The life and death of Sarah

This week’s parashah is confusingly called “The Life of Sarah.” What makes this confusing is that it begins with Sarah’s death, and turns immediately to the negotiations about her burial, saying nothing about her life.

Imagine that you were called on to deliver a eulogy for Sarah. What would you say? Although Jewish tradition considers Sarah a paragon of both beauty and piety, much of what we know about her from the Torah is neither beautiful nor, by our standards, pious.

The episode that follows the burial of Sarah gives some apparently unwitting clues. It concerns the mission of Abraham’s servant, presumably Eliezer, to obtain a wife for Isaac from among Abraham’s kinfolk back in Haran.

Although this story is most often cited as a proof text opposing intermarriage, its structure suggests other lessons. To a modern reader, the way that the servant’s prayer is promptly and completely answered seems too pat, but to the Biblical mind it must have seemed entirely appropriate. He asks for a sign that he’s choosing the right woman, and God immediately provides exactly the sign that he requested.

But will Rebekah agree to this? Will anyone agree to it? Again, the modern mind recoils from the idea that a young woman would promise to go with a stranger who promises her a husband in another country, or that her family would consent.
Yet within the context of the story, it is seen as perfectly reasonable.

To be fair, it wasn’t so very uncommon, in the America of the nineteenth century or the first part of the twentieth, for an immigrant family to send back to the “old country” for a bride for a son, which is more or less what happens here. But the way it happens tell us a lot about Rebekah.

First, she’s decisive. Second, she’s adventurous. One of our resource books on teaching Torah suggests having students stage a debate between Abraham and Sarah about whether to go to Canaan. But Sarah was already married to Abraham, so Rebekah is even more courageous.

Rebekah seems to be like Sarah in other ways, and there’s a hint of this in the parashah, which tells us, “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” (24:67).

The servant’s prayer is one of the earliest examples of petitionary prayer in the Bible. It seems somewhat meretricious, especially because it asks for an external sign. But in context it’s entirely proper, because the servant is praying for God’s help in accomplishing what Abraham believes God wants.