Avraham mourns Sarah: Eulogy first, then tears
The opening verses of Chayei Sarah, this week’s parsha, inform us of the death of Sarah:
The span of Sarah’s life came to one hundred and twenty-seven years. She died in Kiryat Arba [now Chevron] in the land of Canaan; and Avraham came to eulogize Sarah and weep for her (Genesis 23:1-2).
A bit later we are told, “and then Avraham buried his wife Sarah in the cave of the field of Machpelah, facing Mamre [now Chevron] in the land of Canaan (Genesis 23:19).
She is indeed mentioned much later in the story, when her son Yitzchak takes a bride, Rivka. There we learn, “Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rivka as his wife. Isaac loved her and thus found comfort after his mother’s death” (Genesis 24:67).
Nevertheless, how can I justify choosing Sarah as a “person in the parsha” when she plays no “living” role in the entire episode?
I insist that she does. But to prove it, I must return to the opening verses, where we learn of her grief-stricken husband’s “hesped (eulogy)” and “bechi (weeping).”
To demonstrate the “presence” of the deceased even after death, I must first define these two terms and then distinguish between them. For this purpose, I will share comments on the opening verses of our parsha by three great mid-19th-century commentators, contemporaries of one another but with three different approaches to the text — Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg and Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin, zecher tzaddikim l’vracha.
I’ll begin with Rav Hirsch, rabbi of Frankfurt. He wrote his commentary on the Chumash in German, though I study it in Hebrew translation.
He comments on the phrase “and Avraham came to eulogize and weep.” “Came from where?” he asks.
Many much earlier commentators ask this question as well, and they generally answer that Avraham had come from Beersheba to Chevron, since, as we read at the end of last week’s parsha, he had returned to Beersheba directly from the akedah (the binding of Yitzchak). It was in Beersheba that he learned of Sarah’s death in Chevron, and so he “came” there to bury her.
Rav Hirsch strongly rejects this approach. He insists, as was his wont, that the word vayavo (and he came) often means “he withdrew” or “he secluded himself.” Thus, Avraham withdrew from the public that sought to comfort him and did not address an audience.
His “eulogy” was his own inner response to his personal tragedy, and he secluded himself in a place where he could grieve tearfully for his life partner. It was not a performance before an audience but an expression of his torment, and his tears were shed in the presence of the One Above alone. Only afterward could he “go public” and negotiate for a proper burial place for Sarah.
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Rav Mecklenburg takes an entirely different approach. He reports that in his experience, the mourner first sheds tears and only afterward presents a eulogy. First comes a deeply emotional and wholly personal reaction, tears of pain and heartfelt grief. Then the mourner composes himself somewhat and offers a verbal portrait of the person he lost, so that others can know who the deceased was in his or her lifetime.
But Avraham reverses the sequence: first, the relatively calm public assessment of his wife’s life and its great worth, and only then, the bitter tears of personal loss and bereavement. “Why this reversal?” asks the author of “HaKsav V’HaKabbalah,” the rabbi of Koenigsberg.
His answer is a profoundly religious one. Avraham, he correctly assumes, faithfully believed that “the righteous in their death are greater than in their lifetimes” (Chullin 7b). His priority was to convey Sarah’s life of piety, compassion and achievement to a wide audience. That was, and remains, the purpose of a eulogy in Jewish tradition. It is an assertion of the valuable life the deceased lived, and not primarily an expression of grief.
Only after the eulogy accomplished its mission did Avraham allow himself a tear or two. Perhaps, suggests Rav Mecklenburg, that is why the letter kaf in the word v’livkosa (to weep for her) is written smaller than the surrounding letters in the Torah scroll.
Rav Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin, dean of the yeshiva of Volozhin and author of “Haamek Davar,” has yet another approach. He sees the tears as the mourner’s expression of his or her own reaction to the loss of a loved one, and the eulogy as a kind of biography of the deceased for the benefit of those who did not know much about the person who just died.
Avraham did not “lose” Sarah when she passed away. She left behind a son, a heritage and a model of a way of life. His tears were thus secondary to the educational message he felt he needed to convey, a message he knew Sarah would have wanted him to continue to propagate.
Sarah, although no longer among the living, nevertheless plays a vital role after her death. She is still “present” for Avraham, for his very wide and diverse audience and for her beloved son Yitzchak, who attributes the joy he experiences with his new wife to the fact that she reminds him of his mother!
Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb is executive vice president emeritus of the Orthodox Union.
