chayei sarah Archives - Rachael's Centre

Parshat Chayei Sarah: A Blessing on Your Head…I Think

Two old men are sitting on a park bench together one afternoon watching the people walking by (stop me if you’ve heard this one). A group of young girls stroll by chatting. One old man leans to the other and says ‘I can’t believe how short their skirts are, you can see everything, including their pupiks!’ The second man turns to his friend and says, ‘I agree! What a bracha…I mean a broch!’

For non-Yiddish speakers, the punchline is the second man saying ‘what a blessing…I mean a disaster!’

As much as we believe that a blessing would be a universal thing, the truth is that blessings are usually quite subjective. They are layered with assumptions and expectations that we then project onto each other almost without thinking. When I was growing up, if I was at a wedding it would be only polite for women to wish single women ‘Mirtzem bi-you’, (God willing this should happen to you). The assumption is that every woman would want to be married and that single women should not feel envious of the bride because we have prayed that God should make her a bride soon. We don’t say that so much anymore, I hope that’s because we have understood that blessings have the power to communicate more than we intended.

Judaism views blessings as double edged swords. The very general, non-specific ones are great. We bless each other with happiness and long life. I have had occasions to sit with family members discussing insurance policies a few times over the years. Most of those occasions involved insurance agents who were Jewish (once it was a friend of ours who is a Lubavitch Rabbi). The conversation took much longer than it needed to. Life insurance discussions would always involve following any example with ‘you should live to 120’; disability insurance policies were explained with every other sentence being ‘you shouldn’t know from this, not you, not your family, not anyone we know’. After signing the policy with our friend, the Lubavitch Rabbi, he reminded us that he is also a sofer (scribe) and set aside time to check all our mezuzahs. Once, I sat in such a meeting with a non-Jewish insurance agent —I couldn’t do it. I kept wanting to say ‘God should keep us all safe and healthy (amen)’.

Blessings are powerful and empowering moments we offer each other, but we’re not often taught how to do that. When someone sneezes, we may offer the traditional ‘God bless you’. Historically, that is not because we are worried the sneeze indicated they were getting sick, but because during the instant of sneezing they were left unaware and that’s when Satan can enter the soul. We protect them by invoking God’s name. The Hebrew sneeze response, ‘livriyut’, means ‘to health’, more of a Jewish response —the offer of a blessing. Even when we say goodbye to each other, most of us forget that the word ‘goodbye’ is a short form for the original phrase ‘God be with ye’, the blessing we offered each other before departing and encountering danger on the roads (God forbid). In Yiddish, the traditional parting phrase is ‘zei gezunt’, ‘be healthy’ —another blessing offered to each other.

While we all exchange and feel positively about the general blessings we offer each other, the specific ones are when it can get tricky. Offering the blessing of an upcoming marriage to a single woman assumes she would want that for herself; offering the blessing of children to a woman who has suffered a recent miscarriage is well intentioned but often times painful to the recipient. There is an art to crafting a blessing, but most of us are not taught the technique.

In this week’s parshah, Chayei Sarah, the upcoming matriarch, Rebecca, has chosen to leave her home, her family, and marry Isaac, sight unseen. Her family offers her a blessing: “May you become (the mother of) hundreds of thousands and may your seed inherit the gates of their enemies.” It’s a beautiful blessing, who wouldn’t want hordes of descendants and to inherit gates of enemies? If I inherit their gates, it means I outlived them. I didn’t have to battle them, I simply endured longer than they did —I waited them out. What could be the problem?

The midrash points out that this blessing is a double edged sword. For me to inherit the gates of my enemies, I must accept the inheritance and claim their cities. What if they don’t live near me? What if I don’t want what they had? What if their things are a constant reminder to me of the suffering experienced at their hands? What if I want to close that chapter, feel relieved that they’re gone, and never have to think of them again? Why would I want their past constantly in my present and speaking into my future? What if I don’t think it’s a blessing?

Then the midrash points out that these sentiments were also expressed to the patriarch, Isaac. Now what has been offered to Rebecca is her own legacy of blessing to bring to her marriage. She will not fulfill her future by trying to find ways to enter the blessings of Isaac. That’s what happened to Sarah, that’s how Abraham ended up with Hagar, fathering Ishmael.

Between the first generation of ancestry and the second generation, we watch the balance of blessings be introduced between patriarch and matriarch. The blessing sits in the balance.

It’s not so easy to bless each other. We must always be careful of nuance, personal preferences and the appropriate opportunities to offer someone our most heartfelt prayer of something beautiful. We’ll never learn the skill if we don’t take a risk and start offering a blessing to each other.

May we all stay healthy and well, and may God bring wisdom to those seeking cures and vaccines. Amen.

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Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week. I had an interesting adventure this week that involved a trip to Ikea, a 4 year old girl and confronting my own integrity. It happened within seconds of entering an Ikea store. Between you and me, it happens to me within seconds every time I go into an Ikea store…I get lost. To be clear, I enjoy the bright colours and the way things are set up so that I can leave the outside world outside for the time I spend in Ikea. The problem is that the time I spend in Ikea gets longer and longer because I’m trying to find my way through the labyrinth of aisles and displays. I follow the arrows on the floor and try and see the number codes hanging from the ceiling all at the same time. It results in my eyes quickly moving from floor to ceiling and back and forth until I wonder if it got dark outside yet.

A few days ago I had to take a family member with me, a little 4 year old girl. I picked her up from school and we merrily sang of our ‘girl adventure’ to the furniture store. I had pretzels waiting in the car for a fun snack and we held hands as we skipped into Ikea (ok, we didn’t really skip but you get the picture).

This Ikea was the same as any Ikea I’ve ever gone into in my city. The ground entryway immediately leads to a staircase to the floor where the furniture displays begin. We walked up the stairs and I stopped to get my bearings. I’m not sure what my facial expression was or if my hand stiffened as I held hers but something prompted this little cherubic 4 year old to tug on my hand and say: ‘are we lost?’

I immediately lied and said, ‘of course not’. That’s when I confronted my own integrity and realized she deserved the truth. I looked at her and said, ‘I’m always lost’ followed by a realization that I needed to provide context and added ‘in this store’. I told her I would watch the signs on the ceiling if she could keep us going in the direction of the arrows on the floor. Team work, I thought – maybe I should tell her ‘team work makes the dream work’, or maybe I should just zip it and focus on the signs above. Everything was working beautifully until I heard those dreaded words from her, ‘I need to pee’. I felt the blood drain to my feet.

All of this happened yesterday and since then I’ve been thinking about my moments of honesty and judgment in securing a little 4 year old without lying to her. Then I wondered about what circumstances might indeed prompt me to lie to anyone and then I thought about being a woman in Judaism today and that I could never be called as a witness in an Orthodox court because women cannot be witnesses. I can never sign as a witness on a Ketubah, as my signature would invalidate the document if it were ever needed in an Orthodox court. ‘But’, I said in my heart, ‘I tell the truth in Ikea! Why can’t I be a witness?’ And then I thought of this week’s parshah: Chayei Sarah.

In the parshah, Abraham makes his servant, Eliezer, take an oath. In order to take the oath, Abraham tells him to place his hand under his thigh. The oath is administered in that position. I remember learning this portion as a little girl in school and wondering what on earth could be so important about grabbing the back of your thigh. I thought it made you look ridiculous. How much more noble to ‘raise your right hand’ like they did on the Perry Mason shows. I had one of my first questions of Jewish difference at that moment: just because we’re Jews doesn’t mean we have to do EVERYTHING so differently! It wasn’t until decades later that I realized ‘under the thigh’ is where the testicles are – a nuance completely lost in my little girl Jewish world.

Taking an oath in the ancient world meant that a man would hold his manhood and symbolically put it on the line if he should break the oath. He is now risking everything to fulfill the vow and therefore I can believe he will move heaven and earth to get it done. He is believed because he placed his hand ‘under his thigh’. It certainly beats the childhood oath of ‘cross my heart and hope to die’ – a phrase every parent is horrified by. (By the way, as a child in a Jewish school we were all making ‘x’ signs on our hearts, it’s actually supposed to be a Christian cross on the heart – boy did we get that one wrong).

So, if a man takes an oath by risking his external maleness, how could a woman do anything comparable? How would you believe a woman taking an oath, in the ancient world, if she cannot put up collateral to hold her to her word the way a man can? It is a biologically skewed system of exclusion. But it’s not saying a woman can’t be believed, it’s saying we don’t have a comparable mechanism to administer. That should all have changed in the modern world.

Today, no one goes into a court of law and grabs their genitals. I dare say they might be found in contempt of court if they tried. Women in a secular court are administered an oath the same way a man is and are held to the same legal standards. But the Jewish courts never equalized things when the rabbinic courts introduced oath taking in God’s name. Clearly, no one goes into a Jewish court with the biblical ‘under the thigh’ gesture, everyone invokes God’s name to tell the truth. Lying under those circumstances is the definition of “taking God’s Name in vain’, a commandment equally binding on men and women.

It’s time for women’s equal oath taking status to move through the Jewish world. If a woman can bear witness without restriction in Judaism, then she can hold leadership roles without restriction as well, and that, I believe, is the political issue at stake that impedes this.

And just before we conclude how wonderfully modern and egalitarian our western secular world is, let’s not forget that a witness in our courts is called to ‘testify’ as they give their ‘testimony’, words that root back to a man being believed in his words because of what he holds in his hands under his thigh.

See? I told you trips to Ikea are never as simple as they seem.