Thoughts & Teachings
Rabbi Deborah Wechsler
Our parshah is framed by death. It begins with the death of Sarah at the age of 127 and ends with the death of Abraham at the age of 175 years. But the parshah deals not with the death of Sarah as its central narrative concerning the end of her life. Rather the Torah is most interested in the search for a burial plot for her.
After Sarah dies, Abraham sets out to find, not just a place to bury her, but what the Torah calls ahuzat kever, a burial plot that will serve his family and people for generations. The parsha recalls Abraham’s choice of a plot of land, the desire of its owner (Effron the Hittite) to give it to Abvraham as a gift, and Abraham’s insistence that a significant sum of money be handed over as the purchase price for Sarah’s kever. The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot (5:4) records that Abraham was tested with ten trials during his lifetime. Rabbi Yonah of Gerondi, the cousin of the Ramban, spelled out those trials in order. The binding of Isaac, which we read in the synagogue last week, is listed as the ninth test, and the burial of Sarah was listed as the tenth and most difficult trial to overcome.
On one hand it’s surprising. If we had to make the list ourselves, we would have probably specified the akeidah as the most difficult trial of Abraham’s life. But on the other hand, anyone who has buried a loved one knows that there is no more difficult test of our love, our strength and our faith than that. Abraham’s negotiating and arranging to buy the Cave of Machpelah for Sarah’s final resting place, and then burying her there, was the great challenge of his life. Jewish tradition validates that challenge by affirming that all of our Matriarchs and Patriarchs, save for mother Rachel, were buried there.
There are many Jewish traditions regarding death and burial. One of the most central of those traditions is the concept of kevurah be karka, burial in the ground. With due respect and understanding that people make all kinds of choices for themselves, Judaism holds as an enduring value the importance of burying our loved ones in the earth. There are two basic reasons suggested for this: one that the physical human body comes from the ground and needs to be returned to its rightful place so that our spirit might return to God; and two that the body should not be disgraced by being unburied and above ground. We believe that burying our loved ones in sacred ground is the finest way to honor them, honor God, and honor our Jewish community. Whereas this used to be a uniquely Jewish value, in this decade since the events of September 11, many others in our world have come to understand how much it means to actually have a burial site for a loved one. As we learned earlier, it is the most difficult challenge of a lifetime to bury a loved one, but we wonder where Rabbeinu Yonah would have placed on his list of difficult trials, the death of a loved one and the inability to bury them in a family plot that would be lovingly tended. That is almost unimaginable.
