young Jews remain connected—peers, experiences, culture. We can’t control them all. But research consistently points to the home as the strongest thread. Not as the only one, not as a guarantee, but as the place where the deepest patterns form: how questions are received, whether Shabbat makes space for doubt alongside joy, whether parents model honest struggle with Jewish life.
Rabbi Sacks taught that Judaism is profoundly child-centered, that "being a parent is the closest we get to God – bringing life into being through an act of love." Yet we often miss the deeper insight: we are guardians, not owners. We cannot determine who our children will become, but we can shape the conditions – rituals, rhythms, and spaces – in which they grow as Jews.
What does this mean in practice?
Not a comprehensive program or a new list of obligations. What Abraham models is simpler, and more demanding: presence. He sits at the entrance of his tent, available. When strangers appear, he notices, moves toward them, and offers what he has: water, food, dignity.
What if Jewish parenting looked like this? Not carefully choreographed dinners or mastery of answers. Instead, the quiet discipline of noticing: being present, welcoming our children’s friends, asking one Jewish question at dinner and truly listening, letting our children see us wrestle honestly with our own doubts and commitments.
When you set a table, you proclaim: this is where dignity is honored, questions are safe, and the Divine is glimpsed in one another. A home becomes a sanctuary not through perfect ritual but through an open door.
Our institutions – schools, camps, synagogues – remain essential; we must continue investing in them. But we must also recognize what only we can do at home. They teach Torah’s words; we teach that Torah shapes how we live. They explain ritual; we show what it feels like to inhabit those rhythms. They speak of welcoming strangers; we open the door.
Abraham ran toward strangers while God waited – and in doing so, established the hierarchy. Redemption begins not in conference halls or capital campaigns, but in the doorway of a tent, in water offered to the thirsty, in recognizing the sacred in the person before you.
Your home is the truest safeguard of Jewish identity – not because it is perfect, but because it is yours.
Rabbi Matt Marks is Executive Head of Tribe UK, the youth arm of the United Synagogue, and a PhD researcher specialising in the thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. He lives in Brighton & Hove with his wife and their four daughters, where he also serves as a Strategic Adviser for Jewish Life and works with the UK Jewish Chaplaincy team.