dear God,
i've been thinking a lot about resilience.
there's a great darkness in the world,
a loss that sits on the chest at night,
impossible to breathe.
impossible to move forward.
when will the cloud lift?
when will it be safe to leave home?
dear God,
i've been teaching a lot about resilience.
i've been teaching about how resilience looks
differently for different people.
i've been teaching that we can't judge another person's response to loss.
sometimes resilience is staying in bed all day, lights out, curtains closed.
sometimes resilience is silence.
sometimes resilience is yelling, protesting, taking to the streets.
and sometimes,
it's all too much.
sometimes there's no such thing as resilience.
some loss is too hard to bear.
dear God,
did you hear Sarah's cry?
do you know she died for our sake?
parshat chayei sarah, eish kodesh
november 4, 1939
Rashi asks, “Why does the Torah recount the death of Sarah directly after the account of the binding of Isaac?” Is the text suggesting some connection between these two events? Rashi answers, “When Sarah was told of the binding of Isaac -- of how he was prepared for slaughter, of how the knife was laid at his throat -- her soul fled, and she died.” So Moses our teacher, the trusted shepherd, deliberately edited the Torah. He places these two events -- the death of Sarah and the binding of Isaac -- side by side in the text in order to advocate on our behalf. By doing this, Moses is suggesting that if the anguish is, God forbid, unbearable, then death can result. He is showing us something important: that if this could happen even to Sarah -- who was of such stature that the Torah goes to great lengths to tell us how when she was a hundred years old she was as virtuous as a girl of twenty, and when she was twenty she was as innocent as a child of seven; that in fact all her life she was equally virtuous -- and if she, Sarah, was unable to bear such pain, how much less can we.
The Torah may also be telling us that our mother Sarah, who took the binding of Isaac so much to heart that her soul flew out of her, died for the good of the Jewish people. She died in order to show God that a Jew should not be expected to suffer unlimited levels of anguish. Even though a person, with the mercy of God, survives and escapes death, nevertheless elements of his capability, his mind and his spirit are forever broken and, as a result of his ordeal, lost to him.
והנה רש"י פירש ולמה נסמכה מיתת שרה לעקדת יצחק שע"י וכו' פרחה נשמתה ומתה היינו שמש"ר רעיא מהימנא סמך מיתת שרה לעקדת יצחק כדי להמליץ טוב בעדנו ולהראות שע"י יסורים ח"ו יותר מדאי מה נעשה שפרחה נשמתה ועוד באם נעשה כן בשרה צדיקת גדולה כזו שבת ק' כבת כ׳ לחטא וכו' ושני חיי שרה שכלן שווים לטובה ומ"מ לא יכלה לטבול יסורים קשים ומכש"כ אנחנו
עוד אפשר לאמר שגם שרה אמנו עצמה שנתנה כ"כ אל לבה מעשה העקדה עד שצרחה נשמתה לטובת ישראל עשתה להראות לד' איך א"א לישראל לסבול יסורים יותר מדי ואפילו מי שבחמלת ד' נשאר חי גם אחר יסוריו מ"מ חלקי כחו ומוחו ורוחו נשברו ונאבדו ממנו
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