The first sentence of this week’s parsha of Chayei Sarah is: “Sarah’s lifetime was 127 years: the years of Sarah’s life.” Rashi makes a strange comment on the seemingly unnecessary and extra phrase “the years of Sarah’s life.” He says, “The word ‘years’ is repeated and without a number to indicate that all her years were equally good.” How could anyone say that the years of Sarah’s life were equally good? She had so many challenging episodes in her life.
Twice, first in Egypt, then in Gerar, she was asked by Avraham to say that she was his sister rather than his wife and was then taken into a royal harem, a very difficult and dangerous situation. There were many years when, despite G-d’s repeated promise that she would have many children, she was infertile and couldn’t have even a single child. There was the time when she persuaded Avraham to take her handmaid, Hagar, and have a child by her so that he could be a father, which caused her great emotional pain. Her life was one of uncertainty and decades of unfulfilled hopes. How can Rashi then say that all of Sarah’s years were equally good?
The Torah is similarly puzzling with its description of Avraham. Immediately after he buys a burial plot for Sarah, the Torah says, “Avraham was old, well advanced in years, and G-d had blessed Avraham with everything.” (Bereishit 24:1)
Seven times, G-d promised Avraham the land of Canaan. Yet when Sarah died, he did not own a single plot of land in which to bury her and had to go through an exhausting and humiliating negotiation with the Hittites to buy a small piece of the land. How can the Torah say that G-d had blessed Avraham with everything?
Equally confusing is the Torah’s description of Avraham’s death at the end of the parsha: “Avraham breathed his last and died at a good age, old and satisfied, and he was gathered to his people.” Avraham had been promised that he would become the father of many nations and that he would inherit the land. But he did not live to see those promises fulfilled. So how can we imagine that he was “satisfied” at the end of his life?
The answer, for both Sarah and Avraham, is that to understand death, we have to understand life.
Friedrich Nietzsche (a nineteenth-century German philosopher) said: He who has a why in life can bear almost any how. It was Sarah and Avraham’s sense of destiny and calling that gave their lives purpose and allowed them to survive the difficult times and even the unfulfilled goals at the end of their lives, because they had faith that the journey was not yet over. They died satisfied that they had played an important part and taken the first steps for their future family.
RABBI JONATHAN SACKS Z”L
