Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

Chesed is an important word in Jewish life.  It means love, but a particular kind of love –generosity of spirit, kindness, compassion and open heartedness. Abraham is said to be the embodiment of this kind of love. Every day that Abraham lived, he did acts of Chesed. The Slonimer Rebbe (1911-2000) takes this further. He says that it is up to each one of us to follow in Abraham’s footsteps and do acts of chesed every day.  Chesed is the most important mitzvah we can do. 

Every day we human beings benefit from the kindness, the generosity, the compassion, the Chesed, of God.  Through the falling of the rain and the growing of the grasses, in our breathing of the air, we human beings are able to eat and drink and are sustained in this world.  Just as we benefit from God’s chesed, we must pass that chesed on to our fellow human beings.  We have to pay it forward. Thus, the entire world is sustained on a daily basis by God’s goodness flowing through us.  The Slonimer Rebbe teaches that if we fail to perform an act of chesed on a particular day, it is not even considered “a day” in our lives. 

At the conclusion of our Torah reading this week, we are told: “These are the days of the years of the life of Abraham, which he lived – a hundred and seventy-five.”  Why does the Torah add the words “which he lived”?  These words tell us that Abraham lived his life fully – not one day was wasted.  Each day he performed acts of kindness, of generosity, of love, of caring, and each day was accounted a “day” in his life.  It is not how long we live, it is how we live, that determine the “days” of our lives.