Picking Up the Pieces

The events of Parshat Chayei Sarah — Abraham finding a grave for his wife and asking his servant to find a wife for Isaac — follow the story of the Akeidah because, after almost sacrificing his son at the Akedah, Abraham underwent a reorientation. Having spent so much time building a nation, fighting wars, defending cities, and caring for strangers, the trial of the Akeidah helped him realize it was time to start thinking about his family. This is meaningful, but I can’t help but see something else in this story. This story doesn’t feel like one about building a family. It’s a story of picking up the pieces of a broken one in the aftermath of the Akeidah.

Isaac and Abraham don’t come back down the mountain together after the Akeidah. They never speak again, and they move to different locations — Abraham to Be’er Sheva and Isaac to Be’er LeChai Roi. There is a distance between them, so much so that Abraham asks his servant Elazar to find a wife for Isaac rather than do it himself (Genesis 24:1-5), and Isaac brings his new wife to his dead mother’s tent, and not his father’s (Genesis 24:67). Especially with Sarah’s death, this once loving family has fallen apart.

I’ve seen this kind of fallout before. In the aftermath of crisis, regardless of whether or not we’ve survived, sometimes there are scars that never heal. Those scars can be trauma, lost friends, and chronic illness.

I see these scars in Abraham and Isaac, and I can’t help but wonder if God understood the gravity of what he’d asked Abraham to do. And I wonder if God regretted His decision. It wouldn’t be the first time God regretted a decision. Seeing the disaster of the generation of the flood, God regretted having made humankind.

GOD saw how great human wickedness was on earth—how every plan devised by the human mind was nothing but evil all the time. And GOD regretted having made humankind on earth. With a sorrowful heart, GOD said, “I will blot out from the earth humankind whom I created—humans together with animals, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.” (Genesis 6:5-7)

However, the difference between the flood and our story is that life went on after the Akeidah, as it often does. But things are different now. In this story, nobody is evil. Nobody is in trouble — but everyone is hurt. And maybe that’s just the way life goes sometimes.

And yet, I can’t help but be inspired by the fortitude of our forefathers who tried to repair their lives when things felt so broken. Abraham finds a resting place for his wife and a wife for his son. According to rabbinic tradition, Isaac journeys to find Hagar and bring her back to remarry Abraham. And, according to another midrash, Abraham journeys to find Ishmael and make sure he is doing well in his new life. It is a parsha of picking up the pieces, and while there’s pain in that process, there’s also hope.