52 | NOVEMBER 17 • 2022 

H

e was 137 years old. 
He had been through 
two traumatic events 
involving the people most pre-
cious to him in the world. The 
first involved the 
son for whom he 
had waited for a 
lifetime, Isaac. He 
and Sarah had 
given up hope, 
yet God told 
them both that 
they would have 
a son together, and it would 
be he who would continue the 
covenant. The years passed. 
Sarah did not conceive. She had 
grown old, yet God still insisted 
they would have a child.
Eventually it came. There was 
rejoicing. Sarah said: “God has 
brought me laughter, and every-
one who hears about this will 
laugh with me.
” (Gen. 21:6) 

Then came the terrifying 
moment when God said to 
Abraham: “Take your son, your 
only one, the one you love … 
and offer him as a sacrifice.
” 
(Gen. 21:6) Abraham did not 
dissent, protest or delay. Father 
and son traveled together, and 
only at the last moment did the 
command come from heaven 
saying, “Stop!” How does a 
father, let alone a son, survive a 
trauma like that?
Then came grief. Sarah, 
Abraham’s beloved wife, died. 
She had been his constant com-
panion, sharing the journey 
with him as they left behind 
all they knew; their land, their 
birthplace and their families. 
Twice she saved Abraham’s life 
by pretending to be his sister.
What does a man of 137 
do — the Torah calls him “old 
and advanced in years” (Gen.

24:1) — after such a trauma and 
such a bereavement? We would 
not be surprised to find that he 
spent the rest of his days in sad-
ness and memory. He had done 
what God had asked of him. Yet 
he could hardly say that God’s 
promises had been fulfilled. 
Seven times he had been prom-
ised the land of Canaan, yet 
when Sarah died, he owned not 
one square inch of it, not even a 
place in which to bury his wife. 
God had promised him many 
children, a great nation, many 
nations, as many as the grains 
of sand in the seashore and the 
stars in the sky. Yet he had only 
one son of the covenant, Isaac, 
whom he had almost lost, and 
who was still unmarried at the 
age of 37. Abraham had every 
reason to sit and grieve.
Yet he did not. In one of the 
most extraordinary sequences of 
words in the Torah, his grief is 
described in a mere five Hebrew 
words: in English, “
Abraham 
came to mourn for Sarah and to 
weep for her.
” (Gen. 23:2) Then 
immediately we read, “
And 
Abraham rose from his grief.
” 
From then on, he engaged in a 
flurry of activity with two aims 
in mind: first to buy a plot of 
land in which to bury Sarah, 
second to find a wife for his son. 
Note that these correspond pre-
cisely to the two Divine bless-
ings of land and descendants. 

Abraham did not wait for God 
to act. He understood one of the 
profoundest truths of Judaism: 
that God is waiting for us to act.

OVERCOMING 
CHALLENGES
How did Abraham overcome 
the trauma and the grief? How 
do you survive almost losing 
your child and actually losing 
your life-partner, and still have 
the energy to keep going? What 
gave Abraham his resilience, 
his ability to survive, his spirit 
intact?
I learned the answer from the 
people who became my men-
tors in moral courage, namely 
the Holocaust survivors I had 
the privilege to know. How, I 
wondered, did they keep going, 
knowing what they knew, seeing 
what they saw? The survivors 
I knew had the most tenacious 
hold on life. I wanted to under-
stand how they kept going.
Eventually, I discovered most 
of them did not talk about the 
past, even to their marriage 
partners, even to their children. 
Instead, they set about creating 
a new life in a new land. They 
learned its language and cus-
toms. They found work. They 
built careers. They married and 
had children. Having lost their 
own families, the survivors 
became an extended family to 
one another. 
They looked forward, not 
back. First, they built a future. 
Only then — sometimes 40 or 
50 years later — did they speak 
about the past. That was when 
they told their story, first to 
their families, then to the world. 
First you have to build a future. 
Only then can you mourn the 
past.
Two people in the Torah 
looked back, one explicitly, the 
other by implication. Noah, the 
most righteous man of his gen-
eration, ended his life by mak-
ing wine and becoming drunk. 
The Torah does not say why, 
but we can guess. He had lost 

PHOTO BY JOE MABEL

A Call from
the Future

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks 

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

 POINTS FOR DISCUSSION
• How can building the future help with your grief over 
a past event?
• Can you think of examples of Jews who have 
followed Avraham’s lead, and built for the future 
despite the trauma of the past?
• What do you see as your own tafkid? What is God 
calling on you from the future to do?

