FROM OUR PRINTED JAN. 2023 EDITION:
The Life of Sarah
by Len Abram
Boston Broadside Columnist
For centuries, Jews read and re-read the Old Testament, the Torah. The Hamas attacks in Israel of October 7 took place on a holiday celebrating its gift to the Jewish people. As Jews finish the last chapter, they begin at the first, with Genesis, the creation of the world, of the first man and woman, and later the first Jew, Abraham, and his wife, Sarah.
Jews try to find ways to bring Heaven down to Earth. Friday night Sabbath candles celebrate creation. Let there be light, the light not only there at creation, but here melting wax. Can we see the divine in other actions? The first patriarch Abraham was chosen to leave the comforts of his home in Iraq for a land he’d never seen. Why did he go? Abraham’s life, commentators think, lacked purpose.
Judaism is a religion of purpose, of discovering meaning. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist imprisoned at Auschwitz, saw that inmates who found a meaning in their suffering, found a reason to survive. When Abraham left for the Promised Land, he found a purpose, a faith for his own time and for the future, monotheism. One Creator, one deity, in Heaven and on Earth.
Genesis, Chapter 23, continues this theme of purpose. Called Chaya Sarah or The life of Sarah, the chapter begins with her death. Why? Like Abraham, Sarah has had a life of purpose. She insured that her son Isaac would be the next patriarch of the Jews. But in her death, there’s another. For her burial, Abraham will buy a cave in Hebron in present day Israel. Abraham pays perhaps 20 times the going price for land at the time, but it’s a bargain. If anyone asks Abraham or his descendants if they belong in Hebron or elsewhere in the land, Abraham has a deed.
In the media, on campuses, and in our streets, Jews in Israel have been attacked as occupiers with no roots or rights to their land. Along with the massive stones of the Western Wall, the unearthed synagogues or fortresses, the Torah promises the Jews the land of Israel. Others can live in a Jewish state, as do Druze, Christian Arabs, and Arab Muslims, free to pray – or vote.
After October 7, some are asking again, does a Jewish state have a place among the 15 Islamic states in the Middle East? Wars are fought over the issue. But another struggle is in the Islamic world itself, in which Israel is not the cause, but a symptom. Should Islam accept Western ideals, such as human rights, tolerance, and freedom? Hamas and its sponsor Iran are grim opposites.
The Accords between Israel and the Gulf states were a beginning, named after the person who listened to the voice of purpose, Abraham. It may be that Abraham and Sarah’s people, the state of Israel, will help bring its Arab neighbors into a period, maybe a golden age, of peace. This too would be the Life of Sarah. ♦
