Community Blog

This week's d'var Torah was written by Ner Shalom member Percy Brooks

Parshat Chayei Sarah is well known for its quirks and oddities. First, being titled “The Life of Sarah” despite opening with an account of Sarah’s death, then the speed with which it takes a turn into the story of Rebekah’s journey towards Isaac, and plenty of other eyebrow-raising lines throughout the narrative. The pace and style of this story, though, paints a picture of grief and the journey past it that ‘better storytelling’ just couldn’t accomplish.

For those unaware, this past Wednesday was Transgender Day of Remembrance, a yearly opportunity to memorialize Transgender people across the globe who lost their lives to anti-trans violence, the impacts of transphobia, and/or whose identities were misrepresented after their passing. Because of the marginalized identities of these folks and the circumstances under which many of them passed, the majority of them have news reports rather than obituaries or eulogies to document their lives. Those who do have something personal written for them are often disrespected and erased by the family members writing about their life. Working on memorializing these victims is a difficult, painful, and exhausting process that opens up countless questions about life, death, and our obligations to those we’ve lost. Many of these questions, I feel, are addressed throughout Chayei Sarah.

In the opening of Chayei Sarah, we receive a brief and factual account of Sarah’s death. “Sarah's lifetime-the span of Sarah's life-came to one hundred and twenty-seven years. Sarah died in Kiriath-Arba-now Hebron-in the land of Canaan…” (Genesis 23:1-2). It feels clinical, like something out of a textbook or off a coroner's report. Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar discusses this in her commentary on Chayei Sarah, in which she says:

“This moment when people gather to prepare a eulogy is always powerful. At first, they don't know where to begin, what to include, what to leave out. Sometimes there are long pauses scattered with brief sentences: "I loved her brisket." "She was always at my school plays, my baseball games." "She cared deeply about her children, the grandchildren were the center of her life." Sometimes there is a cacophony of voices, all talking over one another, revealing story after story. They speak of friends and travel, of volunteer work, of the wisdom and support she so freely shared. Sometimes there is anger, so many unresolved issues, stone silence, a reluctance to share the truth because they are worried of what I might say.

“And sometimes the grief is so overwhelming there is quiet and the soft sound of crying. I imagine this was the way it was with Abraham: Sarah's lifetime-the span of Sarah's life-came to one hundred and twenty-seven years. Sarah died in Kiriath-Arba-now Hebron-in the land of Canaan; and Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her (Genesis 23:1-2).”

The fact of the matter is, sometimes all we have are the facts of someone’s life. Sometimes we lose the pieces of who someone truly was and are left with little more than a name, age, and news report. It could be because they’ve been forgotten, or because no one truly understood them. It could be because their impact was so intense and indescribable that the people around to describe it can’t find the strength or the words. The reason for the shortness and silence, however, doesn’t change the fact that their life deserves a record.

After the parsha informs us of Sarah’s death, we go on to see the process of Abraham asking to be sold a burial plot. Immediately after asking, the Hittites respond to Abraham with a refusal of payment: “Hear us, my lord: you are the elect of God among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places; none of us will withhold his burial place from you for burying your dead”. While the speaker acknowledges Abraham’s described chosenness as part of the reason for this offer, I think that the ease with which they made this decision as a whole group speaks to an understanding that an appropriate burial place is a dignity that should be afforded to all. After all, the Hittites had no personal obligation to Sarah. Knowing that Abraham was chosen by G-d, they could easily have assumed that G-d would provide some place for Sarah’s body to rest or have taken advantage of Abraham’s offer for compensation. Instead, Abraham’s status grants him the ‘choicest’ burial place for his beloved, because offering him just the cheapest or most accessible space doesn’t speak to his status, just his humanity. They recognize that Abraham is traveling without a particular space to call his, and that while Sarah is not their wife, she is “one of them”, in the way that all humanity is one and the same.

This understanding of obligation towards the dead among the Hittites speaks strongly to the obligations we face when it comes to Transgender Remembrance. Yes, most of the people we mourn today are not members of our physical community. Yes, their bodies have been cared for in the practical sense. Technically, we have no obligation to them and nothing we can do will bring them back. For the Hittites, though, we can see that simply burying a body isn’t enough. A person deserves a space of meaning. With their name, their person, and the promise of being accessible for mourning by those they loved. While the Transgender and Gender Diverse folks we mourn today aren’t necessarily people we knew or loved personally, how can we sit in comfort knowing that many of them have not been put to rest in a space with their name or their dignity and as such, can’t easily be accessed by those who loved them the most? Today we make the choice to grant them a space to rest, in spirit if not in body. We say their names, share their stories, and do our best to not just bury them but offer them the choicest place of rest.

Once Sarah is buried, we take that jarring turn into our introduction to Rebekah. It is easy to feel, at this point, like Sarah has been forgotten and life is continuing on. A second glance, though, shows the scrambling attempts to fill the hole Sarah left in her wake. At this point, Abraham is project hopping. Sitting in a world without Sarah is just too much. The objective of finding a place to bury her is now complete, so what is he supposed to do now? He focuses his mind on what he has left, and on what Sarah would want to do if she were still here, and he works on finding Isaac a wife. When we look at this piece of the narrative not as a method of veering away from the reality of Sarah’s death, but instead as the desperation of a man navigating a world he’d grown so used to navigating as a team, it not only unites the pieces of the story as one but also paints a realistic picture of how we attempt to take control of the uncontrollable, and how we treasure the memory of those we have lost while acknowledging that the world must keep spinning.

We see pieces of Sarah throughout our introduction to Rebekah. We see divine intention in the way the servant’s prayer is instantly answered as he asks G-d to reveal Isaac’s wife to him. We see care and kindness in the way Rebekah offers water to the camels and lodging to the servant. We see unprecedented boldness and agency as Rebekah is allowed to decide for herself when she’ll leave her home. We see this even further in the final line of the parsha: “Isaac loved her[, Rebekah], and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.”

So yes, Chayei Sarah is about the life of Sarah. It is about our responsibility to carve the shape of those we’ve lost into the world and then fill it, so that that person can live on. If we want to say that every life is a universe, then we have to hold the responsibility of carrying that through to death. We have to demand the dignity of saying their names and holding their hearts, whether we know the whole story, or just the bare facts.