NOVEMBER 17 • 2022 | 53

an entire world. While he and 
his family were safe on board 
the ark, everyone else — all his 
contemporaries — had drowned. 
It is not hard to imagine this 
righteous man overwhelmed by 
grief.
Lot’s wife, against the instruc-
tion of the angels, actually did 
look back as the cities of the 
plain disappeared under fire and 
brimstone and the anger of God. 
Immediately she was turned into 
a pillar of salt, the Torah’s graphic 
description of a woman so over-
whelmed by shock and grief as 
to be unable to move on.
It is the background of these 
two stories that helps us under-
stand Abraham after the death 
of Sarah. He set the precedent: 
first build the future, and only 
then can you mourn the past. If 
you reverse the order, you will be 
held captive by the past. You will 
be unable to move on. You will 
become like Lot’s wife.
Something of this deep truth 

drove the work of one of the 
most remarkable survivors of 
the Holocaust, the psychothera-
pist Viktor Frankl. Frankl lived 
through Auschwitz, dedicating 
himself to giving other prisoners 
the will to live. He tells the story 
in several books, most famously 
in Man’s Search for Meaning. 
He did this by finding for each 
of them a task that was calling 
to them, something they had 
not yet done but that only they 
could do. In effect, he gave them 
a future. 
Frankl lived his teachings. 
After the liberation of Auschwitz, 
he built a school of psychothera-
py called Logotherapy, based on 
the human search for meaning. 
Frankl taught people to build a 
future, or more precisely, to hear 
the future calling to them. Like 
Abraham, Frankl lived a long 
and good life, gaining worldwide 
recognition and dying at the age 
of 92.
Abraham heard the future 

calling to him. Sarah had died. 
Isaac was unmarried. Abraham 
had neither land nor grandchil-
dren. He did not cry out in anger 
or anguish to God. Instead, he 
heard the still, small voice saying: 
The next step depends on you. 
You must create a future that 
I will fill with My spirit. That 
is how Abraham survived the 
shock and grief. God forbid that 
we experience any of this, but if 
we do, this is how to survive.
God enters our lives as a call 
from the future. It is as if we hear 
him beckoning to us from the 
far horizon of time, urging us to 
take a journey and undertake a 
task that, in ways we cannot fully 
understand, we were created for. 
That is the meaning of the word 
vocation, literally “a calling,
” a 
mission, a task to which we are 
summoned.
We are not here by accident. 
We are here because God wanted 
us to be and because there is a 
task we were meant to fulfill. 

Discovering what that is isn’t 
easy, and often takes many years 
and false starts. But for each of 
us there is something God is 
calling on us to do, a future not 
yet made that awaits our mak-
ing. It is future-orientation that 
defines Judaism as a faith, as I 
explain in the last chapter of my 
book Future Tense. 
So much of the anger, hatred 
and resentments of this world 
are brought about by people 
obsessed by the past and who, 
like Lot’s wife, are unable to 
move on. There is no good end-
ing to this kind of story, only 
more tears and more tragedy. 
The way of Abraham in 
Chayei Sarah is different. First 
build the future. Only then can 
you mourn the past. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 

served as the chief rabbi of the 

United Hebrew Congregations of the 

Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings 

have been made available to all at rabbi-

sacks.org. This essay was written in 2016.

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