Patriarchs, not role models (Hayyei Sarah)

 “Children were frequently betrothed in infancy, and engagements were broken when alliances shifted. Brides often met their husbands for the first time at or just before the wedding, sometimes after a proxy ceremony in which an ambassador stood in for the groom.”

The foregoing sentence was AI generated in response to an inquiry regarding royal European marriages and relationships. It could just as easily describe the engagement and marriages of Yitzhak and Rivkah in this week’s Torah reading,  Parshat Hayyei Sarah.

Avraham entrusts his major domo Eliezer (Bereishit/Genesis 24:4) to serve as his envoy to find a suitable, i.e., familial, bride for  Yitzhak, his  (Divinely designated) sole heir, but hardly his sole (or favorite) child. Clearly, Avraham’s considerations are dynastic. Emotions or chemistry are not a factor – neither his own emotions nor those of the future bride and groom. In fact, Avraham is nowhere to be found when Eliezer returns with Rivkah. He has absolute trust in his chief servant, and absolutely zero interest in what follows. No inspection of his future daughter-in-law, no wedding ceremony, no celebrations. Nothing. No sooner has Eliezer departed on his mission, than Avraham abandons Yitzhak so he can get back to his life in Beer Sheva, where he had been living in extramarital bliss 40 miles from Sarah’s domicile in Hevron.

The ceremonial mourning and burial of Sarah is a royal event. Avraham understands that a simple burial is insufficient for the official wife of a man of his stature. The Cave of Machpelah is no hole in the ground. It is a major monument with substantial surrounding land (23:17).

One gets the distinct impression that Avraham loves his son  Yitzhak even less than he loved his son’s mother (shades of Charles and Diana?). Indeed, Yitzhak is hardly a love child. Besides, Yitzhak displays no character traits that would make a tribal chieftain like Avraham proud. One might even sense – by dint of his eagerness to comply (22:3)  – that Avraham might have been relieved when God told him to sacrifice Yitzhak as doing so would free him from having to bequeath his legacy to such a deficient offspring.

Stepping back a generation, the marriage of Avram and Sarai was also dynastic. Sarai was Avraham’s niece, and possibly even his half sister. One can recognize that theirs was a marriage made by Heaven, not in Heaven.  Throughout its long years one finds little, if any, evidence of shared affection – no “knowing” (e.g.4:1, 4:26, 25:15) no “laughing” (e.g. 26:8) but plenty regarding their standing as a power couple. A contemporary version would be the enduring, utterly loveless, marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, which also produced but one rather lamentable child.

If we strip away the murky varnish of all those midrashic fables that attempt, needlessly, to burnish Avraham’s image (often, if not mostly, by diminishing and maligning perfectly innocent collateral players)  we are left with the indisputable fact that God has his own considerations, makes His own dynastic choices, and these often – if not always – have little to do with any absolute qualities that his designated key players manifest.

It is clear that Avraham and Sarah are selected by God to serve as the Patriarch and Matriarch of  His chosen People.  And no matter what transgressions, faux pas, or misjudgments they make, God gives them a free pass and continues to remind them of their covenantal destiny.  It seems they can do no wrong even when they do wrong:

1. God tells Avraham to move to Canaan. Yet, no sooner is he there when Avraham leaves for greener pastures in Egypt. True, there was a famine in Canaan. Yet one does not get the impression that all the thousands of Canaanites – who had not been told by God to live there – suddenly decamped to Egypt.
2. Avraham is quite up front with Sarah that his decision to defy God by relocating to Egypt is in order to pursue success (12:13).
3. Sarah, the true better half of this power couple, agrees to render herself available to Egypt’s monarch in order to help her husband realize his ambitions.

It is only God’s intervention that puts a stop to this strange business, and impels Avraham’s returning to Canaan vastly richer than before. Suddenly, the local famine is no longer an issue

Now God instructs Avraham to inspect the land from top to bottom (13:17-18). Once again Avraham ignores God and plants himself in one spot until it is time for some déjà vu as he packs his carpets and chandeliers and heads to the land of the Plishtim where, once again he and Sarah try to pull off their brother-sister caper. And yet again, mirabile dictu,  Divine intervention puts a stop to this hanky panky/

I am not troubled by any of this insofar as it defines and describes the emerging success of a loveless power couple. We see it every day and all around, how God has His own ideas regarding who achieves enormous success and who doesn’t. And clearly, in most cases, such success and power are hardly rewards for good behavior.

Does this give us a license to misbehave? Does it mean we should cast all morals and ethics to the winds and copycat the worst characteristics of those who make it to the top? We should argue the very opposite.  That our challenge is to maintain our core decency and dignity despite the awful examples set by kings, presidents,  oligarchs,  plutocrats and power-hungry rabbis. Our greatest achievement is for us, as independent individual agents,  to retain our own dignity and ethical rectitude despite the execrable examples being set and being honored. As well, we must make peace with the fact that God has His own reckonings to which we are not privy. Avraham and Sarah are great only because that is what God wanted. If you’re looking for stellar, unimpeachable character, you can go the fables of the Midrash or write some of your own.