Haye Sarah
Genesis 23:1-25:18
I Kings 1:1-31
I’ll always be grateful for having known the man I’ll call Dan. Dan was 45 when we met, and dying of AIDS.
In our first conversation, he spoke with exquisite openness and insight and peace about his life, and about his dying process.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve done everything I wanted to do.”
I tried to hear that this was his perspective. But inwardly, I was angry: Everything he wanted to do! He was 45 and dying, a bright, talented, insightful, loving, beautiful man, and he felt he’d done everything he wanted to do?
As our relationship progressed, it became clear that Dan had experienced many painful things in his 45 short years. He had lost his life partner, as well as many, many friends to a terrible epidemic. There was much to grieve, even to regret, in his life.
But when he looked back on his life, what he saw was blessing and abundance. As it turned out, although his dying process included much pain, he took this perspective of gratitude with him to the time of his death.
This week’s parashah, Haye Sarah (literally “The Life of Sarah”), is a reflection on death and life, on love and continuity. Our text unfolds very much in the shadow of last week’s text of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, a story of inscrutable profundity. In fact, one midrashic tradition has it that Sarah actually died the moment she learned that her husband had considered sacrificing their son. According to this reading, Sarah was the person sacrificed; Isaac’s life went on, though in somber and muted tones, and filled with conflict (for a beautiful treatment of this tradition, see Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s “Genesis: The Beginning of Desire”).
Abraham, after very nearly slaughtering his own son, came home to watch his wife die. The text tells us about the funeral arrangements, about the purchase of a burial place in Hebron. Suddenly, finding Abraham in the midst of grief, the text gives us this terse review of his life. “Abraham was now old, advanced in years, and God had blessed Abraham in all things” (Genesis 24:1).
God had blessed Abraham in all things? Here was a man who had been tested by God no less than 10 times, commanded to leave his home, to travel alone for a lifetime, responding to the voice of an unseen God. This was a man who had experienced no lack of family conflict, watched his wife suffer deeply in her infertility, who finally, when blessed with a miraculous son in old age, was asked to sacrifice this very child to prove his devotion to God. The child was saved by a hair’s breath, and Abraham came home, only to watch his wife die. Blessed in all things?
With a life as painful and complex as the one he had lived, Abraham would have had every reason to conclude, in summary, that it had been quite a hard life indeed. But from his perspective, it had been a life filled with blessing.
As one might expect, the commentators are drawn to this beautiful, brief summary of Abraham’s life: “God blessed Abraham in all things” (bakol).
One commentator says that “in all” means that Abraham’s relationship with God was complete, encompassing all of his heart, all of his soul, and all of his might. Another says that Abraham was blessed in all, in that he learned how to manage his own inner flaws (or “evil inclination”), and so was able to live well with “all” of himself.
Yet another says that Abraham lived in such a way that he shared blessings with the collective (bichlal), so that his own sense of blessing was magnified. Finally, one writer says that Abraham was blessed with a sense of the all, with a sense of abundance, so that whatever he had, he felt that he had enough (Itturei Torah, Vol. 1, Pages 184-5).
Abraham’s greatness derives in part from this sense that he knew how to appreciate what he was given, even in the midst of a lifetime that included more than its share of suffering and complexity. This is a faith more accessible to us than the morally questionable “act of faith” of the Akedah, a faith more real than the faith of false optimism or denial. This is faith born in the crucible of real life, including its wonders, but also its suffering and pain.
In this sense, every one of us can be a person of faith, striving for a perspective of gratitude and abundance and wholeness even in the midst of the real struggles of our lives.
May Abraham teach us well, and may we, too, be blessed in all. Amen.