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?