Parashat Vayera begins with a laugh-out-loud story: Three angels come to home of the very elderly Abraham and Sarah’s tent. When they appear, Abraham and Sarah leap into action and welcome them. After a good meal, the angels tell Abraham that Sarah will bear a child at her old age; she hears them from inside the tent and laughs out loud. When God asks Abraham why she laughed, she denies it—but God says directly to her, “You did laugh.”

And it happens – she gets pregnant at her old age, gives birth to a son, and names him Yitzchak, from the Hebrew root meaning “laughter.”

But it’s worth focusing on the beginning of the story, not just its end. There are many scenes like this one in the Tanakh/Hebrew Bible, where a messenger (a person, an angel, God) announces that a woman will bear a child. The biblical scholar Robert Alter teaches that we can learn the most from this kind of “type-scene” by focusing on the details that distinguish it from other scenes of its type.

The most distinctive feature of this specific scene is that Sarah eavesdrops on the announcement of her own miraculous pregnancy—in most of these scenes, the messenger directly tells the woman herself about the birth to come, but Sarah only gets the news by overhearing. Inadvertently, she inserts herself into the conversation by laughing, and only then does God address her directly.

From Sarah, we learn how much it matters to be aware what’s going on around us, because sometimes the only way into an important conversation or moment is to bring ourselves in.

When has your awareness allowed you to be part of an important moment, conversation, or decision you might have missed otherwise?