Avraham had been through two traumatic events involving the people most precious in the world to him. The first was when Hashem told him to offer his son Yitzchak as a sacrifice, after he had waited for a lifetime to have a son with Sarah, and only at the last moment did the command come from Heaven saying, “Stop!” How does a father, or a son, survive a trauma like that?
Then came grief. Sarah, Avraham’s beloved wife, died. She had been his constant companion, sharing the journey with him as they left behind all they knew, their land, their birthplace, and their families. What does a man of 137 years do after such a trauma and such a loss?
He had done everything God had asked of him. Yet he could hardly say that God’s promises had been fulfilled. Seven times he had been promised the land of Canaan, yet he owned not one square inch of it, not even a place in which to bury his wife. God had promised him many children, a great nation, many nations, as many as the grains of sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. Yet he had only one son of the covenant, Yitzchak, whom he had almost lost, and who had no wife or children. Avraham had every reason to spend the rest of his days in sadness and memory. Yet he did not.
In one of the most extraordinary sequences of words in the Torah, his grief is described in a mere five Hebrew words: in English, “Avraham mourned for Sarah and wept for her” (Bereisheet 23:2). Next we read, “Then Avraham rose from his grief.”
From then on, he engaged in a flurry of activity with two aims in mind: first, buy a plot of land for Sarah; second, find a wife for his son. These actions precisely match the two Divine promises: of land and descendants. Avraham did not wait for God to act. He understood one of the profoundest truths of Judaism: that God is waiting for us to act. How did he have the energy to keep going, after almost losing his child and actually losing his partner? What gave Avraham his resilience, his ability to survive, spirit intact?
I learned the answer from the Holocaust survivors I had the privilege to know. They became my mentors in moral courage. Most of them did not talk about the past. Instead they set about creating a new life in a new land. They looked forward, not back. First they built a future. Only then - sometimes forty or fifty years later - did they speak about the past. That was when they told their story, first to their families, then to the world. First you have to build a future. Only then can you mourn the past. Avraham heard the future calling to him, saying: The next step depends on you. That is how Avraham survived the shock and grief.
