Danielle Dugas quoting Ephraim Rubinger; Sermon "Other or Brother"
As a future bride, Rebecca, is approaching her new home, Isaac goes out in the field to meditate. Nothing unusual about that. We would imagine Isaac to be a spiritually sensitive young man; one who would meditate on the eve of his marriage. However, the Torah makes it a point of telling us that Isaac had just come from a place called Beer-Lahai-Roi... Beer-Lahai-Roi is the place where Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac's half-brother, found themselves hungry and thirsty after being sent out by Sarah and Abraham... Now what do you suppose Isaac was doing at this place; specially just before his marriage?... All of this life, Isaac has been haunted by the absence of this half-brother. Why should a brother be expelled? "Maybe it was my fault "the young Isaac agonized, "how could my parents, the epitome of kindness and hospitality, put out a young boy and his mother into the desert?"... But now, with Sarah dead, Isaac could finally explore his brother's agony. And so he goes to the place where his brother suffered so; suffered from not only thirst and hunger, but from the terrible sense of rejection by his father...
Rabbi Yael Shy
Rebecca humbles herself before Isaac at the moment they first see each other in the fields (either "falling" or "descending from" from her camel, covering herself with her veil). Isaac brings Rebecca to his mother's tent - his place of deepest suffering and grief. The first explicit love story in the Torah reverberates with vulnerability from both of the protagonists, which perhaps is the most important requirement for love. Brene Brown says, "there can be no intimacy-emotional intimacy, spiritual intimacy, physical intimacy-without vulnerability... It's about being honest with how we feel, about our fears, about what we need, and, asking for what we need. Vulnerability is a glue that holds intimate relationships together." When Isaac and Rebecca fall in love, they meet each other fully as they are: raw, unfiltered, with a generous, open and vulnerable heart.
Our challenge is to meet the world with the same.
Rabbi Jonathan Kraus on Chaye Sarah:
According to Adin Steinsaltz (in his book, Biblical Images)... Sarah undergoes a transformation (literally and figuratively!) with the promise of Isaac's birth and the renewal of her fertility cycle. As a result, Sarah learns to synthesize her vision/ideals with her family life. Jewish continuity becomes a personal/biological commitment as well as a "professional"/ideological one. Having made this synthesis, however, she is unable to reconcile the inherent contradictions in the akedah's apparent demand that she give up her son.
As for Isaac, we can only imagine what he thinks of God and religion as well as his parents and family life after the akedah. We can't help but wonder what messages are sent and what scars are left by Abraham's willingness to take such a risk for the sake of his "vision" of God. Isaac must be struggling with whether Abraham values his commitment/love for God over his commitment/love for his son. Perhaps, that is why he can't return from Mt. Moriah alongside his father.
Somehow, the working through of this trauma centers on Genesis 24:67. There we read that Isaac brings Rebekah "into the tent of his mother Sarah....and thus found comfort after his mother." Tradition understands that Rebekah emulates Sarah and takes her place in Isaac's life. But perhaps, the comfort comes from entering the tent, itself.
The tent seems to be new in Sarah's life. Previously, we have the impression she lives in Abraham's tent (as when the three messengers come to announce Isaac's impending birth). Perhaps, Sarah's new synthesis of ideological and family commitments makes it necessary for her to define herself apart from Abraham's single-minded devotion to God. Sarah needs a place where she can safely at God's promises and question God's prophecies. In addition, the tent is the place for Sarah as Isaac's mother (the only place she is so referred to in the Torah). It is a symbol of her role as nurturer, caregiver. Third, the tent is the place where both Rebekah and Isaac enter together-man and woman--both entering this place of maternal love and care.
Rabbi Shefa Gold (from Torah Journeys)
This portion tells us how to receive the blessing of comfort that will that will heal us. Isaac, Sarah's son, goes out from Be'er-lahai-roi, the place that is associated with Hagar, the stranger. Our grief makes us a stranger to life and we dwell in isolation and alienation until we are ready to love again.
This preparation for love is described in Isaac's meeting with Rebecca. As prelude to that meeting, Isaac goes out into the field to meditate. The word here for meditation is la-su'ach, which refers to the practice of "conversation" with God. The field, a place of spacious natural beauty, is the setting. Here we engage in holy conversation, pouring out our grief, anger and despair, listening deeply for God's voice. "Min hametzar karati Yah, anani vamerchavyah." (Psalm 118:5, From the narrow places I called out to God, who answers me with Divine expanded perspective, the expansiveness of the open field.) The spaciousness that Isaac achieves in meditation allows him to lift his eyes and behold beauty and the possibility of love. In loving again we are comforted.
There are many perils to the peace and integrity of the soul on the path of mourning. The bitterness, fear, and cynicism that sometimes accompany or follow experiences of tragedy and loss can become obstacles on the path of our soul's journey. When we react to the feelings of vulnerability that loss brings by building up defenses around the heart and fortifying the small self, then we lose access to our own essence.
If we follow Isaac's example we will seek the open field and develop a practice of meditation that will allow us to lift our eyes and open our hearts to love.
Rabbi Marc Margolius writing for IJS Torah study "Mindful Torah: Engaging the Better Angels of Our Nature" (Chayei Sarah; Ahavah/Love at Second Sight)
We understand ahavah love here not in the emotional sense, but as connoting an awareness of the sacred energy permeating and connecting every aspect of life. To practice ahavah/love in this sense means cultivating awareness of the underlying (or transcending) connectivity of everything out of our experience brokenness of life. It means waking up to the interrelatedness of all, an insight which, paradoxically, can happens most powerfully in moment when we experience disconnection and alienation, as Rebekah and Isaac do in this parashah.
This is "love at second sight" love as an awareness of wholeness, which surfaces as we move through the veneer of life's fragmentation and brokenness...
Paradoxically, sometimes we grow in awareness of this energy precisely at moments when life feels most broken, when we feel most estranged from others. Such situations can stir up painful and confusing habits of mind and emotion which, if we see them clearly and approach them with compassion, can yield to a deeper level of awareness: that we have been created to clear our minds and hearts enough for ahavah/love to flow through us into the world, making ourselves, like the trees, channels for that interconnecting chiyut/life force.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor on Parshat Chayei Sarah and it's proximity to Kristallnacht commemoration: (From A Year of Torah, 305-306)
As Auschwitz survivor Dr. Edith Eger has said:
"We don't cover garlic with chocolate, there is no forgiveness without rage, but love conquers all."
We may be hesitant, in the face of the Holocaust, to trust in the healing power of love and yet, if we sit with this statement from a survivor, it becomes ever more convincing. Because what else if not love-for ourselves and for others- would keep us going...
Engaging with the world means that we will get hurt. And while it is true that we often need to be at peace with ourselves first before we can be at peace with others, it is also true that feeling loved and loving someone in return can ground us, break open our detachment and make us stronger and more resilient.