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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