This week’s Torah portion, Vayera, opens with a promise that seems impossible. Three visitors arrive at Abraham’s tent and declare that within a year, ninety-year-old Sarah will bear a son. Sarah, listening from the tent entrance, laughs. “After I am withered, shall I have pleasure, with my husband so old?” (Genesis 18:12)
We often read Sarah’s laughter as doubt or disbelief. But perhaps there’s something deeper here. Sarah laughs because she has lived long enough to know what the world tells women they can and cannot do. She has internalized the limitations placed upon her. The impossible has been defined for her by biology, by society, by the way things have always been.
Yet God challenges Abraham: “Is anything too wondrous for the Eternal?” (Genesis 18:14) And within the year, Isaac—whose very name means “he will laugh”—is born. Sarah’s laughter transforms from skepticism to joy: “God has brought me laughter; everyone who hears will laugh with me” (Genesis 21:6).
This week, Virginia elected Abigail Spanberger as its first woman governor. Like Sarah, she has broken through what many considered an impossible barrier. For 246 years of Virginia’s history—from the founding of our nation through countless elections—the governor’s mansion had been occupied exclusively by men. “It has always been this way” is perhaps the most powerful argument against change, the kind of logic that makes us laugh at impossibility rather than possibility.
But Spanberger’s election reminds us that barriers exist not because they are natural or inevitable, but because they have not yet been broken. What seems impossible in one generation becomes the triumph we celebrate in the next.
Sarah’s story teaches us something crucial: the laughter of disbelief can become the laughter of celebration. When we dare to imagine beyond the constraints of “how things have always been,” we open ourselves to transformation. Sarah doesn’t just bear a child; she becomes the mother of nations. She doesn’t just defy biological odds; she reshapes the narrative of what women can accomplish in our tradition.
As we read Vayera this Shabbat, let us ask ourselves: What impossible things are we laughing at? What barriers do we assume are permanent simply because they have existed for so long? Where are we called to challenge the way things have always been?
Sarah’s laughter—and Spanberger’s victory—remind us that God’s question remains urgent: “Is anything too wondrous?” The answer, as our history repeatedly demonstrates, is no. Nothing is too wondrous when we have the courage to imagine new possibilities and the determination to make them real.
May we be inspired to break barriers, to laugh with joy rather than skepticism, and to create a world where the impossible becomes simply what we haven’t yet achieved.
