Chayei Sarah | The Aliveness of Sarah and Hagar

In this week's Torah portion, the Living of Sarah, Sarah's aliveness continues beyond the death of her body. Our actions reverberate for generations, their energies marked on our DNA and passed on to be celebrated, mourned and healed.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

— The Five Remembrances, Thich Nhat Hanh, The Plum Village Chanting Book.

 

The Healing of Sarah and Hagar

Torah recounts the life of Sarah by her years of soul growth and by the healing that comes after her death. She leaves her tent standing  empty and available, holding space for the return of the light of love and comfort through the union of Rebecca and Isaac.

This is just one way her death opens space for the rising of others. The ones she has touched and left behind are not the same after her death. The world is healed with this  continuity. Something new is birthed.

Medieval Torah commentator Rashi wrote that Sarah's great power continued in Rebecca,  her future daughter-in-law and mother of Jacob/Israel and Esau:

For whilst Sarah was living, a light had been burning in the tent from one Sabbath eve to the next, there was always a blessing in the dough (a miraculous increase) and a cloud was always hanging over the tent (as a divine protection), but since her death all these had stopped. However, when Rebecca came, they reappeared

— Genesis Rabbah 60:16

Hagar too heals and restores the capacity to love. Her traumatic expulsion into the desert was the descent that led her to seeing and being seen, a healing of generational trauma.

וְיִצְחָק בָּא מִבּוֹא בְּאֵר לַחַי רֹאִי וְהוּא יוֹשֵׁב בְּאֶרֶץ הַנֶּגֶב׃

Isaac had just come back from the vicinity of Beer-lahai-roi, Well of the Living One Seeing Me, for he was settled in the region of the Negeb.

Genesis 24:62

Isaac returns from the Well of the Living One Seeing Me, the place named by Hagar. He had fled there, traumatized and brokenhearted, after Abraham's abandonment and Sarah's sudden death. The Well of the Living One Seeing Me is where trauma is healed from the energy of Hagar's encounter with Elohim, Life-Giver. At this well of flowing water, flowing life, Hagar saw the Living One seeing her, the moment of healing from trauma.

As Thomas Hubl explains about trauma healing, "when I feel you feeling me; when I see you seeing me, that is a moment of healing. When I see and feel you, and know you receive my presence, that is a healing moment. Hagar's healing from the trauma between her and Sarah opens Isaac's heart to love again. He meets Rebecca and his heart is restored in Sarah's tent.

וַיְבִאֶהָ יִצְחָק הָאֹהֱלָה שָׂרָה אִמּוֹ וַיִּקַּח אֶת־רִבְקָה וַתְּהִי־לוֹ לְאִשָּׁה וַיֶּאֱהָבֶהָ וַיִּנָּחֵם יִצְחָק אַחֲרֵי אִמּוֹ׃

Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife. Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.

Genesis 24:67

Sarah and Hagar created the healing vessels for Rebecca and Isaac's love. Both Sarah and Hagar are princesses, prophetesses and healers. Once Sarah's soul flies out of her, Hagar and Sarah merge in love. Their bodies and souls are fragrant and pure as incense. Ketorah, Hebrew for the fragrant incense, is their new name:

וַיֹּסֶף אַבְרָהָם וַיִּקַּח אִשָּׁה וּשְׁמָהּ קְטוּרָה׃

Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah

Genesis 25:1

This is Hagar. She is called Keturah because her deeds were now as pleasing as the ketoret, the incense offered in the Holy Temple. (Midrash Rabbah; Rashi)

וַיִּקְבְּרוּ אֹתוֹ יִצְחָק וְיִשְׁמָעֵאל בָּנָיו אֶל־מְעָרַת הַמַּכְפֵּלָה אֶל־שְׂדֵה עֶפְרֹן בֶּן־צֹחַר הַחִתִּי אֲשֶׁר עַל־פְּנֵי מַמְרֵא׃

His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre,

הַשָּׂדֶה אֲשֶׁר־קָנָה אַבְרָהָם מֵאֵת בְּנֵי־חֵת שָׁמָּה קֻבַּר אַבְרָהָם וְשָׂרָה אִשְׁתּוֹ׃

the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites; there Abraham was buried, and Sarah his wife.

Genesis 25:9-10

וְאֵלֶּה שְׁנֵי חַיֵּי יִשְׁמָעֵאל מְאַת שָׁנָה וּשְׁלֹשִׁים שָׁנָה וְשֶׁבַע שָׁנִים וַיִּגְוַע וַיָּמׇת וַיֵּאָסֶף אֶל־עַמָּיו׃

These were the years of the life of Ishmael: one hundred and thirty-seven years; then he breathed his last and died, and was gathered to his kin.

Genesis 25:17

The Aliveness of Sarah ends with the healing of Isaac and Ishmael/Ismail. The brothers come together to bury Abraham in the place of peace established by Abraham' for Sarah, and the indigenous people of the land. Torah then  recounts Ishmael's passing.  Ishmael/Ismail, meaning Seen By God, is gathered to his kin. Abraham has integrated the suffering, healing and awakening of Sarah and Hagar, and himself achieved .

Even before Abraham's sons reunited, before Isaac found a wife, Torah tells us that:

וְאַבְרָהָם זָקֵן בָּא בַּיָּמִים וַיהֹוָה בֵּרַךְ אֶת־אַבְרָהָם בַּכֹּל׃

Abraham was old, advanced in years, and Eternally Present had blessed Abraham with everything.

Genesis 24:1

This בַּכֹּֽל, everything, is the healing from the integration of the women who suffered and trusted. The beauty of the healing brought by these two women is in painful contrast to the suffering and injustices they suffered. This is hard medicine to swallow — that Abraham's enlightenment, the healing of the families, was at the cost of, on the back of, the suffering of Sarah and Hagar. The Torah doesn't flinch from showing us, over and over, how much of what we have has been gained on the backs of the suffering of women. Our Torah today, an evolutionary necessity, is to find ways to advance all of us without sacrificing anyone.

 

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My Mother’s Body

By Marge Piercy

 

1.

The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:

then hawkfaced pain seized you
threw you so you fell with a sharp
cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.
My father heard the crash but paid
no mind, napping after lunch

yet fifteen hundred miles north
I heard and dropped a dish.
Your pain sunk talons in my skull
and crouched there cawing, heavy
as a great vessel filled with water,

oil or blood, till suddenly next day
the weight lifted and I knew your mind
had guttered out like the Chanukah
candles that burn so fast, weeping
veils of wax down the chanukiya.

Those candles were laid out,
friends invited, ingredients bought
for latkes and apple pancakes,
that holiday for liberation
and the winter solstice

when tops turn like little planets.
Shall you have all or nothing
take half or pass by untouched?
Nothing you got, Nun said the dreydl
as the room stopped spinning.

The angel folded you up like laundry
your body thin as an empty dress.
Your clothes were curtains
hanging on the window of what had
been your flesh and now was glass.

Outside in Florida shopping plazas
loudspeakers blared Christmas carols
and palm trees were decked with blinking
lights. Except by the tourist
hotels, the beaches were empty.

Pelicans with pregnant pouches
flapped overhead like pterodactyls.
In my mind I felt you die.
First the pain lifted and then
you flickered and went out.

2.

I walk through the rooms of memory.
Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths,
every chair ghostly and muted.

Other times memory lights up from within
bustling scenes acted just the other side
of a scrim through which surely I could reach

my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain
of time which is and isn’t and will be
the stuff of which we’re made and unmade.

In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen
your first nasty marriage just annulled,
thin from your abortion, clutching a book

against your cheek and trying to look
older, trying to look middle class,
trying for a job at Wanamaker’s,

dressing for parties in cast off
stage costumes of your sisters. Your eyes
were hazy with dreams. You did not

notice me waving as you wandered
past and I saw your slip was showing.
You stood still while I fixed your clothes,

as if I were your mother. Remember me
combing your springy black hair, ringlets
that seemed metallic, glittering;

remember me dressing you, my seventy year
old mother who was my last dollbaby,
giving you too late what your youth had wanted.

3.

What is this mask of skin we wear,
what is this dress of flesh,
this coat of few colors and little hair?

This voluptuous seething heap of desires
and fears, squeaking mice turned up
in a steaming haystack with their babies?

This coat has been handed down, an heirloom
this coat of black hair and ample flesh,
this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.

This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks
they provided cushioning for my grandmother
Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me

and we all sat on them in turn, those major
muscles on which we walk and walk and walk
over the earth in search of peace and plenty.

My mother is my mirror and I am hers.
What do we see? Our face grown young again,
our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant.

Our arms quivering with fat, eyes
set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy,
our belly seamed with childbearing,

Give me your dress that I might try it on.
Oh it will not fit you mother, you are too fat.
I will not fit you mother.

I will not be the bride you can dress,
the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew,
a dog’s leather bone to sharpen your teeth.

You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.
Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks
barbed and drawing blood with their caress.

My twin, my sister, my lost love,
I carry you in me like an embryo
as once you carried me.

4.

What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?
Did I truly think you could put me back inside?
Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten
furnace and be recast, that I would become you?

What did you fear in me, the child who wore
your hair, the woman who let that black hair
grow long as a banner of darkness, when you
a proper flapper wore yours cropped?

You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery
flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough.
Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat.
Secretly the bones formed in the bread.

I became willful, private as a cat.
You never knew what alleys I had wandered.
You called me bad and I posed like a gutter
queen in a dress sewn of knives.

All I feared was being stuck in a box
with a lid. A good woman appeared to me
indistinguishable from a dead one
except that she worked all the time.

Your payday never came. Your dreams ran
with bright colors like Mexican cottons
that bled onto the drab sheets of the day
and would not bleach with scrubbing.

My dear, what you said was one thing
but what you sang was another, sweetly
subversive and dark as blackberries
and I became the daughter of your dream.

This body is your body, ashes now
and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,
my throat, my thighs. You run in me
a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,
you sing in my mind like wine. What you
did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

— Marge Piercy, “My mother’s body” from The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, 1999

 

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Kin

by Mohja Kahf

Sarah, you massaged my sacrum
with a tennis ball when I was in labor.
Like a priestess of the body, you
wiped the newborn Ismail clean
of birthblood and whispered first
holy words into his ear. You are his mother
too. We are kin. No decrees
of man or God can make this truer
than it is, nor can it be cloven.

We did not begin with the husband we shared,
but in Egypt, with divine
intelligence arrowed from eye to eye
across a patio of pagan strangers,
when I was royalty and you were trembling
in the house. You knew exile and I
knew exile. You suffered and I suffered.

Like matter, kinship can be changed
but not destroyed. Cruelty tarnishes,
but cannot dissolve it. We are kin
from bread baked together,
salted, broken, eaten, sacred
as a challah braid at sunset on the Night of Power;
from the battering waters of the sea we crossed;
from the Tree of Life whose branches
we burned to stay alive. Kin
we are from knowledge of the Name;

you had the first letters, I had the last
and, putting them together, we
spelled out the Secret.

“Kin” by Mohja Kahf is from Hagar Poems (University of Arkansas Press, 2016).

 

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For more of my writing on Chayyei Sarah: https://torahattheintersection.com/chayei-sarah-road-to-hebron/