CHOCHMAS NASHIM: CHAYEI SARA: TAKE TWO
By: Suri Davis
Breathe. I’m talking to myself.
The life of Sarah, I’m Sarah.
Been struggling for days now to understand the message of the verse that Abraham eulogized Sarah, but then the Torah doesn’t tell us what he says.
So some say that it was Abraham, and not Solomon, who eulogized Sarah with the famous Eishet Chayil/Woman of Valor poem which we sing on Friday night, but no one explained how the verses fit Sarah’s life!
So what about Sarah? What do we know from pshat/text about Sarah. She traveled around the world with Abraham, sometimes pretending she was his sister so he wouldn’t be killed. She laughed when she was told that she was going to have a son in her old age.
She gave her maidservant Hagar to Abraham and they had a son named Yishmael, and then forced Abraham to force Hagar and Yishmael to leave their home because they were a bad influence on their own son Isaac.
So what exactly are we gonna say about her?
The answer is that there is a lot to say about her and her virtue, but it is all set out in commentary. There is a hint of what she is when the three visitors/angels visit Abraham and they ask Abraham where Sarah is, he replies, “she’s in the tent.”
OK, so what’s happening in the tent? We find that out from Rashi’s commentary AFTER Sarah’s death, when Isaac brings Rebecca, his bride, into his mother’s tent and we are told that the three good deeds/miracles of Sarah were rekindled when Rebecca entered the tent: There was the cloud of glory over the tent, that the challah did not spoil from week to week, and that her candles remained lit from week to week.
So one could say, that the reason Abraham eulogized her was because it wasn’t apparent what her merits were. Looking at the Yalkut Meam Loez, there are pages upon pages of commentaries on eulogizing the righteous which is sourced from this one eulogy for Sarah. Why was this concept expounded for all generations to come upon Sarah’s death, and not upon Adam, Eve or Abraham’s death, or anyone else in the Torah? I couldn’t find an answer, so I’ll take a shot. Abraham’s actions are very well reported in the Torah, his statesmanship and relationship with other nations, very external, and not a mystery. A woman’s role “bat melech pnima/the virtue of a princess is internal” is not apparent at all. It is the engine inside a Lamborghini. On the street, we ooh and ahh the body, but the real connoisseurs open the latch and look at the engine, which isn’t open to all but those who are searching for the real value of the car.
The righteous never really die, because their virtue carries forward with momentum, which became clear when Rebecca entered Sarah’s tent. It was Abraham who fully knew the virtue inside Sarah’s tent.
In this day and age of showmanship, social media and hundreds of television stations, glam girl rules. But a eulogy on the surface of a person doesn’t go very far, and the glam is eaten by worms at death. The long term spiritual legacy permits a person to live on forever.
Shabbat shalom.
Suri