Sarah’s lifetime-the span of Sarah’s life-came to one hundred and twenty-seven years. Sarah died in Kiriath-arba-now Hebron-in the land of Canaan; and Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her. Then Abraham rose from beside his dead, and spoke to the Hittites, saying, “I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site among you, that I may remove my dead for burial.” B’reysheet/Genesis 23:1-4
While the Torah has recorded the deaths of numerous individuals, it is in our parasha that we are introduced to burial and mourning rituals. Avraham must pause during his sadness and loss to deal with the practical necessities of the moment. For our patriarch this is complicated by his being a resident alien and therefore not permitted to own land. This necessitates Abraham’s requesting, and ultimately receiving, special dispensation from the local Hittites to acquire the Cave of Machpelah as a family burial place.
Through the ages, Cha”zal, our ancient sages sought to explain each of the terms used to describe Avraham’s grieving process. A consensus develops around each term with the suggestion that mourning involves the process of eulogizing and speaking about the deceased whereas bewailing is seen as the emotional outpouring brought on by the sense of loss. A challenge raised to this understanding is that the terms seem to be in reverse order. Our first response to the loss of a loved one is emotional, and it is only later that we can begin to share thoughts, stories, and reflections. Some commentators, such as the Gaon of Vilna, reads these terms as an ongoing process wherein mourning becomes the ongoing activity which less frequently triggers tears of sadness as time passes.
The roiling emotions we experience when losing a loved one necessitate an immediate release of grief. Like Avraham, we are required to put these on hold to deal with necessities of the moment, reflected in our text by Avraham’s request to bury Sarah, literally, “to remove the deceased from before me”. It becomes a first step in the grieving process, the beginnings of a journey that in our day takes us from funeral through Shiva, to Shloshim, through a period of saying Kaddish, and eventually to the annual marking of our loved one’s Yahrzeit and the recitation of Yizkor. Each of these are landmarks along the mourner’s journey, guiding the mourner through the immediate maelstrom of emotion towards a crystallization of the role of our lost loved ones as a source of blessing and strength that travels with us.
Shabbat Shalom –
Rabbi David M. Eligberg
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