Erev Shabbat Chayeii Sarah 5781
Rabbi opened and said “What is the edge of Erev Shabbat?” As it says “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”For when you see the face of your neighbor as your own, she [Shekinah] is present.
This is a powerful Shabbat, a deep parasha about mourning and the force of death. Chayeii Sarah, the life of Sarah, starts with her death.
Sarah is hard to see as a heroine, in the epic heroic sense. She does have her intensely miraculous pregnancy and birth in her old age, but otherwise the stories that stick are her insisting Abraham sleep with a servant, Hagar, and then hating her for it. Oh and also managing to literally laugh at g-d! Not exactly traditional heroic qualities. And yet Sarah is the first Jewish woman and we extol her praises constantly! How can we hold these two truths at once?
The rabbis make many reasons the holy Sarah would do such horrible things like turning Hagar and Ishmael out despite – from the simplest meaning of the text – getting exactly what she wanted, a male heir from her servant. They paint Ishmael as wild, cruel to Yitzchak, as possibly even sexually assaulting him. They paint Hagar as haughtily parading her pregnant belly around the ever-barren Sarah. They say she was a daughter of Pharaoh, more prone to elevating herself above others! And yet, the plain text just shows us her, a foreign woman and her child cast out into the desert even after doing everything right – after her owner has sex with her and birthing a child claimed by the woman who owns her. Horrifying and expected. Here she is. Hinenah. Hagar, the cast out, the shadow Shekinah. Weeping, so thirsty and distraught that she drags herself away, trying to not watch the physical act of her child’s death.
Given Avraham’s riches and comfort it is unforgiveable.
But here is a hard truth about Sarah. The people who are the most in danger, the people the world hurts the most, have learned to build boundaries to protect themselves. Those who feel safe in the world can not understand how much effort and energy is spent protecting your very self from the greater world at large. I’ve read Sarah’s narrative as trans before and it heightens those feelings. But no matter Sarah’s sex or gender or any of those things, the essence of Sarah is someone who has had miraculous changes, but who has changed at a cost. Avraham has societal safeties she does not. And so she must make boundaries that he never has to consider.
There is a midrash that the Akedah – The Binding of Yitzhak – happens because Avraham does not make sacrifices at Issac’s weaning. Avraham forgets to remember that all of this is just divinity, that he is not the creator of his fairy tale ending. Satan arrives to argue against him. And so Avraham receives a test. The Test. The Ultimate human test of what you do.
Avraham, he who added a divine letter, who escaped the fires of Ur Chasidim, who sees the Compassionate One Who Gives Life, the First Jew – what do you do when HaShem tells you to raise up your son on a mountain in a time known for human sacrifice. For if HaShem is truly the compassionate one, one who cares about humans, how can there be a requirement to kill something this close to you? Yet to “rise up upon a mountain” is nothing but “Sacrifice” in that world. And in that moment between himself and his son, between the memories of his uncaring father and the tyrant king of his childhood near-death experience, Avraham dared to dream of a greater divinity. A g-d that would not command you to slaughter your child. Raise up. To test you. Raise up. To give you the chance to prove yourself, to re-envision the face of the divine and the face of humanity.
The other midrash of this winding drash story is one of juxtaposition. The Torah does not tell us why Sarah dies. The parasha before gives us many harrowing stories, almost a glut of near misses, of high drama, of literal destruction, and then – the Akedah. And after the Akedah? Chayeii Sarah. The life, the death, of Sarah. Sarah died because of the Akedah, the strain of such a test was too great. She was a mother who put up harsh boundaries to protect her child from perceived danger. And her death is the realization that it did not save her child.
Sarah, the ever barren, the one who will not live without change, the outsider bond/married to an outsider. She who was beauteously gazed upon as Yiscah, who declared herself Sarai “my Princess” to own her sense of self. She who threw out her husband’s original heir and the heir’s mother. Such a powerful sense of who she was and how to protect her life and yet the boundaries did not protect the life of her only son.
Yes Avraham considers killing for his g-d.
But Sarah is willing to die herself at that terrible vision, of a g-d that would give so much only to take it away, a g-d at odds with her reality of the world.
The Pitzcner Reebe, the Esh Kodseh wrote of this parasha in the Warsaw Ghetto with a deeply felt teaching.
“One might … argue that Sarah’s taking the binding of Isaac so much to heart that her soul left her body was a [deliberate] act taken on behalf of Israel. It was intended to demonstrate to God that Israel cannot endure an excessive amount of suffering. For even if, by the grace of God, he remains alive after the period of suffering, nevertheless, a part of his strength, mind, and spirit are broken and lost. [As the Talmud says (Bava Kama 65a)], ‘What difference does it make if one is killed outright, or beaten half to death?’ This explains the point of the words, ‘These were the years of Sarah’s life’ (Genesis 23:1). For it would appear that Sarah sinned by shortening her own life span; had she not taken the binding of Isaac much to heart, she would have lived longer. But since her action was taken on behalf of Israel, Scripture hints ‘These were the years of Sarah’s life.'”
I can not say why Sarah dies when she dies, what physically happens. But I can say why Sarah lived. Because she put down boundaries. Sarah moved across the world when the idea of a world was young and she was a woman in a society that used that against her. It was a world of constant deprivation, of starvation fears and dying thirst. To survive in those ancient worlds, boundaries and safety sometimes came at the expense of others. This modern world does not have such excuses.
Much of parasha Chayei Sarah – the Life of Sarah – is taken up with reconciling the work of life after Sarah, life after the terror of the Akedah. Avraham grows old and well supported, the father of physical nations, multiple children. Yitzhak and Yishmael are on speaking terms, possibly reconciling over the very trauma Avraham inflicted in his search for a better self. Eliezer uses his dutiful lazar focus to find a suitable spouse for Yitzchak, a true sidduch, a partner and a match. These are all each of the characters’ worries as the life of their patriarch winds down, as they watch their own lives shifting.
Much of that healing may have been due to Sarah’s death. Just as we also know that some of that trauma came from Sarah’s life. And to be human is to hold both of those things, one in each hand; to sometimes hold them together in all their complexity.
May the lesson of Sarah’s life on this yartzeit week of both Comrade Leslie Feinberg ז״ל – May hir memory be a blessing – and Hannah Szenes/Senesh הי״ד – May Hashem avenge her blood – be this: There is only so much punishment humans are able to withstand. The human animal longs for bone deep happiness, to be in real honest connection with the self and with the other. It is something we can never achieve with capitalism or facism. Both insist that the model relationship is one of domination and hierarchy, that there are inherently humans that are better. Instead we must face the truth of a Compassionate Divinity, that if we insist that G-d is compassionate, we have to reflect that compassion into reality. And doing that means being the best at what humans are, seeing beyond what we are to what we can be. Envision a world of humans with needs met, a world where basic compassion is a baseline expectation, where everyone has food and clothes and the medical care we know is available. A world where we do not need to turn the stranger out and certainly not one where we convince ourselves we don’t have enough in a nation of plenty.
eish zarah 