Parshat Chayei Sara: My Land, My Love, My Grave
This week’s Torah portion opens with the passing of Avraham’s wife, Sarah. It narrates the back and forth haggling between Avraham and Ephron, the owner of the land Avraham wishes to acquire as a burial plot for his wife. The negotiation doesn’t take place in the privacy of a funeral parlour but in a very public and open forum witnessed by all the townsfolk.
Ephron starts off by offering the land gratis to Avraham but that is soon discovered to be just a ploy to get top dollar. Even though Avraham is in the midst of the pain of his loss, he has to indulge Ephron whose magnanimous gift morphs into a set-up for a price gouge. “What’s 400 silver shekels between friends” Ephron declares with a wink and a nod. Avraham “hears him” loud and clear and forks over the money.
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan points out that the 400 silver shekels Avraham paid for the land was a ridiculously high price. Hundreds of years later, the prophet Jeremiah paid only 17 shekels for a similar plot of land. According to the Hammurabi Code of that time, a whole year’s wage for a working man was between six and eight shekels. To put it in today’s terms, given that the average wage in the USA (according to the US Census Bureau) is about $62,000 and Avraham paid 50 times the average yearly wage, Avraham paid about $3.1 million in today’s dollars for the Machpela Cave to bury Sarah.
All these details serve as a backdrop for us to understand a pivotal point in Jewish history. One can only wonder what must have been going on in Avraham’s mind given the fact that for 62 years, leading up to Sarah’s death, God had repeatedly promised that Avraham would inherit the land of Canaan. Yet during all that time he still didn’t own a sliver of it. Despite all the nice promises by God Himself of a homeland for his future, the fact of the matter is that he had yet to acquire an inch of it.
Until now.
It’s significant that the first realization of God’s many promises of a homeland to Avraham is a grave. And not just any grave but one for his beloved wife, Sarah. It is very symbolic because these are the two greatest acts of intimacy for anyone: A Spouse and a Grave. Yes, you read that correctly. The greatest expressions of intimacy are with one’s spouse and with one’s grave.
Jewish tradition notes that of all the relationships we have, the one of husband and wife is the closest. Adam and Eve are referred to as בשר אחד “one flesh”. They are one being and one entity. The Talmud says that “a wife only dies to her husband and a husband only dies to his wife”. No one else feels the pain of a lost loved-one the way a spouse feels when they lose their beloved. The greatest form of intimacy happens between a husband and wife, not parent-child or any other relationship.
While we generally try not to think too much about it, one also has a very intimate relationship to the grave. We literally become subsumed in our final resting place as our body decomposes into the earth in which we are laid to rest. There is a very primal connection between man and earth from the beginning of Creation when death was the punishment when Adam and Eve, the first couple, sinned. Indeed the generic name of Man – Adam – is related both to his beginning and to his final resting place, Adama which is Hebrew for “earth”.
Most of us give very little thought to the power and attraction of the earth. Farmers, wine-makers and those who work the soil have a very meaningful relationship to the land they live upon. In the movie, Gladiator, Maximus kneels down before a battle, takes a handful of dirt, rubs it between both his hands and smells it. According to director, Ridley Scott it signifies Maximus’ mortality and that he could die there that day, so he wanted to feel the earth he would lie in. Secondly, as a farmer, the earth reminds him of his home and family back in Spain.
The intimate, and dare I suggest, even sexual connection to the Land of Israel is expressed by the prophets who foresaw the return of the Jewish people back to its ancestral homeland after 2000 years of exile. In Isaiah’s prophecy (62:4ff) of his future vision of the Eretz Yisrael, he refers to her as a Be’ula. There is no proper English translation to this word and it is the opposite of Betulah which means “virgin”. If you search for an antonym of “virgin” you will come up with various negative words such as sullied, disgraced, dishonoured, lewd etc. In English, you’d have to use vulgar words to attempt to translate Be’ula but in truth it refers to the intimate, total connection and union that happens when a man and woman are engaged sexually.
Isaiah gets quite explicit when he describes the reconnection of God’s Chosen People and The Promised Land and sees it as akin to the excitement, anticipation and sexual energy that a young man has in anticipation of his wedding night with his virgin bride.
And so it is quite appropriate that the very first time that the very first Hebrew, Avraham actually takes possession of a piece of the land of Israel is via the two greatest expressions of intimacy: Wife and Grave. Eretz Yisrael finally reaches Avraham’s hand through his wife and through her grave.
Thousands of years ago Avraham had his first intimate connection with Eretz Yisrael and it came about only through his beloved Sarah. Today that connection is being repeated over and over and over again by millions of his children and people of all lands and nations as they walk, touch, smell and taste the self-same soil that Avraham did so lovingly 3,500 years ago and that Isaiah envisioned over 2,000 years ago.
The tale that began on the night of my birth
Will be done in a turn of the earth…
Die if I must
Let my bones turn to dust
I’m the lord of the lake and I don’t want to leave it
-Lord Huron
