DRASH – CHAYEI SARAH

Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins OAM

Rabbi Emeritus - Emanuel Synagogue

Discussing Chayei Sarah: land, nation and its meaning for our time

We live in traumatic and perhaps cataclysmic times, with technological development affecting every aspect of our lives, one of them being human discourse itself.  Everyone speaks about how social media, with its algorithmic information loops, stirs outrage and reinforces solipsistic thinking; this is extremely dangerous as we encounter global threats to human existence, from climate change to the development of AI. The Jewish people, our Jewish community, suffers from this breakdown in communication, as so many of us retreat into our silos, condemning, excluding or refusing to listen to and speak with those with whom we disagree. This creates even more danger for us, for one of the great flash points of world conflict centres on our ancient homeland, the land of Israel itself.  In this week’s parashah, Chayei Sarah, we come to the conclusion of our first section of our ancestral story, the one in which we first read two weeks ago, that the land is promised to Avraham and Sarah and their descendants, meaning us who tell the story.  How we will interpret the significance of this story in contemporary political reality, in light of thousands of years of unfolding history and story-telling since that time?

Israeli author Micah Goodman, who describes himself as a public intellectual who studies and researches the evolution of ideas and their impact on political and social reality has commented on the need to revive the form of Talmudic argumentation. In the Autumn 2023 edition of Sapir, “a quarterly journal of ideas for a thriving Jewish future”, Goodman writes: “Jewish tradition has always sanctified study and scholarship. And the book at the heart of the Jewish intellectual tradition is the Talmud. The Talmud is not a book of Halakhah, or Jewish religious law.  If you open a Talmud, you won’t find laws; you will find arguments about laws.  First the Talmud presents the position of a certain rabbi or group of rabbis; then it presents the contrary position, from a different rabbi or group; then it presents arguments supporting the first position and those supporting the latter.  For the most part, the Talmud does not include any resolution of these arguments; it records only the arguments themselves.”  He also notes that the way we study Talmud is by continuing to argue over the meaning of the arguments.  Arguments, as the Oxford Dictionary reminds us, are reasoned conversations requiring us to listen to the other, not retreat into our echo chamber.

In parashah Lech-Lecha, Avram and Sarai, as first known, were told “to go forth…to the land that I will show you; there I will make of you a great nation.” (Gn. 12:1-2).  The brit – the covenant or promise – that God makes with them indicates that the boundaries of that land extend from Egypt to the river Euphrates, where ten nations (as named in Gn. 15:19-20) live at the time.  The saga of the unfolding chapters leading to this week’s denouement establish that Isaac will be the rightful heir of Avraham and Sarah, who have been thus renamed once in the Promised Land.  If the promise at the beginning of their journey has been to be a “nation in the land”, Chayei Sarah concretises that promise in its opening story with Avraham’s purchase of a burial site for Sarah in Hebron – “the field with its cave and all the trees anywhere within the confines of that field passed to Avraham as his possession.” (Gn. 23: 17-18).  Avraham then finds a wife for Isaac, Rebekkah, and the covenantal promise passes to them and their descendants, down to us who still tell this story, from generation to generation, “l’dor v’dor.”  The parashah concludes with the burial of Avraham in that same cave in Hebron, where the Torah later tells us that Isaac and Rebekkah, Jacob and Rachel were also buried.  And so, through this story, we have laid claim to the land.

But in these times of great conflict, how are we to interpret this story, what is its significance and meaning in our contemporary times? Certainly, it establishes the Promised Land, the Holy Land, as our ancestral homeland, with which our people have had deep, spiritual connection for thousands of years.  However, when we read the story not in isolation, but in context of the entire bible followed by thousands of years of exile adumbrated by Talmudic tradition, we must ask ourselves some challenging questions.  Given we have not had sovereignty over this land for most of our thousands of years of storytelling and for the most part we have lived contemporaneously with other nations and ethnicities in this land over that time, inevitably, we will have arguments over the answers to the pressing and perplexing questions of sovereignty, borders and the rights of other nations and peoples among whom we live.

Reading Chayei Sarah in the light (and shadow) of contemporary political Zionism, we must ensure that no one in our community is silenced as we argue over the meaning of our historical connection with and our sovereignty over the land, and how this relates to essential Torah values of justice, compassion and the dignity of every human being, around which Jews ideally build our lives, relationships and communities.  And let us always remember that the original promise to Avraham and Sarah was so that we “shall be a blessing.” (Gn.12:2).