CHAYYEI SARAH
This parsha (Genesis 23 to 25:18) begins with Sarah’s death at or near the Alon Moreh, the teaching tree, in what is today Hevron. Abraham then purchases the family burial plot at Machpelah. The burial plot has become a pilgrimage place, particularly for women who are struggling with fertility. That’s fitting, given the struggles that both Sarah and Rebecca have with bearing children. The burial plot is only purchased after she dies. (23:3) Then we have an unusually extended story of how Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac from his homeland so that he doesn’t intermarry with the local Canaanites. He brings back Rebecca who literally falls off her camel when she first sees Isaac. (24:64) Abraham takes another wife, Keturah, and has six more children, none of whom inherit after he dies, though the text is a bit ambiguous (25:5-6). The lineage that matters in Genesis goes through Sarah. I discuss this more below. Abraham then dies and is buried by Isaac and Ishmael together, but not his children by Keturah. The parsha closes by listing the lineage of Ishmael and his death.
I want to discuss four topics.
Isaac’s practice of conversing in the field.
Myth and ritual
The significance of the lineage of Genesis going through Sarah.
Abraham’s life from the perspective of the heroic journey.
“And Isaac went out walking in the field toward evening.” (24:63) This single verse is the entire basis of Hitbodedut, the Nachman of Bratzlav practice of going alone into the more than human world and crying your heart out to the divine. Hitbodedut, it seems to me, is a fundamental practice of any kind of Judaism that seeks to deepen our connection to the more than human world. Nahman emphasized that it was best to do this out in the woods, to use your own words and not a prescribed text, to pray in the vernacular rather than in Hebrew because it was your native language, and to make lout noises and fully cry and scream. There’s an old story that an upscale stranger comes to visit Bratzlav and he hears this unholy din. He is a little spooked by it and asks his host what on earth is making that noise. His host answers, oh, that’s just Nachman’s followers out praying in the woods.
The verse is a bit hard to translate. You might well ask out Isaac walking in the fields turns into this full bodied wailing in the woods. Rashi, which is where you start when you are looking for the plain sense of a text, says that “lasooach” the verb in question, means to pour out in prayer. The same verb is used in Psalm 102:1 and translated as “supplications” “A prayer of the afflicted person when s/he swoons and pours forth her/his supplications before YHVH.” Others translate the verb as meditating, though I don’t know how they get there. The plain sense of the word is more like conversing, but maybe not just shooting the breeze, but more focused, like a discussion which is a sicha, same root. I offer this discussion of the verse, because I don’t think there’s one way to imitate Isaac, because, for all we know, he was just taking a walk or wanted to see how the grass was growing.
Do you have any kind of hitbodedut practice? If you don’t, start. Figure out what you can do consistently. If it is 15 minutes once a week, start there.
Myth and ritual. In our story, (24:65) Rebecca covers herself with a veil after she is told that who she sees is her intended. To this day, Jewish brides cover themselves in veils at their wedding; it has become a core part of the wedding ritual. Myths, as I use the term following Eliade, are stories of Gods, heroes or herorines, or revered ancestors. The myth here is this simple story of our revered ancestress covering her face (24:65).
Scholars debate at great length about the primacy of myth versus ritual. Does the myth (the story of Rebecca covering herself) create a template that the ritual follows? Alternatively, does the ritual action exist, and then we create a story to justify it? This argument seems hopeless to me. I tend to think that sometimes there are myths and then we translate them into ritual action, and sometimes there are ritual actions and we seek to explain how they originated. Myth and ritual are, to my mind, mutually reinforcing.
Why is this important? Because myth and ritual shape our world view and reinforce our sense of reality. Take the American myth of the rugged lone individual as expressed in the Horatio Alger myth, or the John Wayne character in the movie the Searchers. These stories reinforce, particularly for boys, the idea that they are supposed to go at it alone, that their success wholly depends upon themselves. Thus we get a society where there isn’t a commitment to a common good and you get rich idiots like Elon Musk or poor idiots like Ayn Rand who think that material success has nothing to do with other people. From this myth, we develop the whole idea of meritocracy based on narrow criteria that always favor the privileged and a whole host of rituals that reinforce that the privileged are rightly privileged and for the non privileged, it’s their own damn fault they haven’t made it.
On the other end, there’s the myth of Klal Yisrael, the idea of that all Jews are in it together. That’s true enough when we are faced with Hitler or Hamas, who are just interested in killing Jews, no matter what stripe. But the Jewish community has all sorts of internal disagreements which can become quite vehement. And yet, if the myth of Klal Yisrael as exemplified in the stories of the programs of Eastern Europe, the expulsion from different European countries, the Holocaust—if that is a guiding myth, then directly contrary to John Wayne, the community comes first.
End of rant.
I was married in a Jewish ritual and the veil was significant to me. Like so many of my ancestors, my bride wore a veil (but one in which I could be sure it was her, because of what happens later with Leah and Rachel) in imitation of our foremothers. It was a very concrete moment of belonging because my bride was doing the same thing that her foremother, centuries ago, had done. Food is another really tangible conveyer of meaning and inheritance. The feast of seven fishes at Christmas is another ritual comparable to marrying a bride who wears a veil that conveys a sense of belonging.
What, if anything, are ritual moments that create for you that sense of belonging? What myths have shaped your life?
The lineage of Genesis goes through Sarah. I owe this line of though to an interested but not totally persuasive book I’ve just read, Savina Teubal’s Sarah the Priestess. Teubal argues that there is a tension between the emerging patriarchy, where all that counts is the males and their male descendants, and an older tradition that is focused on descent through the matrilineal line. What’s the argument, why is it significant and how does it clarify the text? I’ll start with how this tension between changing systems explains some of the problems in the text. This examination will also let us look back some at Sarah’s life.
One key component of matrilineal vs patrilineal systems is where a newly married couple lives. Rebecca comes to where Isaac lives. That looks like a patrifocal orientation—meaning that the wives come to live where the men do. But, and this is a big but, Isaac is living in Hebron, his mother’s area, and not where Abraham is. Abraham, we are told at the end of Chapter 22 is living in Beer-Sheva. (That’s a distance of about 40 miles). Why is Isaac not living with his father but with his mother? In a patriarchal world, we’d expect an unmarried son to be living with his father and not his mother in the case of separation.
Second “Isaac brought her [Rebecca] to his mother Sarah’s tent, and she became his wife and he loved her.” (24:67) The tent is identified as Sarah’s tent, not Abraham’s or Isaac’s tent. In a patriarchal system, the property belongs to the males or the clan identified by its male leader. Yet here is Sarah, a married woman, with her own tent. And she passes this tent onto her own descendant. Now, she only has the one son and in many matrilineal societies, this would ordinarily mean that the property would be passed onto some female clanswoman or cousin. Isaac, in a completely matrilineal system would not need it because he would go and live with his wife. But we have something sort of in between here. Isaac inherits the tent from Sarah, his wife comes to live with him, but it is his mother’s tent, not his father’s.
The prominence of Sarah also explains why Isaac is the sole inheritor of Abraham. The sons and daughters of Abraham through Keturah don’t inherit anything. Why does Isaac have more status than they do? It might be because he’s the eldest—only Ishmael is actually the eldest son. This would give us an explanation of Sarah’s actions towards Ishmael. You’ll recall that Sarah has Abraham drive out Ishmael “because the son of this maid will not inherit with my son, with Isaac.” (21:10) and Abraham does this even though “the thing was very bad in Abraham’s eyes.” (21:11). So even though the property is Abraham’s not Sarah’s, the inheritance is through Sarah, not Abraham.
To me, this situation seems a kind of betwixt and between of a move from a more matrilineal system to a patrilineal system. That is, it is unclear where the female line is the one that counts and where the male line counts. Thus the text describes a system that is effectively in flux.
This being in flux between an older and an emerging new system should feel familiar to us. If in Abraham and Sarah’s time, the move was from something more matriarchal to the emerging patriarchy, in our time it is from a patriarchal system to something new. Further, there’s no guarantee we get there. The forces of reaction are strong; the Republicans just elected as speaker someone who believes that homosexual sex should be outlawed. Really.
Where are we, in your view, in this transition between systems? What are some of the opportunities and some of the dangers? Our ancestors moved from a position of at least more equality to a system of male dominance. How do we balance between male and female energies?
Abraham and the heroic journey. We now have the full arc of Abraham’s life and death. I want to look at the story of Abraham from the point of view of a heroic journey, using the threefold division of leaving home, liminality and return. This is the structure of rites of passage following Van Gennep’s work, adopted by Joseph Campbell and elaborated by such thinkers as Bill Plotkin and Victor Turner. I think that this structure or rhythm of this works as a way to understand the task of any initiate. That is, an initiate needs to leave home either literally or symbolically, discover something true and deep and transformational about themselves and then find a way to bring it to a beloved community.
LEAVING HOME.
Abraham’s journey begins with a clarion call: Get going from your ancestral home and everything you’ve known. It’s the opening verse of Chapter 12. This call is echoed in Chapter 22, the binding of Isaac. The akedah, as I argued last parsha, is a second initiation of Abraham.
The timing is interesting. The rhythm of initiations in indigenous societies usually happens at the cusp of adulthood. In more technologically developed societies such as ours, however, there’s also an opportunity for initiations in middle age—and indeed that’s when Jung thought it happened. Abraham is already a middle aged householder, with a wife and followers when he leaves Haran, and also a householder with a wife and two sons when he takes Isaac up the teaching mountain.
THE JOURNEY
After the call that starts Lech Lecha (12:1), Abram is immediately promised a great boon that his descendants will be a great nation (12:2), even though he has not yet been tested nor even done anything—he hasn’t even left home! (that happens in verse 4). As I said, I think leaving home can be symbolic in middle age, but in this case, he simply hasn’t done anything yet. Then in Chapter 22, even after the binding of Isaac, the great boon that he wins from his enormous trial of trusting the divine enough to be ready to sacrifice his son and heir is—exactly the same thing that was promised way back in 12:2, before he even left home. The logic of trials is that the greater the trial, the greater the reward if the initiate succeeds at the trial—but here there’s just no change in the boon or the treasure won, which is consistently the promise that his heirs will be a great nation.
Further, the purpose of the liminal period is to change the initiate through his/her adventures to win a boon (Campbell) or have a vision (Plotkin and many indigenous societies) to bring back to the community. What evidence is there in the text that Abram/Abraham has actually changed through all of his trials? Is Abraham at the end of Chapter 22 any different than Abram at the beginning of Chapter 12?
RETURN
I think the term “return” is a misnomer. From the journey of the initiate s/he comes back with a gift to a community. But, especially for us as moderns, I’m not at all convinced that the community to which we return need be the community from which we departed. In fact, the Biblical model is that our heroes (and I wish we had heroines as well about whom we had enough ancient text to tell stories) often don’t return home. We see Abraham doesn’t, and Joseph remains in Egypt, takes an Egyptian wife and doesn’t even settle his kin where he lives. Moses returns to Egypt, but not the palace that was his home, and then aims to create a community in Canaan, a place he has never been.
The better way to frame the return, in my view, is whether our hero/ine returns to some kind of beloved community to which they pledge their heart and their action, leaving aside the question of if it is the same community from which they departed.
The point of the return is to bring to the hero/ines old/new community a boon won during the liminal period. The boon promised to Abraham does not materialize in his lifetime. I know the text says he is wealthy and provides a few different stories about how he accumulated the riches (from Pharoah in Chapter 12), from being a successful general in Chapter 14), but the final act of his life has him as a sojourner in someone else’s land, needing to buy a field with a cave to create a burial place. Abraham’s relative powerlessness is also revealed in the stories of his interactions with the Pharoah and Abimelech. Mythically, while Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are our patriarchs, Joshua is the one who starts the conquest and settlement of the promised land. And then it’s not as if we actually became this great nation, not as if Abraham’s boon comes true.
What do we know of Abraham in the end? He is this individual who is truly blessed in his ability to be intimate with the divine. He has the chutzpah to argue with the divine to avert the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But how does his gift of being able to communicate with the divine transform his community? We hear literally nothing. As great as he is supposed to be, I can’t see a successful initiation.
In your hero/ine’s journey, have you symbolically left home and started exploring your own uniqueness? If so, what have you found? If you have not (fully) left home, what do you need to do to leave so that you can come back to somewhere?
QUESTIONS/PRACTICES
What, if anything, are ritual moments that create for you that sense of belonging? What myths have shaped your life?
Start some, any, kind of a practice of hitbodedut, of conversing with the divine in the field. If you do the practice, what kind of difference does it make?
Where are we, in your view, in this transition between systems? What are some of the opportunities and some of the dangers? Our ancestors moved from a position of at least more equality to a system of male dominance. How do we balance between male and female energies?
In your hero/ine’s journey, have you symbolically left home and started exploring your own uniqueness? If so, what have you found? If you have not (fully) left home, what do you need to do to leave so that you can come back to somewhere?
