Parashat Hashavua: Chayey Sarah
This Shabbat is the Heschel High School annual Shabbaton. At our Shabbaton, we invite students to share Divrei Torah at each communal meal. All three students who prepared to speak this Shabbat wanted to focus on the theme of Hesed in this week’s Torah portion, Chayey Sarah. Namely, they focused on Rivka’s tremendous kindness to Eliezer who comes to search for a wife for Yitzhak. These students see this kindness as foundational to our Shabbaton theme - exploring the tension between the individual and the community, coming to the conclusion that core to Jewish belief and practice is the value of Hesed - of ensuring that our community is built on care and compassion for others.
Most often, we translate the word Hesed as acts of loving kindness. Just as this week’s Torah portion is about kindness, it is about love.
The parsha begins with Sarah’s death. The second verse states that after Sarah died, Avraham came to eulogize and bury her. Rashi adds that Avraham traveled a distance to do so as he now resided in Be’er Sheva whereas Sarah died in Hevron. Rashi explains that the cause of Sarah’s death was hearing the news about the binding of her son. In other words, Sarah dies from anguish or from heartbreak. While she knows that her son was saved, she experiences tremendous pain at the possibility of his near-death experience. Or perhaps, Sarah realizes the distance that now exists between her son and her spouse and this distance too is heartbreaking.
At the end of the parsha, the Torah states that Yitzhak is (finally) experiencing comfort following the death of his mother. And what is the source of this comfort? His love for his new wife Rivka. Rashi suggests that when Yitzhak and Rivka married, joy re-entered the home: there was light, there was sustenance, and there was divine protection.
In this way, we may come to the conclusion that kindness has the power to heal and mend a broken heart. And this would be the clear conclusion to come to. However, this might lead us to pursue kindness when we identify a purpose or a goal rather than kindness for kindness sake.
At the end of the book of Bereshit, Yakov requests that when the Israelites leave Egypt, that his bones be taken for proper burial back home. Yakov uses the words Hesed (kindness) and Emet (truth) to describe this act. Rashi explains that the term Hesed shel Emet - the ultimate act of kindness - applies to burial because it is an act you can never expect to be reciprocated as you are performing it for the dead.
In this week’s parsha, we see that Avraham rushes to bury his wife Sarah. Even if they parted ways, and even if there was heartbreak, he performs the ultimate act of love and kindness and ensures proper burial. Perhaps this is also an act of repair. Avraham seeks to make amends even when that is no longer possible. He is motivated by tremendous love and compassion to first repair his relationship with his now deceased wife, and then to care for his son and help him recover from this tremendous loss as Avraham is the one who sends Eliezer to find a wife for his son.
Love, kindness, and loss are all interconnected. May we always be inspired to heal & to comfort, and to recognize that while love may lead to heartbreak, it also has the power to heal and create hope.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Dahlia Kronish
High School Associate Head
