Dvar Torah on Parshat Chayei Sarah

Chaye Sarah (the Life of Sarah), is essentially about the death of Abraham's wife, her burial, and the search for a wife for her son, Isaac. The Torah does not elaborate on the cause of her death - she was, after all, 127 years old - but the Rabbis notice the fact that her demise comes immediately after the story of the Binding of Isaac, in which Sarah's husband Abraham almost sacrifices their son, only to be stopped at the last moment by divine intervention. The Rabbis see a connection, and tell us that the Akedah - the binding of Isaac - was actually what killed Sarah. The full Rabbinic story appears in a number of variations, and I'd like to look at the one in Midrashic work Pirkei d'Rebbe Eliezer. It goes like this: "When Abraham left Mt. Moriah [after the binding of Isaac] Satan was upset, having not achieved his desire of preventing Abraham from offering up his son. What did he do? He went and said to Sarah, hey, Sarah, haven't you heard what's going on in the world? She said to him, no. He said to her, your old man took the boy Isaac and offered him as a sacrifice, and the boy is weeping and moaning, for he can not be saved. Immediately, she began to weep and moan...and her soul flew off and she died." Abraham then comes home and finds her dead, a tragic coda to an otherwise successful test of Abraham's and Isaac's faith. This midrashic elaboration of the Biblical text raises a number of questions. Was Abraham hiding the fact of the Akedah from his wife, and if so, why? Was he embarrassed of his decision to go along with God's demand, or did he doubt Sarah's commitment? Why exactly does the news kill her? Was her faith, in fact, not as strong as Abraham's? Should her reaction be understood in a classically pre-feminist way, that she was simply weaker than Abraham, and therefore unable to face the unbelievably difficult and strange demand of the sacrifice of Isaac? Or is her death perhaps something other than a simple lack of fortitude? Five years ago, in November, 2003, I wrote a piece on this parsha which saw Sarah's death as a conscious act of protest, a statement to God about the limits of what we, as human beings, are willing to suffer. Unlike Abraham, who accepted, and actually seems to embrace the commandment to sacrifice Isaac, Sarah's death is actually a rebellion, a walking away from a God who is so demanding, so unreasonable, so difficult to serve. This year, my attention was drawn to one element of the story, Satan's opening question to Sarah: "Haven't you heard what's going on in the world?" This strange preface to his report of the binding of Isaac places the Akedah in "the world" and takes Sarah out of it. As a modest woman, usually found in her tent, this is not strange; traditional women are not "in the world", they are at home, in the tent, in the kitchen. But, perhaps, there is more to this "in the world" than that. Perhaps it is "the world" where the problem lies, it is "the world" from which Sarah, in fact, removes herself, by dying. Satan, by placing the Akedah "in the world", teaches us that the Akedah is not only an act demanded by a jealous God - it is the way of the world. It is not exactly God who asks terrible things of us, who asks fathers to sacrifice sons for ideals, beliefs, truths - it is the world, life itself, that often places impossible choices before us. (I would note that one of the names of God is Hamakom, 'the place', traditionally understood as 'the place of the world'. This approach sees God not so much as a discreet being, but as the very universe itself, or, rather, that which bring the universe into existence and sustains it, a very Maimonidean way of seeing God, one which is very far from a personalized, anthropomorphic view of him, and which makes it extraordinarily hard to discuss or relate to God directly, and also makes things that happen to us 'less personal'.) If this is the case, then, though one can certainly respect Sarah's protest against the cruel world about which Satan informs her, one also sees more clearly that Sarah's death is, in fact, a victory for Satan, for she has proven unable to live up to the demands which a sometimes cruel world places upon us. Satan knows that it is the world, rather than a jealous God, which generates tragic and impossible challenges for us all, and he dares Sarah to face up to them, as her husband did. Her death, though certainly containing a measure of nobility, is a failure to rise to that challenge, a failure to accept, live in, and embrace a world in which it sometimes seems impossible to live.