Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah, Chayei Sarah, begins with the death of the first biblical matriarch. At the end of last week’s reading, Sarah’s husband Abraham nearly slaughtered their son Isaac, heeding a divine command that was rescinded only at the last minute. Several commentaries see the narrative proximity between the binding of Isaac and Sarah’s death as suggesting that the former actually cost Sarah her life. As the medieval interpreter Rashi writes, “Through the announcement of the Binding [of Isaac], and the fact that her son had been made ready for sacrifice and had almost been killed, Sarah’s soul fled from her.” One classical midrash imagines this even more vividly, explaining that when Isaac described his ordeal to his mother, “she cried out six cries, corresponding to six shofar blasts. They say that she did not complete them before she died.”

In a 1939 homily on our parshah, delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto just two months after his son was killed in the German invasion of Poland, the Hasidic rebbe Kalonymus Kalman Shapira invoked Sarah’s anguish and death to articulate a theological response to his own pain and that of his community. Shapira first cites the Talmudic sage Reish Lakish, who believed in the benefits of suffering: “Just as salt sweetens the taste of meat, so too does suffering cleanse a person’s transgressions.” But Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rimanov, a late 18th- and early 19th-century Polish Hasidic leader, was uncomfortable with this claim, and Shapira cites him more approvingly: “Just as meat is ruined when salted too heavily,” Rabbi Menachem Mendel explained in a revision of Reish Lakish’s analogy, “so too can a person be damaged by excess suffering. For suffering to be positive, it needs to be tempered with mercy.” Building on this view, Shapira teaches that Sarah died to teach God a lesson. “She died,” he writes, “in order to show God” that it is wrong for anyone “to be expected to suffer excessively”—that is, she voluntarily succumbed to this fate to demonstrate its injustice. Her death, in this interpretation, was a protest against God and a demand for a more ethical future. For this Shapira extols her; because her actions were done for the benefit of others, he sees them as entirely virtuous.

Of course, as Shapira himself was all too aware, Sarah’s protest did not succeed; we live in a world in which violence and extreme suffering are commonplace. In light of this grim reality, perhaps we can understand his invocation of the matriarch as a call to continue making her demand, in less self-destructive but no less committed ways—to refuse to defend or rationalize unnecessary suffering, no matter the context. If the near-sacrifice of one child, at God’s command, justified such an all-encompassing protest against the divinely ordered world, then all the more so are we obligated to stand up against human authorities that wreak death and destruction against children on a far vaster scale.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.