By Rabbi Moshe Pogrow
Me’aras Hamachpelah consisted of rows of double caves, a most fitting site for married couples, together in life and in death. Adam and Chava, Avraham and Sarah, Yitzchak and Rivka, Yaakov and Leah were all buried there.
These pairs of graves, purchased by the first Jew for his wife, himself, his son, grandson and their wives, was the first property the Jewish people acquired in their land. The value of family ties that bind husband and wife, parents and children, would henceforth be inseparable from the land of Israel. This value became a fundamental feature of Jewish character, enabling the man of Israel to become what he did.
Only after Me’aras Hamachpelah and the area around it had become his permanently did Avraham bury Sarah. While Jews do not make a show of their grief by building mausoleums or turning graves into gardens, the concept of a time limit for cemeteries is alien to us. A place of rest for the dead is sacred forever. Should children buy their parents marble headstones and decorate them with flowers, only to have the grandchildren dig them up and pile their ancestors’ bones in nameless heaps?
The purchase of Efron’s field is also the legal model for a Jewish marriage contract. “Jews buy their wives” is the criticism cast upon us. It is true that a Jewish man “acquires” a bride in a legal sense, but he respects her as his most exalted treasure. Fortunate are we if all our marriages had the spirit of Avraham and Sarah’s, the spirit that found its final expression in the purchase of Me’aras Hamachpelah!
This characteristic, thank G-d, has not vanished from their descendants. “The more she became his wife,” we are told of Yitzchak and Rivka, “the more he loved her.” Like this marriage, Jewish marriages are decided not by passion, but by reason and judgment. Parents consider whether two young people are suited to each other, and their love increases as they come to know each other better.
Many non-Jewish marriages are made on the basis of what they call “love.” But we need only glance at novelistic depictions taken from life, and we immediately see the vast gap between the “love” of such partners before marriage, and how dull and empty it seems to them afterward. This sort of “love” is blind; each step into the future brings new disillusionment.
Not so is Jewish marriage, of which it says, “Vayikach es Rivka, vatehi lo l’isha, vaye’ehaveha.” Rivka became his wife, and he loved her. The wedding is not the culmination of true love, but its beginning.
Based on the commentary of Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch zt”l on Chumash, with permission from the publisher.
