Drash – Chayei Sarah

Rabbi Aviva Kippen

In our world, everything is instant news. Mobile phone footage is posted in real time to live feeds, media outlets pick up the stories. Recently South Melbourne’s biblically-named nursery, refused an Israeli applicant a job and the owner abused her for her nationality and hoped she would leave Australian shores soon. Headlined in the Jerusalem Post the same day, the story was carried extensively on social media. I was perplexed by the surname of the potential employer (that of my rabbi in Brussels in the 1980s) and the name of the business: Garden of Eden Nursery. Perhaps the biblical connection was not relevant to the creator of the marketing identity.

New York city elected its first Muslim Mayor. The irony in the Democrat candidate being endorsed by Bernie Sanders, accompanies fear for Zohran Mamdani’s religious positioning. He identifies the Gaza war as “genocide” and insists “Islamophobia” cannot be a weapon in fighting elections, he also declares himself against Antisemitism. While proposing to retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, he wants to dismantle the Strategic Response Group. Manhattan Central Synagogue’s Senior Rabbi Angela Buchdal engaged with her congregation on Mamdani’s appointment and preached firmly on her own position during the electoral buildup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hngs_NusJRo

These two examples make their impact because we see them though our own lenses, fears, experiences, and anxieties. We weigh the multiple versions of events against the interpretive positions of news commentators’ political, economic, ethnic, geographic and ideological standpoints. In other words, we are trained to be alert to bias and to test our own positions against those of others.

This week Parashat Chayei Sarah invites us to view two versions of the same event. Wikipedia usefully carries the two tellings of the story of how Abraham sent his servant to find a suitable wife for son Isaac, in side-by-side format so you can track the points of view. The first version is told as if by a “New York Times of Hebron” reporter of the day, having watched the interaction in person. The account is first-hand: Abraham said this at Machpelah, instructed this and that, the servant replied. The “camera” picks us the second location crew “Our Nahor correspondent on the ground/by the well in Aram-Nahara’im (Gen:24:10) is at the scene. Over to you …..” .

The second repetition is a testimony, a memoir of the servant’s role in attending to the family, of becoming trusted and of having carried out the mission.

Whether re-encountering a favourite bible story or grappling with current news, we are reminded to cautiously engage with the details from our informed and modern standpoints. We notice for ourselves what so many other commentators have noticed in the past and frame our reactions in modern terms, according to our ethos of inclusion and social justice. The world around us brings complex and challenging news.

Chayei Sarah reminds us to be attentive to the standpoint we invoke when dealing with confronting material. Let us be rigorous in realising the biases we carry, and unrelenting in pursuit of what is actual, what can be proven without doubt. Working within complexity does not automatically validate all points of view. Not all perspectives are truthful. Acceptance of plural positions does not in any way give endorsement to those which represent hatred or violence. Discernment is a subtle and invaluable filter. The courage to go on, as Abraham did, following the death of his beloved wife, depends on discerning a way forward. Let us be clear-eyed and not collude just because there are multiple points of view available in every story, every situation, every reportage of events past and present.