When you ask someone, quickly, what emotion they connect with laughter, the normal answer is joy. People laugh when they are happy, right? They laugh when they find something funny, right? Yes, these are true, but people also laugh when they are uncomfortable, when they are nervous, and when they feel powerless and in need of a weapon. They laugh to make others a target. In other words, laughter is complicated. This too is in the Torah. Not directly, but in the fact that Sarah's famous laugh is, in many ways, very ambiguous: "And Sarah laughed within herself, saying: ‘After I am already worn out, shall I have the deepest satisfaction, and my husband is [also] old?’" (18:12).
Is there anything wrong with laughing to oneself? Couldn’t it be that Sarah's laughter was the laughter of unexpected joy or a hiccup of anxiety at imagining the possibility of one's greatest hopes coming true? Sarah's laughter, however, is most often understood as a waver in faith, as a symptom of disbelief, or as a derision of herself and/or her husband. This judgment on her laughter comes from the very next pasuk: "Then God said to Avraham: why did Sarah laugh, saying: ‘Shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am?’” (18:13). If there was not something wrong with Sarah's laughter, why would Hashem question it?
Perek yud-ches (chapter 18) is not, it is important to note, the only place in which laughter is mentioned in this parsha. Significantly, laughter is part of Yitzchak’s name. Perhaps this choice of name was meant as recompense for Sarah's initial response. Or, perhaps, it is a signal for us to return to the woman and her laughter and to look at it more closely - not to judge Sarah, but to understand her, and, in that way, understand our own selves.
According to the Kotzeker Rebbe, as mentioned in the Artscroll Stone Chumash, Sarah "truly thought that she had laughed not in disbelief but in joy, as Avraham did. The truth was that subconsciously she doubted the possibility of miracles." It is only a year later that Sarah is able to realize that until the moment she was holding her son in her arms, she had held back her heart. She had expected the promise not to be fulfilled. Thus when Avraham called him Yitzchak, Sarah immediately understood the implications and declared, "God has made laughter for me, whoever hears will laugh for me." The use of the words yitzachak lee is particularly interestings - not eemee, with me, but lee, for me. This is the laughter of true joy, of joy that spreads. This is the best type of laughter.
One cannot read this parsha and not realize the significance of what takes place in the time between Sarah's laughter. Sarah and Avraham receive an undeniable promise but between then and the one year later when she gives birth, God tells Avraham what he plans to do with Sedom, Avraham and Sarah witness Sedom and its neighbors’ destruction, they travel to Gerar and deal with yet another royal attempt at emotional entanglement - - All this occurs after over a decade of being somewhat settled.
Life is messy. It's a fact most of us are aware of. It was certainly a fact that Sarah was aware of: Watching Avraham with Yishmael, looking on from a distance at the bad choices of her brother Lot, and wanting to hold on to the hope of motherhood. One of the most beautiful facts about the Jewish canon is that our heroes and heroines are not whitewashed. They are human. They have heartache and joy. They have anger and tears. And in parshas Vayera, we learn from their laughter about our own ways of interacting with the world. We can despair and we can doubt, but at the end of the day our goal, no matter what has come between us, should be that those around us laugh for us, that we share joys with others.
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