The Negotiations for the burial cave of Machpela
Further references to the cave in Sefer Bereishit
The Search for a wife for Yitzchak
“O sister!
May you grow
Into thousands of myriads;
May your offspring seize
The gates of their foes.” (61) Then Rebekah and her maids arose, mounted the camels, and followed the man. So the servant took Rebekah and went his way. (62) Isaac had just come back from the vicinity of Beer-lahai-roi, for he was settled in the region of the Negeb. (63) And Isaac went out walking in the field toward evening and, looking up, he saw camels approaching. (64) Raising her eyes, Rebekah saw Isaac. She alighted from the camel (65) and said to the servant, “Who is that man walking in the field toward us?” And the servant said, “That is my master.” So she took her veil and covered herself. (66) The servant told Isaac all the things that he had done. (67) Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife. Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.
The Promises: Land and Descendants
Beginning the Journey in Lessons in Leadership, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Despite this, when Sarah dies, Abraham has not a single inch of land that he can call his own, and he has only one child who will continue the covenant, Isaac, who is currently unmarried. Neither promise has been fulfilled. Hence the extraordinary detail of the two main stories in Chayei Sarah: the purchase of land and the finding of a wife for Isaac. There is a moral here, and the Torah slows down the speed of the narrative as it speeds up the action, so that we will not miss the point.
God promises, but we have to act. God promised Abraham the land, but he had to buy the first field. God promised Abraham many descendants, but Abraham had to ensure that his son was married, and to a woman who would share the life of the covenant, so that Abraham would have, as we say today, “Jewish grandchildren.”
Despite all the promises, God does not and will not do it alone. By the very act of self-limitation (tzimtzum) through which He creates the space for human freedom, God gives us responsibility, and only by exercising it do we reach our full stature as human beings. God saved Noah from the Flood, but Noah had to make the Ark. He gave the land of Israel to the people of Israel, but they had to fight the battles. God gives us the strength to act, but we have to do the deed. What changes the world, what fulfils our destiny, is not what God does for us but what we do for God.
That is what leaders understand, and it is what made Abraham the first Jewish leader. Leaders take responsibility for creating the conditions through which God’s purposes can be fulfilled. They are not passive but active – even in old age, like Abraham in this week’s parsha. Indeed in the chapter immediately following the story of finding a wife for Isaac, to our surprise, we read that Abraham remarries and has eight more children. Whatever else this tells us – and there are many interpretations (the most likely being that it explains how Abraham became “the father of many nations”) – it certainly conveys the point that Abraham stayed young the way Moses stayed young, “His eyes were undimmed and his natural energy unabated” (Deut. 34:7). Though action takes energy, it gives us energy. The contrast between Noah in old age and Abraham in old age could not be greater.
Perhaps, though, the most important point of this parsha is that large promises – a land, countless children – become real through small beginnings. Leaders begin with an envisioned future, but they also know that there is a long journey between here and there; we can only reach it one act at a time, one day at a time. There is no miraculous shortcut – and if there were, it would not help. The use of a shortcut would culminate in an achievement like Jonah’s gourd, which grew overnight, then died overnight. Abraham acquired only a single field and had just one son who would continue the covenant. Yet he did not complain, and he died serene and satisfied. Because he had begun. Because he had left future generations something on which to build. All great change is the work of more than one generation, and none of us will live to see the full fruit of our endeavours.
Leaders see the destination, begin the journey, and leave behind them those who will continue it. That is enough to endow a life with immortality.
(טז) הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה. אִם לָמַדְתָּ תוֹרָה הַרְבֵּה, נוֹתְנִים לְךָ שָׂכָר הַרְבֵּה. וְנֶאֱמָן הוּא בַעַל מְלַאכְתְּךָ שֶׁיְּשַׁלֵּם לְךָ שְׂכַר פְּעֻלָּתֶךָ. וְדַע מַתַּן שְׂכָרָן שֶׁל צַדִּיקִים לֶעָתִיד לָבֹא:
(16) He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it; If you have studied much Torah, you shall be given much reward. Faithful is your employer to pay you the reward of your labor; And know that the grant of reward unto the righteous is in the age to come.
The Voice of Hope in the Conversation of Mankind
Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense, pp. 231-241
We will not understand Judaism, or the Jewish people, or the trajectory of Jewish history, until we ask: ‘What made Jews different?’… What are Jews called on to do? And why, in the twenty-first century, does it matter? The answer… has to do with the future tense. Judaism is supremely the religion of the not-yet… The answer, I believe, lies in four strange, highly distinctive features of Judaism as a faith.
The first occurs at the formative moment in the life of Moses, when the prophet encounters God at the burning bush… Moses asks, ‘Who are you? When the Israelites ask, who has sent you, what shall I say?’ God replies in a cryptic three-word phrase, Ehyeh asher ehyeh (Exod. 3:14)… God tells Moses to say to the Israelites, ‘”I will be” sent me to you.’ It is as if God had said, ‘My name is the future tense. If you seek to understand me, first you will have to understand the nature and significance of the future tense.’…
The second is the Jewish sense of time… in the Hebrew Bible, a new concept of time was born… Time, for ancients, was cyclical, a matter of the slow revolving of the seasons and the generations, an endlessly repeated sequence of birth, growth, decline and death… The Hebrew Bible is a radical break with this way of seeing things. God is to be found in history, not just in nature. Things do change. Human life is an arena of transformation… until Abraham and Moses, no one thought of time as a journey in which where you are tomorrow will not be where you were yesterday… the future is not a mere repetition of the past. Change, growth, development, are decisive moments that alter everything. God is not only present in eternity. He is also present in the here and now, in the process of change and transformation…
The third has to do with the nature of the Jewish narrative…. The Hebrew Bible is a book of stories, quintessentially so. Whereas science and philosophy represent truth as system, Judaism represents truth as story, a sequence of events that must play themselves out in and through time… there is no other story quite like this. It breaks all the rules of narrative form. It leads us to expectations that are never met in the way we anticipated them. The Hebrew bible is a story without an ending… The Bible leaves us… with ‘the unappeased memory of a future yet to be fulfilled’… in Judaism we are always in the middle of a story whose ending lies in the future….
Which brings us to the fourth of Judaism’s unique ideas. It is the only civilization whose golden age us in the future. Judaism invented the messianic idea… to be a Jew has always been to answer the question ‘Has the messiah come?’ with the reply ‘Not yet’. Not while there is war and terror, hunger and injustice, disease and poverty, corruption and inequality. Hence the fourth conclusion: in Judaism the golden age is always in the future.
We have, then, in Judaism four remarkable, related ideas: a God whose name is in the future tense, a future-orientated concept of time, a literature whose stories always end in a future-not-yet-reached, and a golden age which belongs to the future.
Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense, pp. 249-252
This was perhaps the greatest contribution of Judaism – via the Judaic roots of Christianity – to the West. The idea that time is an arena of change, and that freedom and creativity are God’s gift to humanity, resulted in astonishing advances in science and our understanding of the world, technology and our ability to control the human environment, economics and our ability to lift people out of poverty and starvation, medicine and our ability to cure disease. It led to the abolition of slavery, the growth of a more egalitarian society, the enhanced position of women, and the emergence of democracy and liberalism…
To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope. Every ritual, every command, every syllable of the Jewish story is a protest against escapism, resignation and the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism, the religion of the free God, is a religion of freedom. Jewish faith is written in the future tense. It is belief in a future that is not yet but could be, if we heed God’s call, obey His will and act together as a covenantal community. The name of the Jewish future is hope…
Jews were and are still called on to be the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind.