I begin to write this erev Shabbat email from the Berlin airport, and I will, im yirtzeh HaShem (G*dwilling) finish it in Israel. In the past six weeks I have been in Italy, Paris, and Berlin and am now on my way to our ancestral homeland. Italy, sure, a nice place to visit; and in Paris we have relatives. But Berlin? In a million years I never expected my personal life journey to take me there.
On this week of our Torah reading Hayyei Sarah, the life of Sarah, which serves as her epitath, I can’t help but think of the travels of our great Mother, who showed us so much about the path of life and where it leads – and how you could never anticipate what will come to you along the way.
Sarah, whose life started as Sarai, was, according to the scholarly theory of Savina Teubal, more than likely a working priest in the community of Ishtar in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. I could have said priestess of the religious cult of Ishtar but that language is rather dismissive in English, and Ishtar was not easily dismissable in the land of Ur and Erekh, where she encouraged love and ensured a good harvest, but also promised merciless war against all who threatened her people.
We tend toward stories of the Patriarchs when discerning life lessons from Torah, but the Hebrew Scriptures more than once bids us “remember Sarah your mother, and [not only] Abraham your father, as the rock from which you were hewn.” Sarai married a nice young man in Ur who one day suddenly asked her to drop everything and join him in his abrupt decision to leave their lives and go. Where? not sure.
For Sarai, who if Teubal is correct had a steady job, social standing, and a pension, and who was building herself a life along established respected lines, how can we understand this? Did she welcome the chance to do something wildly different than other women like her? was she indulging a midlife crisis when she said she’d go along on this open-ended journey? Wasn’t this decision only going to derail the life she’d planned?
By the end of that long life, everything she would have expected at the beginning had been upended. Instead of an influential position at court in an urban imperial center, she was freelancing; instead of being a childless career woman, she had borne a son. Weirdest of all, she had left an agricultural community ordered by fealty to the almighty G*ddess Ishtar and so lush that the area’s Sumerian name may be the referent for Eden; left it for a kind of arid Wild West of small nomadic bands, no libraries or museums* and an invisible and highly demanding male G*d.
But that’s where any binary understanding of the story has to end, because Sarai became Sarah as a mark of her own relationship with HaShem, and clearly had her own personal connection with this Canaanite deity, to the extent that when Abraham and Sarah differed in parenting issues, HaShem commanded Abraham in no uncertain terms to “heed Sarah’s words, do as she says.”
Sarah’s life may have become incomprehensible according to the terms of her place of origin, but she clearly created her own power base; by the end of her life, she dwells in a sacred grove near Hebron. Abraham lives in Beer Sheva, perhaps as a condition of the consolidation of his own sphere of influence.
You may think you have laid down plains for your life. But as we know, the best laid plans have a way of going awry, or, as the Yiddish puts it, man trakht un Gott lakht, “humans plan and G*d laughs”. Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav once embarked upon a journey to Israel from his home in Eastern Europe; forced to abort the trip, he nevertheless insisted that “wherever my feet take me, I am going to Jerusalem.” That vision of a shining city on a hill, a representation of the fondest hopes of any journey’s end, is an allegory for every human life and the dreams and hopes that compel it forward.
Call it stubbornness or flexibility, Rabbi Nahman found ways other than the physical to reach his spiritual goal. Abraham is known in our tradition for his unbending single-minded commitment to HaShem, and his lack of flexibility may be what leads him to the tragedy of the Akedah. Is Sarah our teacher in another – less straightforward, and more creative, and, in the end, demonstrably better – way to reach our own spiritual Jerusalem?
Sarah died at the age of 127 years. Rashi said of her that at age twenty she was as innocent as at age seven, and at one hundred, as beautiful as she had been at twenty. Maybe all that challenge to her expectations about life had a positive effect upon her? Perhaps the learning is in staying open to the changes, alert to prevailing winds, and focused upon turning each setback into a different sort of forward movement.
We don’t know what the “Blue Tsunami” of this week’s U.S. midterm elections will bring. We don’t know what Israeli coalition politics will create with the highest Palestinian voting turnout in Israeli history. Both places are far from any imagined city on a hill; but like Sarah, perhaps we can still envision a sacred grove, and plant its trees where we can, as the vicissitudes of our own journeys permit. May it be that wherever you go, you can feel your journey bringing you nearer to your Jerusalem. Shabbat shalom!
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*One of the more fascinating archaeological finds in the ancient city of Ur is a museum of even more ancient artifacts gathered by Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna. You can visit it virtually in the book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid.
