Hayeii Sarah

Drash for Library Minyan Website

November 20, 2005

20 Heshvan 5766

by Rabbi Miriyam Glazer

"Le’khi Lakh," words by Savina Teubal,

music by Debbie Friedman

The name "Sarah," says Annie in Anne Roiphe’s novel Lovingkindness, "reminded me of barren old ladies whose desires were granted too late to bring real satisfaction, a bitter old lady who banished her rival and the child of her rival. Sarah was the name of the matriarch whose namesakes darted through the landscapes of the Ukraine gasping for air." (p. 8)

Old, always old -- her wrinkled body barren; and a nastiness about her – demanding that her husband cast (the young, exotically beautiful) Hagar and child Ishmael into the desert, where they could die of thirst. Even before she was old – in the days when both the Pharoah of Egypt and Abimelech, King of Gerar, thought her so beautiful they wanted to possess her – she was a bit of an embarrassment: her half-brother/husband Abraham used her, frankly, as a pawn. And how had she felt anyway when her husband announced he had had a vision, had heard a voice, that told him to leave everything they had ever known behind and become nomads traveling to an unknown land? After all, after saying "Lech le’kha" to Abraham, had God turned to Sarah and said, "And you, too, lechi lakh"?

The truth is that, in the years before the Jewish women’s movement inspired us – challenged us – to read the Bible in new ways, many a little girl in Hebrew school was a little ashamed of – a little humiliated by – Sarah. Who ever wanted to wear a Sarah costume for Purim?

Maybe little girls weren’t the only ones uncomfortable with the way Genesis portrayed Sarah. The midrashists felt the need to insist on the purity of her soul and her beauty. The opening line of Hayeii Sarah translates literally as "And the life of Sarah [was] 100 years and 20 years and seven years, the life of Sarah" (Gen 23:1). Why, ask the rabbis, does the Torah not simply say that her life was 127 years long? Based on Genesis Rabbah, Rashi explains that each and every stage of Sarah’slife was significant: at 100, she was as sinless as a woman of 20; when she was 20, she was as beautiful as when she was seven. And all the years were good.

The rabbis also compensated for Sarah’s long barrenness by suggesting her miraculous capacity to nourish: once she did become pregnant and once she did bear Isaac, they imagine Sarah a kind of Ur-mother – her breasts flowing with so much milk, she was able to nurse all the babies brought by their mothers to the celebration of Isaac’s circumcision – 100 babies in all! And when she died, they say, there was weeping throughout the land.

But the rabbis will be the rabbis. Their words describing Sarah’s beauty or piety or capacity to nurse aren’t exactly what restlessly curious little girls or grown up, culturally sophisticated, Jewish women were longing to hear.

In fact, it took a little book, published in 1984, to inspire Jewish women to reconceive their image of the matriarch Sarah – and, as a result, of ourselves.

"The book changed my life," a member of the Library Minyan told me this past Shabbat. In fact, Savina Teubal’s Sarah the Priestness: The First Matriarch of Genesis changed many lives.

Based on hints in Genesis, and on 5,000-year-old drawings, carvings, relics, and inscriptions on clay tablets, Sarah the Priestess argues that the narratives of the "Sarah tradition" – including those of Rebekah and Rachel – represent a non-patriarchal religious system and social organization that struggled for survival when transplanted from Mesopotamia to Canaan. The book claims that Sarah’s childlessness, her long residence in the terebinth groves of Mamre, the episodes with Pharoah and Abimelech, and, finally, her burial in the cave of Machpelah, are all episodes characteristic of a Mesopotamian priestess and that, in fact, for most of her life Sarah was the avatar of a goddess. She engaged in the highly ritualized hieros gamos (sacred marriage) with both Pharoah and Abimelech, for example, in order to assure bountiful harvests. "...many enigmatic biblical passages that have been all but impossible to explain," writes Teubal, "become intelligible if the women are understood to have held religious offices and to have functioned importantly in that connection within the community." Rachel, for instance, did not steal the teraphim from her father’s house because she was a clever schemer; she did so because she had "every right to the symbols" of her religious position of clan leadership and spiritual power.

Summarily dismissed by traditional biblical scholars or else described, by others (with a smile) as "well, midrash," from the moment it was published Sarah the Priestess nevertheless awoke a longing in Jewish women across the country to reclaim, reconceive, and re-embrace their biblical foremother. Sarah mattered. Sarah’s story mattered. The book ignited women’s imaginations: if we today were to write-women’s -story into the biblical narratives and into Jewish ritual practice, what would that women’s story look like? what would Judaism itself look like? How would we imagine the Divine? what would our values be? what would our community be? What life cycle ceremonies would be important to us? What prayers? What songs? What music? What language? After Sarah the Priestess, Savina Teubal continued to evoke, encourage, seek to respond to, all those questions, writing, teaching, creating the Sarah’s Tent spiritual community and the Simkhat Khokhma for "Entering Elderhood," writing songs set to music by Debbie Friedman and adopted by thousands in the Jewish world. In her late 70s, Savina was like the commentary Ma-ayanah shel Torah describes the biblical matriarch at 100: still filled with the passion of youth, with optimism, and with enthusiasm.

But loved by a community of friends and sister seekers whom she nurtured and inspired, Savina Teubal, whose Hebrew name was Sarah bat Rivkah, died yesterday. Her death came just after mincha, when our Torah portion became Hayeii Sarah, whose opening words announce the death of Sarah. May her name be for a blessing.