ב”ה

Everyone today speaks the language of justice. Yet the same word can mean opposite things, depending on who is speaking.

A principle championed when it serves us is quietly shelved when it does not. An act condemned when an opponent commits it is explained away when a friend does the same. Agreements are celebrated when signed and forgotten when they become inconvenient. Strength is mistaken for righteousness, and the loudest voice is treated as the voice of truth.

The Torah offers a striking image of such inconsistency. It forbids a merchant to keep two different weights in his bag, a heavy one for buying and a light one for selling, and calls such dishonesty an abomination before G-d.[1] The law speaks of scales in the marketplace. But it also gives us an image of a broader moral danger: measuring others by one standard and ourselves by another.

So how do we know what is truly right?

This week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, offers an answer through Avraham (Abraham), the father of many nations. Its lesson is simple, and demanding:

Even when our rights are real, our obligations remain.

Why Did Avraham Pay for What G-d Had Promised Him?

After Sarah passed away, Avraham needed a place to bury her. He chose the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron.

G-d had already promised the land to Avraham and his descendants.[2] Why, then, did Avraham approach Ephron, the owner of the cave, and insist on paying the full price? Four hundred silver shekels were weighed out publicly, before the people assembled at the city gate.[3]

The Sages notice something in Avraham’s opening words: “I am a stranger and a resident among you.” Rashi, the great 11th-century Bible commentator, explains this based on the Midrash, the Sages’ ancient teachings on Scripture. Avraham was saying: If you agree, I will buy as a stranger. If not, I can claim the land by right, for G-d has promised it to my descendants.[4]

This makes the question even sharper. If Avraham had a right to the land, why ask for a willing sale? The people there honored him as “a prince of G-d,” known for kindness and justice. Would taking the cave by force not shame that name? The Lubavitcher Rebbe answers these questions with an important distinction, as we will see.

The Covenant at the Gates of Yevus

An ancient collection of teachings called Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer adds a remarkable detail.[5]

Before the sale, the people selling the land, the Hittites, asked Avraham for something in return. Among them were the Jebusites, the people of Yevus, the city later called Jerusalem. “We know,” they said, “that the Holy One, blessed be He, will one day give you and your descendants all these lands.” They asked him to swear that his descendants would never take the Jebusites’ city without their consent.

Avraham agreed, and only then did he buy the cave.

At first this seems astonishing. How could Avraham swear to something that seems to contradict G-d’s own promise? And how could an agreement made by one man bind his descendants for generations to come?

A Promise That Outlived Generations

Centuries later, Yehoshua (Joshua) led the Jewish people into the land, yet the Jebusites stayed in their city. Scripture says that the tribe of Yehudah (Judah) “could not drive them out.” The Sages explain: they had the power to drive them out, but they were not allowed to, because of Avraham’s oath.[6] According to the Midrash, the Jebusites had carved the oath on statues set up in their city.[5]

When David became king, the Jebusites again barred his way, invoking Avraham’s oath. This time David took the city.[7]

Yet the story does not end with conquest. The Midrash relates that David later purchased the Jebusite city for the Jewish people, collecting fifty shekels from each tribe toward the purchase.[5] Scripture also tells how David bought a threshing floor from Aravnah, a Jebusite landowner. This was the site where the Holy Temple would later stand. When Aravnah offered the site and animals as a gift, David refused to offer sacrifices that cost him nothing. He insisted on paying.[8]

The king who had conquered the city chose to pay for it. Why?

Ruled, Not Dispossessed

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, resolves these questions in a 1986 talk, later published in his collected talks, Likkutei Sichos (Volume 30, Chayei Sarah, Sichah 1).[9] His answer rests on a distinction whose implications reach far beyond ancient Jerusalem.

There are two different kinds of ownership:

• Collective ownership (sovereignty): the authority of a nation over its land as a whole.

• Private ownership: the right of a person to a particular house, field, or property.

The two do not depend on each other. In simple terms, a government can rule a land without owning every house in it. A king may rule an entire country while individual citizens retain ownership of their homes and fields. Government has legitimate powers, but those powers do not make every private possession the ruler’s personal property.

With this distinction, the Rebbe explains Avraham’s oath. G-d’s promise of the land to Avraham’s descendants was about collective ownership: the land would be ruled by the Jewish people. Avraham’s oath did not give that up. It protected something else: the private property of the Jebusites. They accepted that one day they would live under Israel’s rule. They asked only that their homes and property not be taken without their consent. In short: under Israel’s rule, their homes would stay theirs.

Torah law allows for such an arrangement. Before entering the land, Yehoshua sent messages to its inhabitants: they could leave, or they could make peace. Those who chose peace could stay, on the Torah’s terms. These included keeping the Seven Noahide Commandments and accepting Israel’s rule.[10]

This also explains what David did. The Jebusites used Avraham’s oath to refuse Israel’s rule. But the oath never covered that, so David could capture the city. Torah law also lets a king take private property when the whole nation needs it, such as land for the Temple.[11] Yet Avraham’s oath about private property still mattered.

David’s conquest did not erase Avraham’s oath. As the Rebbe explains, David kept it by paying for the city.

An agreement must not be turned into a weapon against legitimate authority. But legitimate authority must not be turned into an excuse to forget a word that has been given.

The Oath That Bound a King

Scripture tells of another promise that power could not erase.

When Yehoshua entered the land, the Givonim (Gibeonites) won a peace treaty from Israel’s leaders by pretending to come from a distant country. The Sages explain that, in strict law, the oath did not count, because it was obtained by a trick. Even so, Israel kept it, so that G-d’s Name would not be dishonored in the eyes of the nations.[12]

Generations later, King Shaul (Saul) harmed the Givonim. In the days of David, the land suffered three years of famine, and G-d revealed its cause: the wrong done to the Givonim.[13]

If Israel kept even a promise won by a trick, how much more must we keep a promise we gave freely? Time and a change of leadership do not dissolve a promise.

The Bank Manager and the Widow

A story told of Rabbi Yisrael of Vizhnitz shows how this principle lives in everyday life.

One evening, Rabbi Yisrael visited the home of a bank manager. He sat for some time in silence, then rose to leave. The puzzled manager followed him and asked why he had come.

Rabbi Yisrael answered with a teaching of the Sages: just as there is a mitzvah (a commandment) to say something that will be heard, there is also a mitzvah not to say something that will not be heard.[14]

Pressed further, Rabbi Yisrael explained. A poor widow owed the bank money, and her house was about to be sold. He had come to ask the manager to forgive the debt. “But I am only the manager,” the man protested. “The money belongs to the bank. How can I forgive a debt that is not mine?”

Rabbi Yisrael did not argue. He left. But the conversation would not leave the manager. In the end, he paid the widow’s debt from his own pocket.[15]

The manager’s position did not make the bank’s money his to give away. Yet he could give what truly belonged to him. He did not have to choose between respecting property rights and showing compassion. He honored both.

Two Weights, Two Measures

It is easy to defend justice when justice serves us. The real test comes when justice asks something of us.

• Do we respect another person’s rights even when we strongly disagree with that person?

• Do we keep our word when keeping it has become costly?

• Do we judge ourselves by the standard we demand of others?

• Do our principles still hold when the one who suffers is not one of our own?

The great sage Hillel taught: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”[16] A principle that applies only when it benefits us is not a principle at all. It is a preference dressed in the clothing of morality.

This is not a call for weakness. The Sages taught that without the authority of government, people would swallow one another alive.[17] There are times when authority must be exercised, laws enforced, and wrongdoing confronted firmly.

But strength that answers to no one stops being justice and becomes mere force. When promises are honored only while convenient, no promise can be trusted. When rights depend on who holds them, no one’s rights are secure, our own included.

Justice worthy of the name must remain justice even when it limits our own power.

For the Children of Noach

Avraham was called “the father of a multitude of nations.” The Torah tells us that G-d chose him to teach his household to “keep the way of the L-rd, to do righteousness and justice.”[18] His example also offers a powerful lesson to people beyond his own descendants.

Among the Seven Noahide Commandments are the prohibition of theft and the obligation of dinim: the duty to set up just courts that uphold the Noahide laws.[19] These are Divine obligations, not conveniences to be rewritten whenever those in power find them troublesome.

A just society must be concerned not only with the laws it proclaims, but with how those laws are applied: to friend and stranger, to the strong and the weak, and to ourselves as well as to others.

This begins with each of us. In business, in our families, and in our communities, we decide every day whether to press our own advantage or to honor another’s rightful claim.

• Avraham teaches us to honor that claim even when we hold a claim of our own.

• Yehoshua and David teach us that an old promise still binds, across generations and changes of power.

• The bank manager teaches us that respecting what belongs to others never prevents generosity. It makes generosity real.

The Test of Power

Jerusalem became the spiritual heart of the Jewish people and the home of the Holy Temple. According to the Midrash, it came to Israel through conquest and through an oath kept. Its story is not only about who had power.

It is also a story about the responsibility to keep a promise. The place chosen for G-d’s Presence is bound up with a promise kept.

The Sages taught that the world endures on three things: justice, truth, and peace.[20] There is no lasting peace without justice, and no justice without truth. That truth includes the truth of our own commitments.

The world does not need more slogans about justice. It needs people, communities, and nations willing to live by their principles consistently:

• People who understand that being strong does not place anyone above the law.

• People who know that another’s rights do not disappear when they become inconvenient.

• People who remember that the true test of character is not how we behave when we are powerless, but how we behave when we have the power to do otherwise.

“Justice, justice shall you pursue,” the Torah commands.[21] Its repeated call challenges us to seek justice with the same seriousness when it favors us and when it costs us.

Avraham’s legacy is this: greatness is measured not by how much power we hold, but by how faithfully we use it in accordance with the will of G-d.


Shabbat Shalom.


By Rabbi Avriel Rabenou, MSc. MBA

Sources and References

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