Due to a famine in the land of Canaan, Avraham and Sorah decided to travel to Egypt. As they approached the border between the two countries, Avraham became aware of Sorah’s beauty and began to worry that the Egyptians would want to marry her and would kill him in order to do so, so he asked her to please identify herself as his sister instead of as his wife (12:13). While it was understandable for Avraham to share his plan with Sorah in advance, it is difficult to understand why he had to ask her to “please” go along with it. If her husband’s life was potentially at risk, wasn’t it clear that she would cooperate with his suggestion? Why did Avraham have to ask her to do him a favor and save him from imminent danger?
Rav Itzele Volozhiner was the head of the renowned yeshiva in Volozhin. At one point, the yeshiva became so overcrowded and stretched for resources that he had no choice but to enact quotas on how many bochurim could enroll from each city. As a result, it sometimes happened that boys who wished to attend knew they would be unable to do so because all the positions allotted to their hometowns were filled. To gain access to the celebrated yeshiva, these bochurim would first travel to a larger town with a correspondingly larger quota of bochurim permitted to enroll. After spending a period of time in the big city, they would then travel to Volozhin and present themselves as residents of the larger town.
After Rav Itzele became aware of this practice, he remarked that it helped him understand Avraham’s request of Sorah. He compared it to a case of two bochurim from a small village who traveled to Vilna to be able to honestly say they were coming from Vilna. On their way from Vilna to Volozhin, one of the bochurim would introduce himself as a Vilna resident, while his friend saw no reason to begin doing so at that point, and instead gave the name of their small village as his hometown.
Only when they arrived in Volozhin did both claim to be from Vilna, which enabled them to be accepted. On the market day in Volozhin, when merchants from surrounding areas came to peddle their wares, one of the sellers recognized the two boys and called out to greet them, referring to one of them as the bochur from Vilna and to the other as the bochur from his small village. As a result of the fact that the latter was not careful to don his guise as a Vilna resident in advance, his true identity became revealed.
Similarly, Rav Itzele explains that Avraham knew that Sorah would understand his concern that he could be killed if the Egyptians knew their true relationship as husband and wife, and she would therefore go along with his plan to tell them that she was his sister. However, he was worried that if they presented themselves as a married couple on their travels to Egypt and only adopted their new purported relationship when they arrived, there was a possibility that somebody who encountered them earlier and recognized them as husband and wife would see them in Egypt and inadvertently reveal their secret.
Therefore, the Torah emphasizes that as they approached Egypt, Avraham turned to Sorah and asked her to begin identifying herself as his sister, even while they were still traveling, to ensure that his plan would succeed. Because his life was not yet in jeopardy and Avraham was only suggesting this as an additional precaution, he therefore needed to ask Sorah to “please” accommodate his request. (R’ Ozer Alport)
