42 | NOVEMBER 9 • 2023 

T

he name of our 
parshah seems to 
embody a paradox. 
It is called Chaye Sarah, “the 
life of Sarah,” but it begins 
with the death of Sarah. 
What is more, toward the 
end, it records 
the death of 
Abraham. Why 
is a parshah 
about death 
called “life”? 
The answer, it 
seems to me, 
is that — not 
always, but often — death 
and how we face it is a 
commentary on life and how 
we live it.
Which brings us to a 
deeper paradox. The first 
sentence of this week’s 
parshah of Chayei Sarah, 
is: “Sarah’s lifetime was 127 
years: the years of Sarah’s 
life.” A well-known comment 
by Rashi on the apparently 
superfluous phrase, “the 
years of Sarah’s life,” states: 
“The word ‘years’ is repeated 
and without a number to 

indicate that they were all 
equally good.” How could 
anyone say that the years of 
Sarah’s life were equally good? 
Twice, first in Egypt, then in 
Gerar, she was persuaded by 
Abraham to say that she was 
his sister rather than his wife, 
and then taken into a royal 
harem, a situation fraught 
with moral hazard.
There were the years 
when, despite God’s repeated 
promise of many children, 
she was infertile, unable to 
have even a single child. 
There was the time when 
she persuaded Abraham to 
take her handmaid, Hagar, 
and have a child by her, 
which caused her great 
strife of the spirit. These 
things constituted a life of 
uncertainty and decades 
of unmet hopes. How is it 
remotely plausible to say 
that all of Sarah’s years were 
equally good?
That is Sarah. About 
Abraham, the text is similarly 
puzzling. Immediately after 
the account of his purchase 

of a burial plot for Sarah, 
we read: “Abraham was old, 
well advanced in years, and 
God had blessed Abraham 
with everything” (Gen. 24:1). 
This, too, is strange. Seven 
times, God had promised 
Abraham the land of Canaan. 
Yet when Sarah died, he did 
not own a single plot of land 
in which to bury her, and had 
to undergo an elaborate and 
even humiliating negotiation 
with the Hittites, forced to 
admit at the outset that, “I 
am a stranger and temporary 
resident among you” (Genesis 
23:4). How can the text 
say that God had blessed 
Abraham with everything?
Equally haunting is its 
account of Abraham’s death, 
perhaps the most serene in 
the Torah: “Abraham breathed 
his last and died at a good 
age, old and satisfied, and he 
was gathered to his people.” 
He had been promised that he 
would become a great nation, 
the father of many nations, 
and that he would inherit 
the land. Not one of these 

promises had been fulfilled in 
his lifetime. How then was he 
“satisfied”?
The answer again is that to 
understand a death, we have 
to understand a life.
I have mixed feelings about 
Friedrich Nietzsche. He was 
one of the most brilliant 
thinkers of the modern age 
and also one of the most 
dangerous. He himself was 
ambivalent about Jews and 
negative about Judaism. Yet 
one of his most famous 
remarks is both profound and 
true: “He who has a why in 
life can bear almost any how.” 
(In this context, I should add 
a remark he made in The 
Genealogy of Morality that 
I have not quoted before. 
Having criticized other 
sacred Scriptures, he then 
writes: “the Old Testament 
— well, that is something 
quite different: every respect 
for the Old Testament! I 
find in it great men, heroic 
landscape and something 
of utmost rarity on earth, 
the incomparable naivety 

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

Finding Contentment

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

