This week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, begins with a death and ends with one too. It begins with the death of our foremother Sarah, an interesting figure – considered by midrash to be one of the four most beautiful women ever to have lived. Also considered by midrash to have been intersex, the owner of a body that did not conform to standard ideas of male and female. We know Sarah for having laughed aloud when an angel announced she was to give birth at age 90. And we know her for expelling Abraham’s older son Ishmael and his mother, Hagar.
Sarah’s death is reported in Torah immediately after the conclusion of the story of the akeydah, the binding of Isaac by his father for sacrifice. Midrash says this placement is because the two events are connected. Sarah heard across the miles that this had happened, that her son was nearly offered up to God by her husband, and in the shock of it, her soul flew out of her body.
In this time we’re living in, this time of children offered up as sacrifice, the children of Israel and the children of Gaza, if these things don’t cause our souls to fly right out of our bodies, I don’t know what would.
On some level feel already like my soul has flown away. Like here it is next to me and I am literally beside myself – my poor, exiled soul fluttering, trying to alight on anything solid, but nothing is solid. Whatever we thought unshakeable has shook: our beliefs, our allegiances, our alliances. The complexities of what we see, what we hear, who says it, how it is languaged – these are all moving targets. Every day I read something and think, “Oh yes, that’s right.” And then I read the opposite and I think, “Oh yes, that’s right.”
In the mad scurry of people staking out their positions and signalling to their allies, I’ve found myself frustrated, upset with the policy positions and slogans of people with whom I mostly agree. Feeling like they are using words that will divide us more than they unite us. And then all the moreso people whose positions and slogans horrify me. And I see us, all of us, trying to latch onto one of those positions or one of those slogans, maybe just to have something to hold onto.
It all gets me going; I feel my nerves fraying in real time.
On Wednesday night, the Nitzanim parents had a circle to discuss our feelings about what’s going on and one of the parents who facilitated reminded us of our bodies’ fear responses and of the generations of trauma that have taught us when to be afraid and I realized with a start that I am afraid. I am walking around afraid. Not always afraid of something specific. My body is fueled by adrenaline and programmed by the epigenetics of generations of ancestors whose fear responses enabled their survival and mine.
And so in this state of heightened fear, everything I don’t understand or words I don’t fully agree with feel like danger. In my heightened state of fear, everything is a danger. But as the Sufi poet Hafiz famously said, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.”
So is there a spot where our souls can come in for a landing? A better spot with better conditions? I think there are a couple. I think grief, as much as we don’t want to feel grief, is real and solid and universal. We often ask how we can hold our grief, without noticing how amply grief can hold us.
The other landing spot I am seeing is the much discredited quality of compassion. We are taught as children to be compassionate and then encouraged to abandon our compassion as adults. I think the compassionate position is never the wrong position. I would rather make decisions based on compassion that don’t go so well than make decisions based on fear that end up fueling more fear. In the absence of the certainty of what I know, the tenderness of grief and generosity of compassion seem to me to be reasonable guideposts.
I said that the Torah portion begins with a death and ends with one. It ends with the death of Abraham. He has remarried, he has had more children, and now he breathes his last at the ripe old age of 175. And then something remarkable happens that Torah seems to find utterly unremarkable. His sons Ishmael and Isaac come together to bury him. The story of those brothers is a setup for us to imagine them locked in a lifelong enmity. But Torah gives no evidence of that. In fact, for Ishmael to have arrived in time for burial he would have had to be there already. Isaac and Ishmael, together not only in burying their father, but in caring for him together in his final days.
As the sun sets on this Torah portion, there they are, these two brothers, the mythical forebears of the Jews and the Arabs, old men already in their own right: Ishmael 83 and Isaac 75, the age that the State of Israel is now. Together they grieve. They grieve their father. They grieve the lost opportunities to heal their family. It is a terse moment in Torah, but it smacks of compassion; it smacks of love.
This is the lesson that Torah is whispering to me this week: at the end of the day, at the end of the story, love. Love. Love that is formed by shared experience and by destiny. Love that is intertwined with grief. Love that does not need everything to be fixed. Love that does not require just the right words. But Isaac and Ishmael, shoulder to shoulder at the grave, honoring the past and burying it, for both their sakes.