A Love that Outlasts
She sees a stranger in the distance, and an almost sacred intuition thrums within her. Rivkah dismounts the camel and asks her guardian who the man is. “That is my master,” he answers.
Around her the grasses move like water, graceful with promise. She veils herself and takes another step forward. The young man moves toward her, and it all shudders through her, just for one moment — what will be of them.
He takes her to his mother’s tent and he loves her as his wife, his helpmate, and his comfort.
***
Parashat Chayei Sara offers a glimpse at two kinds of devotion.
The first is the devotion of Yitzchak and Rivkah: tender, bold, naïve, blushing. It is the devotion of newlyweds before they have been tested together.
But there is another one, the complex devotion of a husband to the wife he has lived an entire life with. It is this devotion I am fascinated by: the depths of the love of a man whose wife laughed when she heard he could father a child in his old age. The rhythms of a marriage between a woman who offered her maidservant as a wife to her husband — and then exiled the maidservant. The steadfastness of a woman who would always come second to God, who watched her own son come second to that love.
And the devotion, too, of a man who stands up from lying beside his dead wife, after eulogizing and crying out for her, and proceeds to find a final burial place for her.
The Sefer HaYashar offers a beautiful depiction of Sarah’s funeral:
And Avraham buried Sarah in great display, as it is customary with the burials of kings, and she was interred in very beautiful and costly garments. And her bier was attended by Shem and his sons Eber and Abimelech, also by Auer, Eshcol, and Mamre, and all the dignitaries of the land followed her bier. And the days of Sarah were a hundred and seven and twenty years when she died, and Avraham made a great and heavy mourning, and he observed that mourning for seven days. And all the inhabitants of the land consoled Avraham and Yitzchak his son concerning Sarah.
The funeral, according to this midrash, was a queenly affair. Sarah was clothed in the finest of shrouds; her burial was witnessed by the powerful figures of their time. Avraham’s grief was so profound he was comforted by all of his neighbors.
But this is not his final act of devotion.
At the end of the parasha, Avraham remarries: to the woman our sages often identify as the maidservant he was once married to.
Later in his life, he returns to a woman who was once his wife’s adversary.
We don’t have anything conclusive explaining why he went back to her. But I would like to suggest one way of reading this story and the ones that come before it.
Perhaps Avraham cared for Hagar, too.
Years earlier, Sarah insisted Hagar was mistreating her. Avraham deferred to Sarah’s desire to exile Hagar. He chose to remain respectful to Sarah’s wishes: “Deal with her as you think right in your eyes.” Not in Avraham’s eyes — in Sarah’s.
And yet, when Sarah’s eyes are no longer cast upon them, he remarries the woman who caused her so much anguish.
Avraham was the male authority, the patriarch. Especially if he cared for Hagar, he was in a position to override Sarah.
But he didn’t. He chose not to do anything that might hurt Sarah while she still lived.
There is a telling in the Zohar that adds something even more profound: “Avraham, although he married again, never entered Sarah’s tent nor allowed that woman to enter there, for a handmaid may not be heir to her mistress. No other woman, in fact, ever appeared in Sarah’s tent save Rivkah.”
And that is complex devotion. That is the devotion of a life spent together, through sorrow and through joy.
***
When I married my husband, I remember what it felt like: full of so much promise. The youthful love of expectations and dreams; the giddiness and gushing as we began to build something.
That was the love of Yitzchak and Rivkah. And it is a beautiful devotion — something I pray each and every couple gets to experience.
But the steadfastness of Avraham and Sarah is one I have come to learn over the past seven-plus years and two children, and one I know will continue to expand. And that devotion is stronger than the one I knew before.
For almost a third of my life, my husband and I have finished one another’s sentences. We have seen each other’s worst moments; we’ve experienced each other’s failures and successes. We have worked well, as a team, and less effectively, as opponents. We have negotiated and capitulated and argued and made up and made anew. We have had children, and our darkest nightmares have been rewritten.
In the end, this is the love I wish for other people. This enduring, complex, challenging devotion. Avraham and Sarah’s love.
Buried together in the cave he bought his wife, Avraham and Sarah prove to us that there are some loves that will always outlast life.
