Chaye Sarah
Genesis 23:1-25:18
I Kings 1:1-31
The other day, after a full day of teaching at a conference, I walked with my husband toward a restaurant for dinner. I was telling him that I had felt very satisfied with one part of my own teaching but I had real doubts about the other part. He listened patiently, clearly preparing to tell me that he was sure it had been just fine. Suddenly, a stranger on the street called out in my direction, “Weren’t you at the conference today?” I said that yes, I had been there. She said, in a most heartfelt way, “What you did was so wonderful. It really touched me.” I said softly, “Oh, I’m glad. It was helpful for you?” She said emphatically, “Oh yes. More than you can know.” And then she headed off down the street.
My husband and I resumed our walk toward the restaurant. I took a moment to take in the woman’s kind words, noticing the irony of her compliment coming just when it did, before I launched back into my own self-doubting rumination. My husband, usually far more the rationalist than I am, called out insistently, “Did you notice what just happened?” Gesturing vaguely toward the sky, he said, with laughter in his face, “Even I got that one!” I laughed, looking heavenward, and said, “OK, OK, I hear you. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.”
The scientists among us may insist that such chance encounters are delightful but fundamentally random. Now I don’t believe in a human-esque God who sits in heaven calculating to which street corner a kindly person needs to be dispatched. I don’t believe in a God who could “send” such a person to ease my doubt, by showing up at precisely the right place at the right time. But I am convinced that experiences such as this one are not random occurrences either. Somehow, the impulse for good, for kindness, and for healing in the universe gives rise to such “coincidences.” And this dimension of life is a part of what I call God, the Source of all and the Author of Truth.
This week’s parashah brings us the Torah’s quintessential story of divinely inspired “coincidence.” Abraham has sent his servant Eliezer back to Abraham’s birthplace to find for Isaac a wife among Abraham’s kin. Eliezer reaches his destination and immediately prays that the woman who responds to his request for water be precisely the woman whom God desires for Isaac. He had scarcely finished speaking when Rebecca, who turns out to be Abraham’s cousin and a kind and beautiful woman, offers water to him and his camels in a most generous and gracious way.
When Eliezer learns that this is indeed his master’s cousin, he is overtaken by wonder, crying out, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not withheld God’s steadfast faithfulness from my master. For I have been guided on my errand by God, to the house of my master’s kinsmen.” (Genesis 24:27) Eliezer exuberantly tells the story twice more, and those who hear it exclaim, “This is from God.” (Gen. 24:50)
What so strikes me about this story is Eliezer’s immediate, unhesitating openness to the mystery of the encounter. Eliezer does not resist the implication that this is a wondrous event; he does not argue with it, or try to insist that this “coincidence” could be explained by the laws of nature.
When this kind of encounter happens in our own lives, we have such trouble opening to the awe of it. Embedded in post-modern skepticism, we feel it is so important to believe that we are in charge of things, or that we at least have mastery over events by virtue of being able to explain them scientifically. We are so afraid of those moments when mystery breaks through — the spontaneous remission, the two estranged friends who pick up the phone to reconcile at just the same moment, the e-mail arrives that answers a heartfelt desire.
Our attachment to rational analysis, of course, has given rise to boundless advances in our understanding of life. But it also robs of the ability to appreciate life’s mystery and wonder. We are an impoverished age, in that we have such difficulty recognizing the things that are from God.
May this beautiful story reignite our religious imagination, allowing us to recognize the Holy in some of its many guises.
Rabbi Amy Eilberg is a spiritual director in private practice.