Tomorrow, the weekly Torah reading is focused on the story of Abraham. This reading contains a strange episode in which the biblical patriarch tells the Egyptians that Sarah is not his wife but his sister, after which Pharaoh has her brought to her palace. A similar episode happens in next week’s parashah, and yet again with Abraham’s son Isaac later on. Medieval commentators like Moses Nahmanides and David Kimhi criticized Abraham for his behavior, whereas other rabbinic sources appear to defend him.

Lawrence Schiffman describes the discomfort Second Temple-era Jewish writers felt about this episode, and the ways they tried to interpret it away:

The Genesis Apocryphon, [found among the Dead Sea Scrolls], dealt with this issue by its explanation that Abraham received divine revelation through a dream that essentially commanded him to follow this disingenuous approach. The book of Jubilees, [included in the Scripture of Ethiopian Jews and many Christians], on the other hand, chose to narrate the story fully only once and to abbreviate and/or to skip it in the second and third accounts. Josephus essentially stayed close to the Bible in the first episode, skipped the lying in the second, and essentially omitted the third occurrence.

Clearly, the author of Jubilees also took this approach out of discomfort with Abraham’s behavior. Similar feelings no doubt motivated Josephus.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.