Questions for the Shabbat Table: Chayei Sarah
A printable study booklet: one question per page, the Rav’s answer, its source, and a lesson to discuss as a family.
Two parashiyot (weekly Torah portions) bear the word “life” in their titles even though they tell of a passing: that of Sarah and that of Yaakov. This lecture begins from that paradox and asks what it means, in Judaism, to buy a grave at the very moment one takes possession of a promised land. Rav Raphaël Benizri follows step by step the purchase of the Me’arat HaMakhpelah (the Cave of Makhpelah) from Efron, and shows why Avraham refuses a field and insists on a cave. From this he draws a reading of the cemetery as a title deed, and of the feminine as that which grounds the continuity of the generations.
The starting point is a principle: the righteous, even in death, are called living, while those for whom time is dead are called dead even in their lifetime. From there the Rav describes existence as a duplex whose upper floor is the World to Come, and death as an eclipse necessary for climbing to a higher rung. The foundation of faith, he specifies, is not so much the Garden of Eden as the resurrection of the dead.
The lecture then moves to what immediately precedes Sarah’s death in the text — the birth of Rivkah, announced right after the binding of Yitzchak — and on to the bargaining with Efron, Avraham’s long-ago discovery of the cave, the reading of Sarah’s hundred and twenty-seven years, and finally Yitzchak’s silent mourning and the consolation he finds when Rivkah enters his mother’s tent. The question of funerals — an honor paid to the departed, or to the living? — runs through the final part.
What this lecture teaches
The righteous, even in their death, are called living. This principle explains why the two portions that speak of the passing of a righteous person are titled, one “the life of Sarah,” the other “and Yaakov lived.” Conversely, those for whom time is dead are called dead even while they are still alive. The title, then, does not conceal the content: it corrects it. Yaakov lives still, and that is what the Torah insists on telling us.
We live in a duplex. In this world we occupy the lower floor, and the upper floor is the World to Come; we go back and forth between the two. Which amounts to saying that we never truly die. Death is an eclipse, necessary and indispensable for climbing to another rung of life and passing to another vision of the world. The principle of faith is not so much that of the Garden of Eden as that of the resurrection: the passage through death is only a decomposition, like that of the seed in the soil.
Three places in the Land of Israel were bought, not received. The Temple Mount, paid for to its owner; the Cave of Makhpelah in Hevron, paid for to Efron; and Shechem, acquired by Yaakov. These places were not given to us: they were acquired with our own money. The Rav notes that, regrettably, two of these possessions have been given up, even though they are ours by the most incontestable title there is.
Taking possession of the land begins with a cemetery. The fact is striking, but the Hebrew word immediately corrects it: the cemetery is called Beit HaChayim, the house of life, the house of the living. There is here a closeness of impurity and holiness, a presence of the soul hovering over the graves. The true taking-possession of a land is the place where we have buried our bones, the body that carried the values we brought to light — for without that body we could have applied nothing, accomplished nothing. It is that place which constitutes our title deed.
Avraham refuses a field because a field can be seized. Efron wanted to give him the field; but an agricultural field can be taken from him at any moment, nationalized, have its status changed, be set aside for future construction. A cemetery cannot: one cannot play with it, one cannot change its status. It remains the property of all who are buried there, and those who buried their loved ones there claim their share in it, because that is where their essence and their origins lie. That is why Avraham insists on the cave, and pays.
It is through the woman that this acquisition is made. The woman is regarded as the ground of the universe, because it is she who gives life, she who brings forth, she who ensures the continuity of the generations. It therefore had to be for Sarah that the land was bought. Sarah is also the first to laugh in the Bible — an inner laughter, a laughter that almost mocks the situation in which she finds herself, bearing a child at ninety. It is not that she does not believe: the One who created the world can surely work miracles.
The miracle performed for Sarah was not performed for her alone. It is taught that Milkah, too, had a child at ninety, and that this child is Rivkah’s forebear. When the Creator performs a miracle, He extends its benefit to all the women who were hoping and anxiously waiting. That is why the text, before recounting Sarah’s death, briefly mentions this birth in the family that remained in Mesopotamia. The link between the two passages is not accidental.
Every tragedy carries within it a new sun. After the binding, Avraham is filled with remorse: Yitzchak is thirty-seven and he has not sought a wife for him; he could have had descendants before he was asked to bring him up on the altar. The answer the Rav reads in the text is that this trial opened a new path — the sun rises and the sun sets, and one sun is extinguished only when the rising of the next is already provided for. One must not, therefore, speak of irreplaceable people, nor settle into endless mourning. Here the new sun is the birth of Rivkah.
The three sons of Terach embody three relationships to the land. Avraham is the only one who wants a land for his descendants, because a people without a land is uprooted, exposed to every wind. Nachor leans toward a more cosmopolitan outlook, and he himself ends up an Aramean, having lost his identity as an Ivri (a Hebrew). The Rav recalls that one school of thought held that the vocation of the Jewish people was to spread the word of G-d through exile, the land then holding only a secondary place, and that in this reading exile took on a markedly positive meaning. Haran, for his part, threw himself into the furnace and did not come out, whereas Avraham came out of it.
The woman must come; the son must not go. When Eliezer asks what he should do if the woman refuses to follow him — may Yitzchak go to her? — Avraham makes him swear not to take his son back there. Rivkah must change course and regard Israel as essential to pursuing Avraham’s goals. And that is what happens: she is aware of it, and she joins Yitzchak. At the root of their union lies, first of all, the will to build one’s home in Israel.
The patriarchs knew one another; the matriarchs never did. Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov lived during one another’s lifetimes. Rivkah never knew Sarah; Rachel and Leah never knew Rivkah. One may smile at this — they had no mother-in-law problems — but the essential reason lies elsewhere: the woman is malkhut, kingship; she is the queen of the home, and there cannot be two queens in one home. As long as Sarah is there, there is no room for Rivkah. One can govern in cohabitation, but kingship is a final end and cannot be shared.
Not everyone counts the same years, depending on what they have lived. The Rav relates the story of a rabbi invited to fill a vacant post, who first asks to see the cemetery and is astonished at the ages inscribed on the tombstones: five years, twelve years, three years. It is explained to him that when a person dies, an accounting is made and the time they truly devoted to the community is inscribed, the other days being days of absence. The anecdote is a mirror: to examine the course of one’s life is to measure how much dead time it contains, and how often one has risen to the level of one’s duties.
Avraham came with his days. The text says of him that he was old, “come into days”: he lost not a single day, he carried them with him. This is the hallmark of those who rest in the Makhpelah — those who lived doubly all their lives, whose existence was neither torn nor truncated. Rashi likewise emphasizes that Sarah, at a hundred and twenty-seven, had the virtue and freshness of spirit of her twenties, and at twenty the beauty and grace of a child of seven. The values and dimensions are obviously not the same, but nothing jars in that life’s course: no tear, no break. This is what the verse means when it says that G-d knows the days of the wholehearted — those whose faith is always equal to itself.
The Makhpelah is the cemetery of couples. The first to be buried there was Adam with his wife, that first couple who were the foundation of humanity and who bore within them the image of G-d. The place holds perfect couples, and the Rav reads in its name the person capable of folding himself in two to answer the needs of the other, the call of the other. He also notes that the numerical value of the word Makhpelah is one hundred seventy-five, the number of Avraham’s years.
Avraham discovered the cave while chasing a lamb. He had opened his home to guests and decided to slaughter a lamb in their honor; the animal ran off, he ran after it and caught up with it in the Makhpelah. That is how he discovered where this place was. What this means is that it was Avraham’s openness to others, his kindness, that gave this place its own value. Its holiness comes from there, and our Sages say that in this cave lies the cornerstone of ownership of the Land of Israel.
Yitzchak does not weep — and that is the sign of trauma. Avraham eulogizes his wife and weeps for her, in due proportion; of Yitzchak we know nothing, we do not see him mourning his mother. This is because he is traumatized by her passing, whose cause we know: the Satan took on Yitzchak’s appearance and came to tell Sarah that his father had nearly slaughtered him, and a mother’s heart could not bear it. Yitzchak will recover from this only on the day he finds Rivkah and brings her into his mother’s tent.
The tent is rekindled with Rivkah. The light that Sarah used to kindle from Shabbat to Shabbat shines again, a cloud of holiness returns to the tent, and the dough regains the form it had under Sarah’s hands. It is then that the text says Yitzchak was comforted. He who had given up attaching himself to anything, so severe had he become, puts an end to this and allows himself to be comforted. Consolation does not come from a speech; it comes from a home taken up again.
Is a funeral for the dead or for the living? Both, the Rav answers. For the living, because one must tell oneself that this person who was here two hours ago with all their energy has become inert matter, and that we must take up the torch: they must be held up as an example. For the departed too, because we do not always realize the reach of a life within a family and a community, what that person fought for and what they achieved. It is hard to see, for we only ever have samples, never the whole picture. Here lies Avraham’s lesson: to eulogize his wife before burying her.
Full transcript of the lecture
The subject we are going to address this evening is Chayei Sarah, “the life of Sarah.” In reality, it concerns the passing of Sarah, the funeral of Sarah — but we have a principle: tzaddikim be-mitatam keruyim chayim, the righteous, even in their death, are called living, whereas the resha’im, the wicked — the unbelievers, those for whom time is dead — are called metim, dead, departed, even in their lifetime. That is why the two portions that speak of the passing of the righteous are Chayei Sarah and Vayechi — Va-yechi Yaakov be-eretz Mitzrayim, “And Yaakov lived in the land of Egypt.” They open with, they bear as their title, “the life of Sarah,” when what they are really about is the passing of Sarah and the passing of Yaakov. But not Yaakov: Yaakov lives still, Yaakov lives still.
We are called to live in this world as in a duplex or a penthouse, are we not? In this world we occupy the lower floor, and we have the upper floor, and the upper floor is the Olam HaBa (the World to Come). So we go back and forth between the future world and the world here below, which means that in reality we never die. Death is quite simply an eclipse. It is a necessary eclipse, indispensable for climbing to another rung of life, for passing to another vision of the world. And so the principle of faith in Judaism is not so much that of the Garden of Eden; the principle, the foundation of faith, is the resurrection, the phenomenon of the resurrection of the dead.
The phenomenon of resurrection means that we do not die; we are called to live again. The passage through death is only a decomposition of one’s being, like the decomposition of the seed in the soil in order to reach another life. And that is why, you see, this city is the one chosen first for taking charge of — for taking possession of — the Land of Israel. You know that there are three places in Israel that we had to pay for with our own money. We bought them. We bought the Temple Mount, and we paid for it to Aravnah the Jebusite — Aravnah was a Jebusite. We paid for the Cave of Makhpelah to Efron; we paid Efron for it. And the third, which was bought by Yaakov, is Shechem, the city of Shechem.
It so happens that, regrettably, we have given up two of these possessions — but these possessions are ours. They were not given to us; we acquired them with our own money. What matters here, though, is the fact that the taking of the land — the taking possession of the land — begins, one might say, with a cemetery. But no: in Hebrew a cemetery is called Beit HaChayim, the house of life, the house of the living. In a Beit HaChayim there is a closeness of impurity and holiness. There is a presence of spiritual life, like a presence of the soul hovering over the graves. And so, in reality, the true taking-possession of the land is the place where we have, I would say, buried our body, our bones — the being that carried the values we brought to light. For in reality, without that body, we could not have applied anything, brought anything to light.
So the land — the house of the living, which is the house of those who have been eclipsed, who have departed — that is our title deed to the land that was promised to us. Yes: it is the kinyan (the act of acquisition). It is the kinyan. And Efron, as his name indicates — from the word for dust — does not understand. For him, it is a matter of an agricultural field — something that in the end can be seized, transformed later on, or set aside for future construction. But no: a cemetery is a property that one cannot play with like farmland and whose status one cannot change. The cemetery remains the property of all who are laid in it, and those who have buried their loved ones there claim their share in that cemetery, because it is there, where they buried them, that their loved ones lie — their essence, their origins.
It is there that they can truly trace back their family tree. Hevron means “joined,” “bound together” — from chaver. It is the meeting point between spirit and matter, body and soul. That is why the Torah gave primary importance to this acquisition — and through whom? Through the woman. The woman is regarded as karka olam, as the ground of the universe. Why? Because it is she who gives life, because it is she who brings forth, because it is she who ensures the continuity of the generations. So it had to be Sarah — Sarah, Sarah — the Mona Lisa of the Bible, if you like, in my view — because it is she who left her mark with her first smile: va-titzchak Sarah be-kirbah, “and Sarah laughed within herself.” Sarah is the first woman who laughs — an inner laughter, a laughter that, at the very limit, mocks the situation in which she finds herself: at the age of ninety, bringing a child into the world. She does believe it; it is not that she does not believe — the One who created the world can surely work miracles. Moreover, it was not only Sarah who benefited from these miracles. We are told that Milkah, too, had a child at the age of ninety, just like Sarah, and that child is Rivkah’s forebear — Rivkah too came of a birth at the age of ninety — because when G-d performed the miracle, He extended its benefit to all those who had been hoping, or anxiously waiting for a child, or hoping to have one. That is in fact why, before relating the death of Sarah, the text briefly tells us — acharei ha-devarim ha-eleh, “after these things,” that is, after the event, at thirty-seven, when Avraham was filled with remorse…
“Why did I leave my child until the age of thirty-seven without seeking a wife for him? He would have had children; then, when I was asked to bring him up on the altar of G-d, at least he would have had descendants.” But that is not what happened. And to this the answer is: no — this trial you have passed through has opened a new path. For u-va ha-shemesh, “and the sun sets” — one must not be alarmed by the tragedies one lives through. Every tragedy carries within it a new sun. And the Holy One, blessed be He, permits Himself to extinguish one sun only when He has already provided for the rising, the dawn, of a new star, of a new event. This is borne out throughout history. So one must not speak of irreplaceable people, nor sink into endless mourning for those who leave us.
There is always something else, a new sun being prepared. And here, this new sun is the birth of Rivkah — the birth of Rivkah, who is the daughter of Betuel; Betuel is the son of Nachor. You know that there were three — Avraham had two brothers. And when Terach took the first steps of the journey toward the land of Canaan — for, whether we like it or not, to be sure of what we build, of what we leave behind, one always needs a portion of land. A people without a land is uprooted; it is exposed to every wind, whereas when it has a land, it is rooted. Of course, this is a right-wing theory; the left does not attach importance to land.
Why? Because for the left, land can be the source of moral rot within it, of divisions within society, and of inequalities — it deepens still further the process of inequality among the members of a people. And therefore, therefore, they want no country, they want no nation; the universe belongs to everyone, and what matters is to put the emphasis on the social side, the social struggle among people. And Nachor, Avraham’s brother, somewhat belongs to that tendency. Avraham is the only one who wants a land for his descendants. Nachor has a somewhat cosmopolitan tendency. And Haran is for a people spread somewhat throughout the world, spreading faith in G-d across the world. Rabbi Shimshon […], too, thought that the vocation of the Jewish people was, through exile, to spread the word of G-d, so that the land held an ancillary, secondary position relative to the destiny of the people of Israel; galut, exile, had a far more pronounced positive meaning. Well, it is a fact that Haran was the victim of a shoah, a holocaust — Haran was consumed: he threw himself into a blazing furnace and did not come out of it. Avraham came out of it, because he was determined at all costs […] to go all the way. And Nachor, Avraham’s third brother, who was somewhat in favor of cohabitation […], in the end became an Aramean — Lavan ha-Arami — he became an Aramean, he lost his identity, he is no longer an Ivri. So the sun now rising is in the family of Nachor: it is Nachor’s little granddaughter, it is Rivkah, Rivkah who is the future wife of Yitzchak. And together — the union. That is also why, when Eliezer says, “If the woman does not wish to come with me, may Yitzchak go to her?”, Avraham tells him: “No — I make you swear not to bring my son back there.” The woman must absolutely change course and regard Israel as essential to the pursuit of Avraham’s goals, in accordance with the will of G-d.
And that is what happens. Rivkah is aware of this and joins Yitzchak. So, if you like, the underlying reason for the union of Rivkah and Yitzchak is, first of all, the will to build one’s home in Israel. That, then, is the short passage that precedes Chayei Sarah. And a perceptive remark has been made: Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov met one another, they knew one another. Yitzchak lived during his father Avraham’s lifetime, and Yaakov likewise during his grandfather’s lifetime. The matriarchs, on the other hand — none knew the other; they each belong to their own time. Rivkah does not know Sarah, Rachel does not know Rivkah, Leah does not know Rivkah. […] used to say that they had no problems with their mothers-in-law, because they never knew them.
But the essential reason, the essential reason, is that the woman is malkhut; the woman is kingship, the woman is the queen of the home. There cannot be two queens in one home; there is only one queen. Consequently, as long as Sarah is there, there is no room for Rivkah. When Rivkah is there, there is no room either for Rachel or for Leah. And so on. […] It is Shabbat — […] rightly belonging to the feminine. So among the sefirot, gevurah (strength) can go with chesed (kindness), can coexist with kindness; kindness can coexist. But that is not the case with malkhut: malkhut is a final end, malkhut is a final end.
So now, Chayei Sarah: we understand that priority was given to this burial of Sarah — Sarah as the charter, the title deed to the Promised Land — which the marriage of Yitzchak and Rivkah will come to confirm. And here, of course, lies the meaning of the Me’arat HaMakhpelah. I said earlier that we live in a penthouse or a duplex, or in a room that opens onto another room, and for our Sages this is the image of the fact that man has a double life, a double life. It is this life that grows in Olam HaZeh (this world) and in Olam HaBa, or that restores to Olam HaZeh a value, a dimension of Olam HaBa, and somehow opens our view onto what the Garden of Eden must be. For the Garden of Eden is without a body — those are pure souls — […] up to the fiftieth degree. And there, ultimately, of course, there is no room for bodily needs.
Yet there are [bodily] needs. Now, only three people lived both in this Olam HaZeh and in the Olam HaBa. The story is told that a rabbi was once approached, let us say, to fill the post of spiritual leader of a community whose rabbi had just died. He came ahead to see for himself and was received by the gabbaim (the synagogue officers) and so on. He asked to see where the beit almin, the cemetery, was, to see whether everything there was surrounded with proper respect, whether there was no mixing. He goes, he walks along, and he sees on the tombstones: here lies So-and-so, who lived five years; beside her, So-and-so, who lived twelve years; another who lived three years.
He said, “What is this?” They told him: “At the end of life, when a person dies, we draw up their account: how much time they devoted to the community, what they gave, what they lived. And according to that we determine what the sum of their days actually is — because on the other days they were absent, they were not living within our community. That is how it is.” And indeed, indeed, when we have to examine the course of our own life — how much dead time there is in it, how many times we have truly risen to the level of our duty’s demands — that is a problem, it is a real problem. So the Torah tells us the distinctive trait of the Avot and the Imahot (the patriarchs and matriarchs), those who lived — those buried — in the Me’arat HaMakhpelah: they lived doubly all their lives. They did not lose any days; they carried their days with them, like Avraham, ba ba-yamim (“come into days”), and they were blessed with ba-kol, mi-kol, kol (“with everything, from everything, everything”).
Their life was not torn; their life was not amputated of a few weeks or a few months. It was whole. And that is the example for which Rashi points out that Sarah, who was a hundred and twenty-seven years old — bat esrim — was recognizable in her time as she had been, in virtue and freshness of spirit, at the age of twenty; and at the age of twenty, with the beauty and grace of a child of seven. Of course the values are not the same, the dimensions are not the same, but there is a development such that everything holds together and nothing jars within this course of life. There is no tear, there is no break. Yode’a Hashem yemei temimim: Hashem knows the days of the wholehearted — the temimim, the wholehearted, meaning those who carry a faith that is always equal to itself.
It is Sarah who gives us the proof, and it is on this account that Avraham bought the burial plot in the Me’arat HaMakhpelah — for the first to be buried in the Me’arat HaMakhpelah were Adam HaRishon (the first man) and his wife: the first couple, the one who was the foundation of humanity, who bore the image of G-d within him. The first couple — the Makhpelah of couples: it is the cemetery of couples, of perfect couples. And this title was recognized because man managed to fold himself in two, as throughout his life, to answer the needs of the other, the call of the other. And Makhpelah — the value of Makhpelah is 175, its numerical value. A hundred and seventy-five years was also the length of Avraham’s life.
And that is va-yigva, “he expired”: it means the limit — even when he reaches the limit, he is still alive. Va-yigva. And of Yaakov it was not said va-yamot, “and he died.” Of Yaakov it is not said; only va-yigva, va-yigva: he is not dead. And just as his descendants are alive, he too lives on with his descendants. The patriarchs and matriarchs buried in the Me’arat HaMakhpelah set the example of a harmonious life — not that it merely seemed so: it was perfect. This cave, this cavern, was discovered by Avraham when he opened his home to guests and decided to slaughter a lamb in their honor. And that lamb ran away, and he ran after it and caught up with it in the Me’arat HaMakhpelah. That is where he found, where he discovered, the location of this Me’arat HaMakhpelah.
What does this mean? That it was this openness of Avraham, his kindness toward others, that in fact gave that place its own value. And that is what makes its holiness. Our chakhamim (Sages) say that in this cave, in this grotto, lies the cornerstone of the State of Israel — of the ownership of the Land of Israel. And that is why Hevron remains to this day a nerve center — not only, I would say, of contemplation, but also of identity for the Jewish people, because the patriarchs are found there. Now, there was a whole open bargaining between Efron and Avraham over the acquisition of these properties. I have already said that Avraham did not want it to be as a sadeh, a field — a field that one owns.
He did not want to buy a field. Efron wanted to give him the sadeh, the field. But a field — he may want to take it back from him at any moment. He may want to nationalize it at any moment, and designate it for something else. Avraham says no: he wants the me’arah, the cave, the grotto. Because there is no… One cannot nationalize a cemetery. […] Indeed, [where] we have no respect for those who have departed, for the dead, people allow themselves to turn all those graves into fertilizer — sadly, when respect for man reaches its limits, its low limits; and that is what happens. But today it is a fact that Hevron is, for all religions, a place of spiritual renewal.
When, where, will the newlyweds, Rivkah and Yitzchak, meet? They will meet at the Me’arat HaMakhpelah. When Eliezer returns accompanied by Rivkah, he finds Yitzchak in the sadeh, in the field — which field? The field where his mother was buried. It is a fact that of Yitzchak’s grief we are told nothing at all. We do not see him mourning his mother. Va-yavo Avraham lispod le-Sarah ve-livkotah: Avraham comes to eulogize, to weep for the loss of his wife. Avraham weeps for Sarah. There is a small kaf [in ve-livkotah, “and to weep for her”]. She had indeed completed her life, fulfilled her life. There is nothing to add.
But the question has always been asked about funerals: are they for the dead or for the living? Is it an honor paid to the departed, or to those who remain, so that they be told: “You see, this person who was with us an hour ago, two hours ago, who had all their energy […], has now become inert matter — but know that to their credit there was this and that, and we must take up the torch”? Accordingly, one ought to hold them up somewhat as an example. But now, if we say it is yekara di-shekhivei — an honor to those we have lost — that too is true, because we do not always realize the reach of each person in the family, in the community: what they fought for, struggled for, and what they achieved in life. It is hard to see, because we only ever have samples; we do not have the view of a whole life. And that is a lesson Avraham gives us by eulogizing his wife before burying her, while weeping for her in due proportion. But Yitzchak — Yitzchak, we do not know, we do not know. In reality, Yitzchak is traumatized by her passing.
For we know very well what caused Sarah’s sudden death, given that she had not been told of the offering of Yitzchak. The Satan took on the appearance of Yitzchak and came to tell his mother that his father had nearly slaughtered him, and a mother’s heart could not bear it: she let out a cry of terror, and with that she died. Traumatized by that image, Yitzchak did not recover. He will recover on the day he finds Rivkah, his wife, and brings her — ushers her — into his mother’s tent. And there, we read, the light of Sarah, which she used to kindle from Shabbat to Shabbat, began to shine again.
A cloud of holiness returned to that tent. And the dough kneaded by Rivkah naturally took on the form of the dough blessed by Sarah’s hands. So we are told that it was at that moment that Yitzchak attached himself — he who had given up loving anything at all, so severe had he become — here he attaches himself to her, comes to love her, and is comforted for… [the recording breaks off here]
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