Friends, Jews, Landsmen & Landswomen,
We’ve come in Parshat Hayeii Sarah to bury Sarah… but should we also praise her?
I ask, in part, for in all the parshanut classes and women’s Torah classes I’ve taught over the years, every single one of the women admitted that they did not like her.
We may admire Rivka for her courage and conviction. We may admire Rachel for her beauty. But, after all, what is it exactly about Sarah, as she is portrayed in Genesis, that any woman should admire?
To begin with, who, actually, is this woman? From the outset, we know Abraham’s lineage all the way back to Noah’s son Shem, but Sarah’s lineage is ambiguous. Is she Abraham’s half-sister, as he will claim later? Or is she, perhaps, Abraham’s niece, as some of our ancient rabbis suggest?
Moreover, as much as the song written by Debby Friedman and Savina Teubal (z"l) sings of "Lech l’cha" and "L’chi lach," it is Abraham alone to whom God speaks when God orders the patriarch to leave his homeland and everything familiar to him. Unlike Rivka a generation later, there’s no sign at all in our Torah that the wife of Abraham, Sarah, is given a choice.
How appealing as a role model is THAT?
Unlike Rivka, Rachel, and Leah, moreover, we never experience Sarah as a young woman. She is 75 years old when we first meet her, after all.
We see the generous, friendly Rivka at the well; we see the beautiful, gracious Rachel at the well, but it is not the elderly Sarah, but the young Hagar, who is associated with the well in Genesis.
And whatever justifications we or the ancient rabbis can find for Sarah’s behavior toward Hagar, still – it feels harsh & cruel to most people. The old woman demands that the young woman (and her child!) be cast out.
How attractive is THAT?
Experience suggests to me, however, that the ambivalence many Jewish women feel toward Sarah eemaynu is not only because of Sarah herself.
I’d like to suggest, rather, that women’s ambivalence toward Sarah is rooted just as much in who we are, as in whom we imagine her to be:
I’d like to suggest that Sarah, for us, embodies, first, our own long secondary position within Judaism. We project into Sarah our own sense of marginalization. As one prominent Masorti rabbi has insisted in opposing the inclusion of the imahot in the opening of the Amidah, "God did NOT cut a covenant with the matriarchs"…. any more, really, than the sign of the covenant is "engraved in our flesh" as women.
No wonder, then, some of us feel passionately about the inclusion of the matriarchs in the first paragraph of the Amidah – it is ourselves we are asking to be included.
Secondly, Sarah, I believe, embodies our own ambivalences and unease about our own mothers, about fertility and maternality themselves, and, above all, towards growing old.
Living in a country in which 3.5 million women have had some kind of cosmetic surgery, how many of us, after all, accept our aging with grace and perhaps even with pleasure?
How many of us perceive beauty in the face of the aged?
How many of us imagine a beautiful Rivka, a lovely Rachel, an exotically attractive if desperate Hagar, but a somewhat dried-up, wrinkled, pushy, bitter old Sarah, perhaps even with little hairs growing out of her chin?
How many of us regard Sarah, at the least, with some kind of distaste, and at the most as a source of embarrassment?
And yet, as is so characteristic of our tradition, midrash comes in to fill in the blanks left by the Torah. In this case, it is as if the ancient rabbis themselves also longed for a more present, a more vivid, Sarah, as if they were determined to see her not merely as the First Lady to Mr. President, but also as a powerful foreparent in her own right.
Even more than a foreparent. In the spiritual imaginations of our rabbis, Sarah is transformed into an all-encompassing Archetypal Feminine. Whereas the myths of other ancient cultures make clear distinctions between the figure of the All-Giving Great Mother, the Beautiful Daughter, and the Wise Woman (for example: Ceres, Persephone, Athena), in the eyes of the rabbis, Sarah is all three.
She is at once breathtakingly Beautiful, a loving and a loyal Wife, a generous Mother, and a wise woman – indeed a prophet.
Let’s review Sarah’s life from the rabbis’ perspective.
Firstly, from the very outset, the rabbis saw Sarah has one of the four most beautiful women in the world – according to the Talmud’s Rabbi Yitzhak, she was also called "Yiscah," as in Genesis 11:29, because everyone "gazed" on her in light of her extraordinary beauty. And the rabbis have a different association with the name "Yiscah" as well, for, they say, this most beautiful of women had a special wisdom: She is "Yiscah" because was able to "gaze" with the Divine Spirit. In other words, Sarah was also our first Prophet. And that is why, later in the story, God tells Abraham, "whatever Sarah says, do as she says."
Like Avigail generations later, therefore, the first matriarch, Sarah, is both "beautiful and wise."
Beautiful, wise, and, thirdly, say the rabbis, a powerful and transformative leader. Explaining what Torah meant by Abraham and Sarah leaving their homeland with "the persons that they had acquired in Haran," the rabbis in Genesis Rabbah (39:14) explain that "Abram converted the men and Sarah converted the women."
Fourthly, Sarah is also portrayed by our rabbis as a generous, endlessly nurturant, Mother Earth nourishing the peoples of the world. For when Abraham weaned Isaac and held a great feast (Gen 21:8), the Talmud (Baba Metzia 87a) tells us that all the nations of the world gossiped, saying, "Did you see that old man and old woman, who brought an orphan from the marketplace and claim that he is their son?" So Abraham and Sarah invited all the great ones of their generation; the wives all brought their babies – and Sarah’s breasts opened like two fountains, and she nursed them all.
It is said that all those who become Jews by choice, and all those who feel a sense of awe for God, are descended from those who nursed at Sarah’s breasts. (Pesikta Rabbati)
There is another quality that Sarah had that, I think, possesses a rather poignant and powerful lesson for us. You may recall from Lech L’cha, not long after Abram and Sarah arrive in the Negev, there is a famine, and like their descendants after them, they make their way to Egypt to find food. As they were about to enter Egypt, Abram says (Gen 12:11): Hiney-nah yadahti ki ishah yifat-mar’eh aht. Or, as we might translate his words into contemporary English: "Wow, I suddenly get what a gorgeous woman you are!"
Why is it, ask the rabbis, that after all these years, it is only now that Abram realizes that his wife is beautiful?
One of the answers given in Genesis Rabbah is: some people become worn out, dirtied, sullied by the rigors of the journey, but Sarah became only more beautiful.
Perhaps we can see that, too, as a metaphor for all of our lives. We start out with such smooth skin, edenic in its beauty and innocence.
The journey of life takes its toll on us. We get our emotional, spiritual, and physical wrinkles. We walk less quickly and less straight. We who have accumulated lifetimes of memories remember less.
And yet, holding Sarah in our imaginations as a role model, we can claim that it is not solely the untouched quality of youth that is beautiful. There is a different kind of beauty in having endured the rigors of the journey without getting sullied, without compromising our integrity, without giving up our dreams. Hiney-nah yadahti ki ishah yifat-mar’eh aht….
In the end, our first Patriarch and our First Matriarch together become magnificently moving role models for us.
The Talmudic tractate of Bava Batra (58a) relates a touching story to us. Rabbi B’na’ah comes to the Cave of Machpelah, where he finds Eliezer, Abraham’s servant in the entrance to the cave. "What is Abraham doing?" the rabbi asks Eliezer. Eliezer responds,
Abraham is "lying in Sarah’s arms,
And she is gazing fondly at his head."
Who among us could ask, in the end, for anything more?
Shabbat Shalom.