Curiously, the Zohar introduces a discussion of our sedra with Proverbs 31, the biblical chapter traditionally recited by a husband at Shabbat dinner in honor of his wife: eshet chayil mi yimtza, "What a precious find is a capable wife!" What catches the Zohar's attention is verse 23, "Her husband is prominent in the gates." "Gates" suggests a parallel to the place where Abraham is found as our sedra opens: "the entrance to the tent." (Genesis 18:1) "Gates" are to a city what "entrance" is to a tent.

Finding Abraham there, the visiting angels tell him the good news of Sarah's prospective pregnancy. People rarely notice, however, that Sarah too was stationed "at the entrance to the tent" (verse 10). The tent was open on all sides, we are told; Sarah was at one entrance, Abraham at the one opposite.

In a desert, one opening is pretty much the same as another — no roads lead to either one. The angels might just as easily have seen Sarah and told her first.

Either way, Abraham and Sarah would have heard the news simultaneously, because of where they spent each day: at the tent's two openings. They had figured out that life's opportunities occur not where we are already settled, but at the door leading away from that place. The unanticipated happens at the entrances to our tents, projecting us beyond the certainty of home onto the unknown roads that lead to adventure and opportunity far away.

The Zohar now goes deeper. The master image throughout kabalistic literature reflects the human condition of alienation, fragmentation, and loss. At our best, we feel whole, at home in the universe. But more often, we suffer the haunting sense that something is missing from our lives. Wholeness can be likened to Israel's condition when we still lived on our Land with the Temple intact, enjoying the certain sense that God was among us. Alienation is exile, just the opposite — the Temple destroyed, our people scattered throughout the world and wondering just where God is. That is our current state of being — not just here, but even in Israel, since "Israel rebuilt" is not the same as "Israel redeemed." The genius of Kabala was to intuit the sense of loss that is part of being human, then to promise its end in a messianic future, and offset despair in the meanwhile by providing occasional glimpses of the wholeness that awaits us when the end finally arrives.

Those glimpses come with the Kabala's daring assurance that God actually accompanies us into exile. God too, then, must lack wholeness. But since God is One, what could God possibly lack, except for part of God's own self? So the kabalists imagined God as two separated parts of a single whole, two lovers, really, male and female in search of the perfect unity that arrives when they finally come together as one. The Proverbs passage is not just some earthly husband extolling his wife; its mystical reference is the masculine side of God praising His missing feminine half (the Shehina), and doing so on Friday night because Shabbat is that time each week when they find each other in anticipation of the perfect wholeness yet to come.

The Proverbs assurance that "her husband is prominent in the gates" denotes the masculine side of God, who, like Abraham, is found at a metaphoric doorway, with the Shehina, like Sarah, waiting at another. Imagine the angels of Shabbat (whom we welcome with "Shalom Aleichem") as the angels of our sedra arriving all over again, this time at one or the other of these doorways with the news of the seventh day that will restore God — and ourselves — to wholeness.

Yes: not just God but ourselves too, for Abraham and Sarah model the two parts of God, and we model Abraham and Sarah — looking for openings in our lives that suggest a better future. Imagination is the key, says the Zohar. We must take up residence at life's openings, the place where we can imagine possibilities beyond the ken of those who never venture to look out.

The Zohar also calls these entrances "openings of faith." No wonder Abraham is known as the paradigmatic man of faith.

We too need faith, but we see now that faith is not so hard to find. Far from being some ethereal state of being, it is just the willingness to believe that new possibilities will inevitably pass by our doorways. If we just open the protective flaps of our tents and look outside, we will be able to imagine a better tomorrow; and if we can imagine it, making it come to pass cannot be far off.