Chayei Sarah
This week we read about how Abraham buried his wife Sarah. Curiously much detail is given about how the contract for sale was negotiated. The Torah records how everything in the vicinity, even the trees in the surrounding fields, came into Abraham's possession. Why is this so?
The Torah is careful to point out that Abraham was not fatalistic about the future, even in grief. He believed in the future, and to him, the trees growing in the field around his wife's grave were worth caring for enough to be included in the sale.
Sometimes we are depressed by life. But just outside there is nature and evolving life, hope to live for after the hard and painful experiences. Abraham believed in this and marched on in the very hope that founded us as a nation.
The very next chapter serves to illustrate this positive outlook on life. Abraham asks his trusted servant Eliezer to travel to Haran to seek out a wife for Isaac.
Haran is very symbolic. Terach had moved his entire family out of Ur many more about 50 years earlier. They moved to Haran, a town with a similar name to one of Abraham's brothers, who had predeceased his father. Perhaps Terach believed in the maxim - meshaneh makom, meshaneh mazal - move town, change fortune. One branch of the family, Nachor's children stayed put. Abraham - or Abram as he was then called, could not settle.
An ancient midrashic source relates that Abraham was an astrologer who believed in God but felt governed by fate written in the stars. One day, on the first day of the seventh month, he was studying the stars to foretell the coming year's luck. Suddenly, he realised that if God had created everything, why should he worry himself about the future? No sooner he realised this. God told him to seek the future - but in a new way. Instead of feeling bound and limited by fate, Abraham was told to push boundaries beyond ordinary limits - and succeeded! He and his wife begat a child at an advanced age; he left his comfort zone and home territory, yet founded an independent nation.
The lesson is clear - Abraham rose above and beyond the mazal - predetermined fortune - to write his own story. We can do this too, as children of Abraham and realise new potential.
The return to Haran is perplexing. Why did Abraham marry his son to relatives who clearly fell short of his own standards? Is it purely because blood is thicker than water?
The story of how Eliezer spotted Rebecca as a future wife for Isaac teaches us about priorities. Arriving from Canaan, where locals argued forever about wells of water, he surmised that should a female water drawer show him kindness and water his entire caravan of camels this would be a sign of divine guidance to the right spouse for Isaac. Some commentaries wonder whether it may actually have been forbidden for him to divine the future in this way. Yet one thing is clear - Eliezer knew that for all Bethuel and Laban may be crooks, the family trait of kindness would shine through. There is no hopeful prayer to endow the indifferent with love and mercy; but each morning we pray to "straighten the crooked". Hence Abraham knew that for all that Canaan had upright people - such as Aner, Eshkol and Mamre, his covenanted friends, the ingrained nature of kindness and love is the seed that must be implanted at the very core of our beings, from which the possibility of honesty and integrity stems.
Rabbi Ariel Abel is Rabbi of Radlett United Synagogue and Director of the Judith Lady Montefiore College London Semicha Programme.
