Parashat Chayei Sarah
Genesis 23:1 – 25:18
November 10, 2012
I AM WOMAN; HEAR ME ROAR…..REALLY….IT’S BEEN THAT KIND OF WEEK. As a proud feminist, I was honored and delighted to be asked to lead this particular torah study on Sarah, matriarch of Jewish women.
This was the same torah portion that I did for my bat mitzvah, 40 years ago on November 11, 1972. So, this parashat has a particular significance for me, on many levels. It is fascinating to think about how the world of Jewish women looked to a young girl just turning thirteen vs. how it looks today to a (slightly) older woman with 40 years more experience.
As a young girl, I didn’t yet realize that women weren’t always treated equally, or that there were things some folks felt we couldn’t do or accomplish because we were women. I was very naïve about such things, and never questioned my parents and teachers who said I could be whatever I wanted to be, do whatever I wanted to do. I was wonderfully naïve about such things growing up. My focus on my torah portion wasn’t even on Sarah, but on Rebecca, who I thought was quite brave to leave her home and family to travel across the desert to meet a strange man and be his wife. What courage, I thought. What faith she must have had to say “I will go.” My older, more cynical eyes, now say, why ever not? What did she have to lose? She had an overbearing brother and an abusive father – and both happy to sell her off to the highest bidder. Of course she wanted to leave, how relieved she must have been to say, “I will go.”
This brings me to my question today; not of feminism per se, but of perspective. What a difference a few years, or a few decades, or a few millennium make. I wanted to talk about the matriarchs and their power; how women in the torah seem so strong and how they seem to “get it” so much easier than the men. But, the more I read, the less sense it made.
· Is this a story of transition, from one generation (Abraham/Sarah) to another (Isaac/Rebecca)?
· Is Sarah’s death linked to (the Akedah) Isaac’s close escape from death at Abraham’s hand on orders from God? Does Sarah die instead of Isaac, because God forms a covenant with him and for his seed after him? Or is she overcome with grief upon hearing (or dreaming) about what happened?
· Why were Abraham and Sarah in different places when she died? Had she left him?
· Why so much detail about where and how to bury Sarah? Why this particular piece of land? The chapter ends with Abraham’s death and burial in the same place. What if Abraham had died first? Would the story have turned out any differently?
· Is this just an elaborate plot device to set up a family plot for future generations? Or maybe this is all about property rights.
There is no shortage of commentary on this parashat. Much of it depends on the perspective you bring to it when you read the section. What do you want to believe? What do you want it to mean? So, being a true skeptic, another gift of 40 years of experience, I went back to the original text. What did it actually say, without interpretation or embellishment? Below is a surprisingly short summary of every mention of Sarai/Sarah in the book of Genesis.
· Chapter 11 – we are introduced to Abram’s wife Sarai and told she was barren.
· Chapter 12 – Abram took Sarai to Canaan, where he passed her off as his sister and she was taken into Pharaoh’s house. Then the Lord plagued Pharaoh, and they were released.
· Chapter 16 – Sarai gave Hagar to Abram to conceive a child, then dealt harshly with Hagar who ran away, and then was told by the angel of the Lord to go back to Sarai.
· Chapter 17 – Sarai’s name is changed to Sarah, and the Lord blesses her and promises she will bear a son at age 90 and be a mother of nations and establishes a covenant with her.
· Chapter 18 – the Lord sends 3 angels to tell Abraham and Sarah they will have a son; Sarah laughs and is admonished by God.
· Chapter 20 – Abraham and Sarah journey south, and again he passes Sarah off as his sister to Abimelech, with similar results as with the Pharaoh.
· Chapter 21 – Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, named Isaac. Sarah tells Abraham to cast out Ishmael so he will not inherit with her son.
· Chapter 23 – And the life of Sarah was a hundred and seven and twenty years, and she died in Hebron. Abraham came to weep for her, and then he buried her in the cave of the field of Machpelah in Canaan, where he was later buried as well.
One of the things I enjoy most about Holy Scrollers is the abundance of perspectives that we bring to any discussion. There are folks who are old and young; male and female; products of book-learning or the school of hard knocks; liberals and conservatives; artists and scholars.
So, what is your perspective? What does this Parashat, or even all of the above, tell us about Sarah’s life, about women in the Torah? And, when combined with the rest of this parashat about Rebecca (and Isaac), does this tell us any more about how Judaism is relevant to women, or how we “go forward in our faith”? Or, is it just an elaborate instruction manual?
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