Chayei Sarah: Generational Continuity

Chayei Sarah (which literally means “The life of Sarah”) is a sedra (Torah portion) that is really about two topics: Avraham (Abraham) and Sarah (a) having descendants (b) who can inherit the land of Israel. As Rabbi Sacks z”tzl noted, Avraham was really worried about two things: having children and knowing that those children could inherit the land of Israel, just as today the two greatest issues of concern to the Jewish people today are (a) intermarriage and whether there will be Jewish continuity into the next generation and (b) the defense of the land of Israel and whether we can hold on to it. These two topics are linked: we survived as a people with no land, but the situation was dangerous and ultimately untenable; however, a land with no people is also untenable. We need both: proud Jews and a land for them to live in.

Although the proof-texts for Avraham’s worries actually come from the sedra from two weeks ago, Chayei Sarah is more focused on these topics, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

The sedra opens with Avraham buying land for the burial of Sarah. It is noteworthy that, in Bereshit, the Patriarchs buy land, the only land owned by Jews before the conquest of the land under Yehoshua (Joshua), but this land is always used for tombs. Avraham buys the Cave of Machpelah here which, according to tradition, is the tomb for Avraham and Sarah, Yitzchak (Isaac) and Rivka (Rebecca) and Yaakov (Jacob) and Leah as well as Adam and Chava (Eve). Although not explicitly stated as being bought, Yaakov buries Rachel near Beit-Lechem (Bethlehem) (perhaps there was no need to buy the land as she was buried on the road, which no one owns). And then Yaakov buys some land near Shechem (modern Nablus), which, much later, after the conquest of the land, becomes the Tomb of Yosef (Joseph). So, there is a deep link between the people and land. This is the land we want, not just to live in, but to be buried in. This is where we want to finish up, even if we spend time living elsewhere. We want to spend eternity here.

At the same time, the Patriarchs intuit or understand that this is not our land yet. As God tells Avraham, the current owners, the Canaanites, are not sinful enough to warrant losing the land yet. Avraham just buys a Cave and the field it is in for a tomb, not somewhere to live. Yitzchak doesn’t buy land at all (even though he’s the only Patriarch who farms crops). Yaakov buys some land to live on (eventually the Tomb of Yosef), but it goes wrong; he soon has to flee after his daughter, Dinah, is raped and his sons massacre the Canaanite townsmen in retribution. He can’t live there yet; he still has to live as a “stranger” in the land. This is part of the prophecy at the Covenant Between the Parts, that they will live as strangers until God redeems them from Egypt.

Avraham was also promised offspring that will number like dust and like stars, but he will not see his descendants in the covenantal family number more than the fingers on his hand. Even in the future, the Jews will be the smallest of people. However, if you realize that the Jewish people stretch across time over more than three thousand years, suddenly the numbers add up.

However, in the wake of the Akedah, the near-sacrifice of Yitzchak in last week’s sedra, Avraham apparently realized that Yitzchak could have died without children. Rather than wait for a miracle, he resolves to do something about this, sending his servant back to his family in Aram to find a wife for Yitzchak.

In Aram, we do not expect anyone to know God, yet Lavan (Laban), Avraham’s great-nephew, use the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God that is used primarily in the context of the covenant and is generally not used by non-Israelites. Is there a family tradition about Avraham’s One God? Perhaps this would explain why the rabbinic tradition sees Rivka as already being a monotheist – perhaps she was raised on stories of “crazy Uncle Avraham and His One God who sent him to Canaan” and secretly rebelled against the idolatry of her surroundings.

The length at which the story of Avraham’s servant’s search for a wife for Yitzchak is narrated, along with the other Patriarchal stories of difficulties with getting married and long periods of infertility contrast with the swiftly-related genealogies of the non-covenantal branches of Avraham’s family across the book of Bereshit. Everything seems much harder for covenantal family. Whether this was literally true or is just a narrative technique, we are primed to accept the idea that life in the covenant is not easy. Even righteousness is not a guarantee of an easy life. The covenant requires hard work and faith in a God who can seem absent for long periods.

Alongside keeping faith with a God Who often “hides His face,” the sedra gives us a sense of the need to keep faith with the past and the future, with ancestors and descendants, to bury the dead and to ensure the birth of the next generation. Jews are not alone, but part of a continuous history. Yitzchak brings Rivka to Sarah’s tent. Literally, the verse reads, “And Yitzchak brought her to the tent – Sarah his mother!” When Rivka enters Sarah’s tent, she in a sense becomes her, one generation flowing smoothly into the next. It is this that prompts Yitzchak to take Rivka as his wife, to love her and to be comforted after the death of his mother, a phrase that sounds disturbingly Freudian (wife as mother substitute), but actually relates a sense of generational continuity, reflected in the rabbinic statement that the miraculous blessings of Sarah’s housekeeping, absent since her death, reappeared with Rivka’s arrival.

Although I’m wary of reading too much into sedra titles, Chayei Sarah, The Life of Sarah, is appropriate, as Sarah lives on in her descendants, the Jewish people.