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Parsha by Gura

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Parshat Chaya Sarah (Genesis 23:1 to 25:18)
Shabbat 27 Cheshvan 5761

In most of the day-to-day reading we engage in, newspaper and magazine articles, professional reading, short stories, novels, the authors go to great lengths to make clear to us the connections between the different sections of the work. Clarity, brevity, literary transparency are the hallmarks of successful writing. When we thrust ourselves into reading antique works, then, we struggle not only with different language, and all the conventions and social constructions enveloped in that differing language, but also often with quite different literary presumptions.

As we read the Bible then we are dealing not only (although certainly not only) with sacred text bearing millenniums of meanings and purpose, but also with a text that was transmitted using particular kinds of language, conventions and, of course, literary constructs. To put it another way: if we read this week's portion, which is dominated by the "courtship" of Rivka by Yitzhak's agent, Eliezer, the slave of Avraham, the sections of the parsha really do not seem to hold together all that well. The parsha is mostly a series of exchanges--Avraham with elders of the council as he negotiates the purchase of the cave of Machpeleh; Avraham with Ephron, the owner of the cave; Avraham with Eliezer as he charges him to find a suitable bride for Yitzhak; Eliezer's introduction to Rivka; his subsequent negotiation with Laban; Rivka's decision to go with Eliezer to marry the yet-unmet Yitzhak, their meeting; and Avraham's remarriage and subsequent death. The tensions raised in these exchanges are never quite resolved, or at least, with one exception, resolved in a manner clearly and easily identifiable to us as contemporary readers.

Much of that lack of resolution revolves around the way the Torah presents narrative and the way we usually read: with very, very rare exception, we simply are not let directly into the head (or heart) of the main players. Avraham's reaction to Sarah's death demonstrates the point quite well: "Sarah dies in Kiriath-arba, which is Hebron in the land of Canaan, and Avraham came to eulogize Sarah and to bewail her" (23:2); "And afterwards Avraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah facing Mamre, which is Hebron, in the land of Canaan. Thus, the field with its cave confirmed as Avraham's as an estate for a burial site, from the children of Heth" (23:19-20).

To emphasize that reluctance to reveal inner life, R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great 19th century German exponent of neo-orthodoxy, pointed out that in the Torah text proper, the word translated as "to bewail her" is written oddly, with one letter substantially smaller than the others. That is, as the Stone edition of the Torah paraphrases him, "to suggest that the full extent of his weeping was kept private. His grief was infinite, but the full measure of his pain was concealed in his heart and in the privacy of his home."

Following Sarah's burial, Avraham abrupt turns to the business now at hand: secure for his adult son a bride. He charges his faithful slave, Eliezer, to go to the land Avraham had previously abandoned to find a wife. Eliezer goes, encounters the beautiful, graceful and gracious Rivka when she offers him and his camels great hospitality. He negotiates the marriage arrangements with Rivka's brother, the boorish Laban. When offered the option to stay with her family for some extended period of time, Rivka instead decides to go immediately with Eliezer to her future husband.

Now, what don't we get here? Rivka couldn't have been more than a teenager, but she was casting herself, seemingly impetuously, into the hands and fate of distant relatives (Rivka being Avraham's grand-niece) to wed an unmet, unknown 40 year old mama's boy. To our modern sensibility, this is either a set up for a romantic comedy of some sort or a recipe for connubial disaster.

Much of the way we think of romance and courtship is both reflected in and proposed by film. How often have we watched a romance or romantic comedy and been allured into, at least, sentimentality, if not clear and out right emotion. The dramatic arch of romances where set a while back, although they have not quite the antiquity of our central text. Dante, Petrach and Boccaccio were all inspired by a vision of the unattainable woman of beauty and poetry. She in turn was modeled on the medieval romances, if memory of my college history of literature course serves me.

We inherit, and revivified and reused, the same themes in our films and novels, creating a modified, more democratic dramatic arch: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy pines for girl, boy engages of deeds of daring and valor, boy continues to pine for girl (the basic plot line of Lancelot and Guinevere, for example). We moderns, at least in our musicals (now done only in cartoon versions by Disney, but that's another story) and in our comedies, make sure that girl pines for boy, but that they get together in the end.

And that's the point: they get together in the end, which is only the beginning. We never saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers 25 years later with three kids, a suburban house and mortgage, or Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan worrying about how to raise their children in a corrosive culture, trying to counter the influence of Eminem.

Our cultural experience teaches us that the interaction, the exchanges during courtship, the time when we fall in love and idealize that rush of feelings, is primary, and that our family relations are in fact secondary. But, for the most part, our real experience tell us just the opposite-and so, in a very subtle, almost secret way, so does this some of this parsha.

After a massive elaborate quasi-courtship and marriage negotiation, with Eliezer acting as Avraham's agent, taking 61 lines of Genesis 24, Rivka finally meets Yitzhak: "Now Yitzhak came from having gone to Beer-lahai-roi, for he dwelt in the south country. 'Yitzhak went out to pray in the field towards the evening and he raised his eyes and saw, and behold, camels were coming. And Rivka raised her eyes and saw Yitzhak; she leaned down while upon the camel. And she said to the servant, 'Who is that man walking in the field toward us?' 'And the servant said, 'He is my master.' 'She then took the veil and covered herself. The servant told Yitzhak all the things he had done. 'And Yitzhak brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother; he married Rivka, she became his wife, and he loved her, and thus was Yitzhak comforted after his mother." (24:62-67)

This is all quite romantic, but it is not the romance we are accustomed to at all. No dramatic dismounting, no running towards each other and flinging into each other's arms. No bend-over backward three minute kiss for the public. On the contrary, Rivka veils herself, an act in traditional rabbinic lore of praiseworthy modesty. Yitzhak's first appearance is not as the dashing romantic lead, but as a worshipper of the One True G-d.

Look at the final sequence: first marriage (that is, public ceremony and obligation) which sets the stage for Rivka to now be Yitzhak's wife (literally, his woman), and then (AND THEN) he loved her.

Yitzhak, the beloved of Avraham and the almost sacrificed (Genesis 22:2) now loves in 24:67. The word which rolls off of our lips daily, we loved the soup, we love to go to the movies, we love our spouses and our children, waits twenty-two chapters to show up in Torah, and another two, almost three, before being applied to love between wife and husband.

Our day to day lives do not make for terrible dramatic and enthralling movie plots (or novels for that matter). It is the risk of loss of love that gives the romantic movies, whether drama, comedy or musical, its edge, its interest. But the lesson in this text is that it is in exactly our daily lives, in the blossoming of relationship over time, vested in holiness and dedicated in some purposeful measure, that lets real love bloom.

We come all too often to think of "real love", "true love" that painful yearning that starts all too early in adolescence and finds expression in song, poem, novel, film. We come to think that few things could be less civilized than arranged marriages. Yet, after our now 50 or 60 years of more or less unbridled pursuit of romantic love, we are being forced to face that fact that we certainly have not done better, as a group, in our marriage choices and married lives, than those who did not quite make their own decisions as independently as we believe we do. It is not simply that we mistake eros for philia (erotic longing for deep felt loving friendship), although we do. It is that we think of eros all too narrowly, so to speak.

Look again at line 67, and think about the Oedipal field day one could have with it. Yitzhak can be seen as a mama's boy, unable, at 40, to let go even of the apron strings of his now-deceased mother. The rabbis, on the other hand, unencumbered by our enlightened psychology, have a different take: As Rivka enters the tent of Sarah, she becomes in some sacred sense Sarah -- she becomes imbued with the holiness, the separateness, that reveals her future to be the mother of a holy people.

Avraham and Sarah were the first Jews: This is the first Jewish wedding. Now, in the context of a wedding, a sacred contract, vested with the Divine Presence, love, unmentioned with Adam and Eve, passed by for Noah and his wife, unnoticed even for Sarah and Avraham, now love, a manifestation of holiness, permeates the bonding. Within that love, then, Yitzhak finds comfort, is comforted. The romantic love of our culture pretends that once it is present, we live happily ever after, and pain and sorrow are vanquished. The love in a marriage, and the love from G-d that we let in, does not pretend that our lives henceforth are carefree, only that, should such cares and pain come, that love can be a source of comfort, almost, if you will, a vessel for the Source of Comfort. Yitzhak, pained and passive, loves Rivka, and she comforts him. Their lives, as we shall see, are complex and complicated, and they are indeed in the future at odds. But, nevertheless, he loved her, and he was comforted.

May G-d grant peace to our holy land of Eretz Israel, and bring comfort to the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem, in the continuing agony.

Shabbat Shalom.

Dennis