Chayeh Sarah and Coming Home

”CHAYYE SARAH”: Genesis 23:1 to 25:18.

The Torah is a book of mysteries. Characters come, characters go, we learn a great deal about a few days in someone’s life and almost nothing about the rest; plot lines are left unfinished, subplots unravel. There are repetitions that don’t quite repeat and motifs that are worked to death. One is tempted to say it is like a first draft which needs a good Editor, if not indeed an entire editorial team, in order to hammer it into a coherent narrative. I am not the first to notice this, and the entire corpus of Midrash is a collective rabbinic attempt over centuries to fill some of the gaps and find partial answers to some of the questions.

So: In Genesis 22:19, after the dramatic incident known as the ”Akedat Yitzhak”, the binding and near-sacrifice of his surviving son, Abraham descends once more from the mountain he had ascended together with Yitzhak, seemingly alone, he rejoins his two servant boys who had been left holding the donkey, and he returns to Beersheva, a place which had been named in 21:31 as a symbol of a peace treaty between this wandering Beduin and the Pelishtim. In 21:33 he even plants a tree here and calls upon God, then continues to live in what is not the land God had promised him for his descendants, but ”the land of the Pelishtim.” Since he ”returns to Beersheva” we can assume that this is the place where God speaks to him in 22:1 and from where he sets out with Yitzhak on the three-day journey to an as-yet-unnamed ”place God will show him.”

Then in Chapter 23:1f Sarah dies, aged 127 in – ”Kiryat Arba, also called Hebron, in the land of Canaan.” (Since she was 90 when Yitzhak was born this makes him 37 at this point). Abraham has to ”come” to mourn her and make funeral arrangements. Come from where? From Beersheva? Probably. In which case, why is she here and he there? Is this a result of an argument, a split over Abraham’s effective kidnapping of Yitzhak without his mother’s permission? Had Sarah perhaps set off (alone!) to head northward back to ”home” in Haran and dies on the way? If so, why had he not followed her, pleaded with her to return, apologised for his actions? How long does it take for the news of his wife’s death to get to him and for him to get there – and what state is the body in by this time? Where is Yitzhak? He does not attend the funeral and in 24:67 when, now aged forty, i.e. three years later, he accepts Rivkah as his wife, one chosen for him by his father’s servant, he is living in ”his mother’s tent” in Beer Lahai Ro’i and only now can he cease mourning for her – there had been no ”closure” until now – and start his new phase of life. This will be described at the beginning of the next sidra, ”Toldot” in Genesis 25:19f.

When Abraham also dies in 25:7-11 both Yitzhak and Ishmael come together to carry out the filial duty of burying their father – but none of the six other sons whom he had conceived with his next wife Keturah in 25:1-4. Here it is stated that Avraham made Yitzhak into his main heir and gave these six others – Yitzhak’s half-brothers Simran and Jokshan and Medan and Midian and Jishbak and Shuach – gifts but sent them away, he shows no desire to build up a family with them, not even a patchwork one; it is almost as though they are an embarrassment, an old man’s late-born children. Of Keturah and her feelings about this banishment of her sons, we hear less than nothing, and how both Yitzhak and Ishmael hear of their father’s passing is also a blank. Poor Ishmael acts as a good son in spite of everything this father had done to him and his mother, but God specifically gives Yitzhak the Blessing, the covenant, not he, and Yitzhak goes back to Beer Lahai Ro’i. When Ishmael then dies in 25:17 he is also ”returned to his ancestors” just as Abraham was in 25:7, but we are not told where; indeed, his offspring seem by now to have settled the entire region from Egypt to Syria. Who are ”his people”? Abraham lies next to Sarah – the first time we learn of a couple lying together even after death – but we never learn where Ishmael’s mother Hagar gets buried, she has been written out of the series.

Is any of this really important? It all depends on one’s point of view. We hear in these chapters of a dysfunctional family and of the Patriarch living in the land of the Pelishtim and then negotiating with a Hittite to buy a plot in the land of Canaan. Clearly issues of Who Owns What were relevant then as they are now and yet despite the many conflicts the fact remains that most of those involved are still somehow related to one another. Ironically the Tanach describes three plots of land which are bought formally with cash from the previous owners – the Graves for Sarah and then later other patriarchs and matriarchs at the Machpelah in Hebron; the land at Shechem which Jacob acquires (Gen. 33:19) with a view to settling down on his return from Haran with a large family; and in II Samuel 24 the threshing floor of Arauna which David buys as a good spot for his planned Temple (though Solomon builds it.) Yet it is precisely these three spots, Hebron, Nablus and East Jerusalem, which remain the foci of so much conflict…

In the past weeks we have been witness to how many families in Israel (and elsewhere, such as in Nepal and Tanzania) have found closure to the tragic loss of a family member when at last – after years – they had a grave they could visit. These murdered victims of terror were literally ”returned to their peoples” – ”veye’assef el-Amav” as the text says….. and as I write this on 13th November a few still remain unreturned and the pain continues for those families and we can only hope that they too will receive their loved ones in due course.

It is strange how a couple of words can jump out of a biblical text and hit one between the eyes, a text one has read maybe thirty or more times. This year, there is added poignancy. With all their troubles and all their conflicts, their geographical and generational distances, in spite of all this – a father, mothers, sons, half-brothers, cousins – all are somehow involved, all are Mishpacha, one People, and those who died are returned, at last, to their People……

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Rabbi Dr. Walter Rothschild