Chaye Sara

Chaye Sara - Deborah Silver 

Deborah Silver is a second year student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in California. Previously a lawyer, she is a native Brit and a long-term Limmud volunteer, participator and facilitator.

There's a poem by Sheenagh Pugh which begins:

"Sometimes things don't go, after all,
From bad to worse: sometimes muscadel
Faces down frost..."

The poem celebrates the raise of the eyebrows which happens when, contrary to our expectations, things go right rather than wrong. Its sentiments sit well with this sidra, which, despite its opening with Sarah's death, somehow manages to pull off a series of fortunate outcomes.

At the central point of the narrative we find another pointer to this theme: a rare and exquisite note, a shalshelet, which occurs only four times in the whole Torah. Its function, as on the other three occasions it is sung, is to emphasise an exceptional moment. We hear it this week as Abraham's servant begins to pray to the God of his master that his quest to find a wife for Isaac will be successful. How likely was it, really, that a woman would come along and satisfy precisely the involved test set for her? Yet, even before the servant has finished speaking, there she is, right on cue.

Elsewhere in the sidra, also, we can discern this sense of pleasant wonder, of the expected order of things being somehow subverted. Abraham has to employ his most persuasive negotiating skills to persuade the sons of Het actually to accept payment for the cave of Machpelah. Rebecca's family eagerly welcomes the servant who has come from miles away. Rebecca herself, in defiance of what our expectations might be, professes herself eager to leave her family home. When she sees Isaac, she falls clean off her camel. And Isaac loves her, arranged marriage notwithstanding.

Perhaps most astonishingly, Isaac and Ishmael, those two long-term rivals, come together to bury their father. Not only that, but the sidra mentions - not once but twice - that Isaac lives in 'be'er lehay ro'i', the very place to which Hagar fled from Sarai's wrath and where Ishmael's birth was prophesied. Rashi and Ramban (classical biblical commentators) both observe that the language of Ishmael's death (which closes the sidra) is that which is used for recording the death of the righteous, a death without pain. It is as if Ishmael - the same Ishmael who gave Sarah so much heartache - is finally, by his death, fully rehabilitated into the narrative, with Isaac moving in to occupy the place identified previously with his step-brother.

It is interesting, in the light of this, to look again at the opening lines of the sidra. On any reading, Sarah's death is tragic: her lifespan is the shortest of any human being so far recorded in Genesis. Even though she does get an extra seven years over the prescribed one hundred and twenty (Genesis 6:3), Ishmael outlives her by ten years. No doubt she would have found this galling. Yet, and perhaps despite herself, the sidra which bears her name and which is titled for her life (rather than for her death) tells a story in which the positive values of love and reconciliation triumph over and over again. We should remember that Sarah is the one who steadfastly refused to believe that she could ever bear a child. Perhaps her legacy is that sometimes, in defiance even of belief, and even if only for a while, things do go well, after all.