PARASHAT CHAYEY SARAH (Genesis 23:1-25:18) This week’s Torah portion begins with the death of Avraham’s wife Sarah. “Sarah lived to be 127 years old; these were the years of Sarah’s life. Sarah died in Kiryat-Arba, also known as Hevron, in the land of Kena‘an; and Avraham came to mourn Sarah and weep for her. Then he got up from his dead one and said to the sons of Het, “I am a foreigner living as an alien with you; let me have a burial site with you, so that I can bury my dead wife.” (23:1-4) The rest of the chapter recounts the very, VERY Middle-Eastern bargaining protocol as Avraham sets out to buy from the sons of Het (that is, the Hittites) a cave in which to bury her. If you go to the shuk / souk (Hebrew / Arabic for “marketplace”) in the Old city of Jerusalem you can experience this process live in hundreds of stores. To this day the cave that Avraham bought in Hevron is considered one of the holiest sites in Judaism. In honor of this week’s parashah hundreds of Israelis go to Hevron for the weekend, where they visit the Cave of Machpelah, where Sarah is buried. It is also the burial place of Avraham, Yitzchak, Rivkah, Ya’akov and Leah. In Chapter 24 Avraham sends his most trusted servant some 300 miles north to his family in Haran to find a wife for his son Yitz’chak. Avraham said to him, “See to it that you don’t bring my son back there. ADONAI, the God of heaven — who took me away from my father’s house and away from the land I was born in, who spoke to me and swore to me, ‘I will give this land to your descendants’ — he will send his angel ahead of you; and you are to bring a wife for my son from there.” (24:7-8) Thus reassured, the servant goes, and we see the Lord leading him. He stops at a spring outside Haran and asks God to give him a sign revealing which girl he should choose, and the sign he asks for is that she offer him and his ten camels water to drink. Rivkah appears, fills her jug with water and offers it to him, then goes and waters the camels. See Martha’s black-and-white picture of the servant Eliezer and Rivkah at the well. It’s another of the pictures she drew for the children in our congregation to color in when they had the lesson on this parashah. Rivkah’s family agree to let her go and marry Yitz’chak. Avraham’s servant has her mount one of the camels and brings her back to where Yitz’chak is living, in the Negev Desert. Yitz’chak appears, walking through a field. Rivkah spots him and, according to the plain sense of the text (24:64), she “fell off the camel.” An impressive first meeting! In the Complete Jewish Bible I translated it, “She quickly dismounted the camel” (which is a possible rendering). We are informed that “the servant told Yitzchak everything he had done. Then Yitzchak brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent and took Rivkah, and she became his wife, and he loved her. Thus was Yitzchak comforted for the loss of his mother.” (24:66-67) My own mother died two months before Martha and I got married. Someone gave me that verse when she died. Martha was with me at the time, and the next day she painted the picture showing Yitz’chak and Rivkah in Sarah’s tent (blue and yellow stripes), with the angel of death hovering over them and Sarah’s pale profile rising to heaven. Martha did another version of this picture and verse when she painted our ketubah (marriage contract) – this time making sure Rivkah had red hair. I’ve included a picture from the ketubah. An additional significance for us: traditionally Yitz’chak was 40 when he married Rivkah, and I was 40 when I married Martha. Shabbat shalom. -- David and Martha PS We’re always glad when you share our Facebook pages with your friends.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 15:23:05 +0000
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