Hayyei Sarah (Torah)

Scenes from a Marriage

The Book of Bereshit (Genesis) may be read as a series of scenes presenting the archetypes that are the basic building blocks of human life: from the Creation of the universe itself, through the mysteries of human freedom, of sexuality, of the discovery of the lethal potential of violence of one man against another, of the propensity to hubris and challenging God, of the possibility of rank evil; introducing the world of human religious consciousness and spirituality with Abraham, the first God-intoxicated man, and his various tests and the difficult trials on his life path. In Hayyei Sarah (Gen 23-25:18) we encounter the next stage—the beginnings of family life. While Abraham was of course married, and Sarah even plays a pivotal role in certain moments in his life, the subject of marriage and family life per se is somehow peripheral to the concerns of the Abraham cycle. Unlike the Ingrid Bergman film of the above-mentioned title, and the modern sensibility it reflects, the scenes that the Torah shows of marriage do not make sex—before, during and after—to be the center of marriage (notwithstanding Isaac’s giveaway “sporting” with his wife in 26:8). Nevertheless, marriage is clearly the central theme here. The two central vignettes around which Hayyei Sarah is focused capture, to my mind, the essence of Jewish marriage.

The parshah begins at the end: with the “summing up” (in Somerset Maugham’s apt phrase), the end of Abraham’s marriage to Sarah with her death. We have heard a great deal over the past three decades about how this section teaches us of the Jewish people’s claim to Eretz Yisrael, in general, and to the “city of the patriarchs,” in particular. To my mind, the human situation portrayed here, briefly but profoundly, is no less important. In moving terms, we see the widowed Abraham coming to Hebron “to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.” (The modern sense of lispod in the sense of “eulogize,” to deliver a hesped, is later and secondary. The original sense is closer to “moaning” or “keening.”) Only then does he proceed to the business of buying the plot of land with the cave on it (contrary to current Jewish usage, where the formal mourning of shivah is specifically after burial). It is as if, with his partner’s death, he too is bereft, without any anchor or fixed point of being in his own life.

We are reminded of the Rabbinic dictum: “No woman dies save to her husband; no man dies but to his wife.” Children mourn for their parents, but in some sense everyone knows and accepts that it is the way of the world for one generation to pass on while another comes into full strength. (Indeed, in olden times it was customary among Jews for a man in his prime to wryly refer to his son as his “Kaddish’l”) At times, parents are bereaved of their offspring: surely that is the most poignant, bitter loss, and one all-too-familiar in contemporary Israeli society; Hebrew even has a special verb, shekhol, to refer to this form of bereavement. But it is the loss of a partner which is perhaps the most wrenching, removing the life companion who has been ones “missing limb.” The death of parents is the final end of childhood; the death of a child is the truncation of the future; but the death of a spouse is for many tantamount to the end of life itself. I remember our own mother, during the months following my father’s death, saying “my own life is over.”

Perhaps the Torah deliberately places this story here to introduce the theme of marriage by way of negation—revealing its centrality through the deep pain involved in its end. It is as if the Torah is telling Isaac: you are about to be married, to have a wife brought to you “on a silver platter,” arranged by your father’s emissary. By observing the mourning, the loss, the look on your father’s face on the day he came to bury Sarah, you may infer how deep and central it was to him: the symbiosis, the sheer mutual interdependence and support of her presence by his side. For many of us, the figure of the widower has been an emblematic one in the Torah world. Three of the most innovative, dynamic leaders within Orthodox Jewry over the past generation, each of them a leader of a major camp—Rav Soloveitchik, Rav Zvi Yehudah Kook, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe—were widowers for extended periods. One of the most striking images is that of the Rav saying Kaddish for his beloved wife at every public prayer, and reciting Kaddish de-Rabanan at the end of every public Torah lecture (shiur): beginning from the day she died, continuing long past the end of the mourning year had ended, for over a decade, until he himself was no longer able to participate in public worship. The depth of the attachment, and of the loss, seemed to be symbolized in this simple gesture. We can somehow imagine Avraham Avinu in similar light.

As for the other pole: Yitzhak’s marriage to Rivkah. I referred before to “Scenes from a Marriage”; but of course these are really scenes from two different marriages—of Abraham and Sarah, and of Yitzhak and Rivkah. And yet, in one of the psychologically strangest, possibly most strikingly Freudian verse in the entire Torah, we read: “And Isaac brought her [Rebecca] to the tent, [of] Sarah his mother, and Isaac was comforted after his mother” (24:67). Rashi, following the midrash in Bereshit Rabbah (60.16) elaborating on the absence of the conjuctive shel (“of”) between the words “tent” and “Sarah his mother,” reads the verse, “and be brought her to the tent, [and she was] Sarah his mother.” True, he immediately qualifies this, saying that it is to be understood metaphorically: i.e., that she resembled, or assumed, the persona of Sarah, by her actions and by the blessing brought about by her presence in the tent. Nevertheless, the straightforward sense of the midrash is that in some metaphysical or symbolic sense Rebekah actually became Sarah. Isaac’s marriage is not painted in romantic, but primarily in familial colors. The son is dependent upon a maternal figure—even if his own wife. As if, already from the beginning, he was calling her “imma” or “mother,” liked old married couples. If you will (and this is strongly supported by the literal meaning of the verse itself), the wife and the mother in some sense play the same psychological role in a man’s life: most basically, of building a home in which to live. Ishto, zo beito (“His wife is his home”).

One can imagine Abraham and Isaac, during the period following Sarah’s death, living in the manner of bachelors—without the grace and invitingness provided by the proverbial woman’s touch. Busy with their round of masculine pursuits—whether roughly physical, subduing the stubborn intransigence of the material world, or lost in abstract intellectual endeavors, like the withdrawn, contemplative Torah scholar or mystic in which light Isaac is portrayed— they see the tent, the home, as merely a place in which to put their head for the night. Until Rebecca comes, and once again there is a candle burning from Sabbath eve to Sabbath eve, symbolizing domesticity and warmth; a cloud is spread over the tent—symbolizing the Divine presence; the doors are open wide in all four directions, signaling hospitality and a home to the wayfarer; and, finally, there is blessing in the dough.

I am not advocating here a simplistic return to Home and Hearth, or the “three K’s” (Kirche, kuche und kinder) associated with women’s provenance in Germanic culture, but to something deeper. There often seems a tent-like, nomadic aspect to modern culture. Today’s urban centers are so work-oriented, for both men and women, that there seems an absence of the sense of the home as a serious center, as a focus for life energy. This is of course diametrically opposed to the Judaic scale of values.

“And Isaac went out to meditate in the field” (Gen 24:63)

We see here the figure of Isaac as an intensely introverted, inwardly-turning man, going out to meditate in the field towards evening. There is a sense of an inactive, quiet figure; given to long, lonely walks, not overly involved in matters of this world. The Sages use this verse to infer that Yitzhak introduced Minhah, the Afternoon Prayer—perhaps significantly so. Unlike Abraham, who instituted Shaharit —“and Abraham rose early in the morning”— a busy individual, who has plenty to do in the course of a day after davening; Isaac is a dreamy contemplative, whom we can imagine spending long hours spent alone in thought and reflection.

An Orientalist at Bar-Ilan University, Dr. Yosef Drori, has suggested that this passage does not refer to systematic meditation or prayer, or even to “going after his thoughts.” Rather, it was a kind of opening up without any predetermined purpose; walking about in nature to simply feel the presence of God, like the Sufist or other Quietists. (This is apparently suggested by the Arabic root sah). Abraham and Jacob are familiar human types: Abraham is portrayed, at least in the well-known midrashic image, as the warm, generous hevra’man, concerned about others, caring about their needs, drawing them near, teaching—while constantly focused, on another level of consciousness, on a clear, intimate sense of God’s presence. Jacob is the doer, a somewhat morally ambiguous figure, who undergoes a complex zig-zag path of personal growth and problematic interpersonal encounters in all kinds of situations; an ambitious person, always on the move. Isaac, by contrast, is more difficult—and perhaps there is even something frightening, disturbing in him to other people. He is involved in delving deeply into himself—the symbolism of the wells. His stillness and inwardness is disturbing and hard to comprehend—yet it is the very heart, the very stuff and substance, of his experience.

Who Was Yitzhak? A Personal Midrash

“And Isaac had come from Be’er-lahai-ro’i, and was dwelling in the Negev. And Isaac went out to meditate in the field towards evening, and he lifted up his eyes and saw a caravan of camels coming….” [Gen 24:62-63]

In these verses we encounter Yitzhak for the first time since the Akedah. His presence is not noted at his mother’s funeral, nor is he at all involved when Abraham sends his servant messenger Eliezer on the long journey to “the old country” to find him a bride. Indeed, there are midrashim galore that try to figure out where he was during this period. One says that he had gone to study at the yeshivah of Shem and Eber to learn their ancient wisdom; another that he was in the Garden of Eden, healing from the wound inflicted on him by Abraham at the Akedah (but we don’t read about any wound there!); yet a third says that he was in fact slaughtered and burnt, and that his ashes were restored by miraculous heavenly dew. (On these and more, see Shalom Spiegel’s The Last Trial.) Then there are those who suggest (see Dov Elboim’s intriguing article, “Yitzhak, the Forgotten Patriarch” in Akdamot 9 [2000], 131-141) that he in fact become a kind of disbeliever, the great rebel against God, and that the great silence regarding his life, compared to the elaborate, detailed descriptions of the doings of Abraham and Jacob, was because he was in fact “the bad son.”

In an earlier discussion (HY I: Hayyei Sarah; cf. Toldot & Vayetsei), we characterized Isaac as a weak, withdrawn, distant, to all purposes ineffectual figure. But was he so? How are we to understand him:? I envision him as a deeply introspective, brooding figure lost in an inner world of his own. He made contact with the world around him only with great difficulty. His wife Rivkah was clearly the dominant figure in the everyday life of the household, and in understanding the dynamics of the interaction between the two so different brothers; she also sized up far more accurately the women Esau chose for himself.

Isaac’s life was shaped by the trauma of the Akedah. A well-known midrash explains that he became blind in old age because the tears that the angels shed upon him at the time of the Binding. But more than that. He had undergone an experience, before which everything else that came before or since paled. The business of life—sowing and reaping, marriage and raising children, everyday interaction with neighbors and friends—must have seemed to him petty and insignificant.

Abraham discovered God. He is also depicted in his formative years as a loner, who spent long hours in contemplation, pondering the secrets of the universe, wondering the world itself could exist if there were nothing beyond the idols of wood and stone that his father made—until he arrived at knowledge of the one God. But Isaac‘s experience was on a different level. The question that confronted him was not: what is the nature of God? But: what is the nature of the religious man? This was the essence of the Akedah, which presented a powerful, overwhelming vision of life totally devoted to God; that life itself is unimportant compared to the singular imperative of total dedication to God. And when that was halted in mid-stroke, so to speak, when Abraham was told to stay his hand and not slaughter him—how was he to go on living thereafter?

In the above verses we encounter Isaac coming home, returning from a place whose name might be translated “the well where my seer liveth” or “the well where the living One sees.” The very first thing that he does when he returns, almost, is to go out to the field and to commune (presumably, with God). The Sages cite this verse to infer that Yitzhak introduced Minhah, the Afternoon Prayer. Unlike Abraham, who instituted Shaharit —“and Abraham rose early in the morning”— a busy individual, who has plenty to do in the course of a day after davening; Isaac is a dreamy contemplative, whom we can imagine spending long hours spent alone in thought and reflection.

Dr. Yosef Drori, an Orientalist at Bar-Ilan University, suggests that this passage does not refer to systematic meditation or prayer, or even to “going after his thoughts,” but was a kind of opening up without any predetermined purpose; walking about in nature to simply feel the presence of God, like the Sufist or other Quietists. (This is apparently suggested by the Arabic root sah).

But there is more to it than that. I see Yitzhak as the prototypic mystic, whose entire life was devoted to meditation, introspection, perhaps brooding—to attempting to figure out the great riddle of his own life. I imagine him as someone who has had a profoundly transformative experience of inner vision, that totally changed his subsequent perspective on life. Contemporary analogies might be someone who has taken LSD, and had an overwhelming mystical vision; the political radical who has made certain decisions that change the course of his entire life: e.g., to go to jail for ones convictions (a Natan Sharansky, or a ‘60’s draft resister); or one who has entered into the world of outcasts, of those considered the dregs of society—perhaps forging a close friendship with a criminal or a prostitute—whom he has come to know in their complex humanity, forever casting aside conventional judgments. How does such a one ever find his way back to “normal” life? Surely, he will seem to others as “strange,” “odd,” decidedly not a regular member of society.