I have never understood the Rashi at the beginning of this week’s parsha.
Rashi is responding to theTorah’s lengthy way of telling us Sarah’s age at death -- vayeheyu hayei Sarah me’ah shanah ve’esrim shanah . . . . ”Sarah’s lifetime was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years -- this was the span of Sarah’s life” (23:1). Why the repeated use of the word “years” and the extra phrase at the end? Rashi explains these superfluities to mean that Sarah was a person who was, in terms of sinlessness and beauty, the same at age 100 and at age 20 and at age 7. All her years were equal in their goodness -- kulan shavin letovah.
So what bothers me is that we normally think the best way to be in the world is to grow and improve and always be striving and moving forward, not to remain the same throughout our lives. In Hasidic terms, we are supposed to be more a mahalakh, a walker with two legs, than a malakh, an angel, who has only one leg and stands still; we are supposed to climb the ladder, rung after rung, to keep reaching and changing.
Avraham is such a mover. From the moment God instructs him to “go” -- lekh lekha, he never stops moving, going up and down the land multiple times. And this physical movement mirrors an intense time of growth for Avraham, as he moves through ten trials, the first of which -- leaving his home -- was far easier than the last -- sacrificing his son, showing that Avraham had indeed made immense progress in his spiritual journey.
But Rashi seems to be telling us there is another way to be as well, another way that is equally praiseworthy -- to stay the same, not to try to alter what is already perfect from the start, but simply to remain who you already are at all times, perfect and beautiful and pure as you always have been since childhood. Sarah represents this truth. While Avraham is running around welcoming guests, hither and thither, so much to do, no time to do it, where is Sarah? Inside the tent. Staked and steadfast and unmoving, in the tent. Things are already perfect. She has nowhere to run.
These two ways of being -- the one of movement and the other of staying put -- are not at odds with each other here, but perfect complements. Sarah’s steadiness soothes Avraham’s restlessness, and his activity gives energy, actualization and purpose to her calm. They are a team. Avraham is the 6 workdays to Sarah’s shabbat.
To take it one step further, Sarah seems to represent Presence, both human presence and divine Presence -- the feminine Shekhinah -- in the life of the family. The tent she is associated with comes up again in this week’s parsha, as Yitzhak brings Rivka, his new bride, into it and is comforted over his mother’s death. Amidst the flurry of verbose words and activity in the story of the servant’s search for this wife for Yitzhak, this moment in the tent is one of intense presence. It is as if the world stops for a moment, and it is just the two of them, Yitzhak and Rivka, present to each other in a loving, comforting way, an experience that Yitzhak probably hasn’t had since the loss of his mother.
Now this tent itself -- Sarah’s tent -- has certain miraculous qualities associated with it; according to tradition, while Sarah was alive, a cloud hovered around it at all times, the Shabbat light lasted the entire week, and the bread dough was always “blessed,” successful and plentiful. These qualities are reminiscent of another tent of divine presence, the mishkan (tabernacle), with its hovering cloud of glory, the eternal light of the ner tamid , and the plentiful and everpresent showbread. Read in this light, when Avraham tells the angels last week that Sarah is “in the tent,” it is a way of saying that she is with God, immersed in divine presence.
While Avraham heard God’s voice speak to him many times, tradition has it that Sarah was actually the greater of the two in ruach hakadosh, prophetic insight (see Rashi on 21:12). Indeed, according to one interpretation, Sarah’s other name, Yiskah, is related to sokhah, meaning “seeing,” because she was a “seer” from a young age.
So Sarah and her tent and her connection to the divine presence must have been an important support for Avraham in his journey of faith. As Rabbi Shlomo Riskin has pointed out, after Sarah dies, Avraham no longer hears directly from God or experiences any further divine trials; with the loss of Sarah, he has lost some of his access to the divine. He turns now to more ordinary pursuits, like getting his son married, remarrying himself and having many more children, all born -- not, as with Sarah, through miraculous intervention -- but in the ordinary way.
Circling back to the first Rashi of the parsha, the idea that Sarah lived a life not of change, but of sameness, seems more appealing now, a piece of the divine. While it is true that the world we live in and each of us in it is broken and in dire need of healing and growing -- a truth that Avraham carried so well -- it is at the very same moment also true that the world is already perfect just as it is and no change is needed. We are all already perfect, all born perfect and beautiful just as God wants us and none of that ever leaves us. No matter how messed up we end up, there is still that perfect stillness inside us that needs no healing or change at all. And so both the restless seeking and the peace are true, one on the human plane -- where we can see the mess and see the great improvements that are possible -- and the other on some higher plane, a place where we feel the perfection of this divinely created world so clearly that we cry out in praise “halleluyah!” despite the brokenness. This feeling is the essence of Shabbat; on Shabbat, there are no problems that need solving; nothing needs to be changed at all; all is perfect just as it is and we can stand as still as Sarah did.
So we need this quality of Sarah’s, this sense of not changing. But of course, Sarah alone would not have done much good in the world either. She would have remained in her tent and the goodness would not have spread. The combination is ideal, not just in couples, but also inside ourselves. We each have both of these aspects. We have a part of us that yearns to change and fix and improve ourselves, to be constantly moving forward; this part sees that so much is not yet right in our world and in ourselves and cannot rest. This is a beautiful part, an honored part, an essential part. But it cannot work alone. It needs to also know the truth of Sarah; it needs to learn to rest in Sarah’s tent, to rest in the knowledge that in spite of the mess, everything is also already just right. There is peace here, and from this place of peace, the part that yearns for change can act, not out of desperation and panic, but out of love and peace and presence.
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