Gen. 23:1-25:18
Précis: The parasha begins with the counting the days of the life of Sarah (chayye Sarah) and with her death. It continues with a detailed description of the purchase of the cave of Machpela by Abraham for a family burial site. Abraham orders his servant to go to Abraham’s ancestral home to obtain a wife for Isaac, and after a series of fulfilled signs, the servant finds Rebecca. Rebecca returns with the servant; she and Isaac meet, fall in love at first sight, and become man and wife. The parasha ends with the death of Abraham, and his burial by Isaac and Ishmael in the family plot.
Gen. 23:1 “And the life of Sarah was a hundred and seven and twenty years; these were the days of the life of Sarah.
This week’s reading begins with a statement announcing the end of the life of Sarah, the matriarch of our People.
Last Shabbat, 11 of her spiritual descendants were murdered simple because they were her descendants. Not in some far-off place, but here, in America.
Some remarked after the horrid event last week, “This is not the America I know.” I suggest that their knowledge of America is inaccurate and faulty, in large part because we have been blessed during the past several decades with a relatively obscure amount of antisemitism.
But Jew hatred is older than our nation; it has always been a part of this country. When the first Jews arrived here in New Amsterdam (now New York) seeking asylum from the Inquisition in Brazil, Governor Peter Stuyvesant begged his corporate overseers in Holland to permit him to expel the Jews. They refused his request (perhaps because there were quite a few Jewish shareholders in the Dutch Company which ran the colony). Antisemitism was rarely seen in Colonial America, probably because there were so few Jews. Washington famously announced in his letter to the congregation in Rhode Island that religious bigotry had no place in America, but Admiral Uriah Levy, a hero of the War of 1812, was court marshalled repeatedly during his career for refusing to accept antisemitic insults.
After the Civil War, the KKK targeted blacks, immigrants and Jews. While the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, and other ethnic groups were hated as immigrants upon arrival, within a few generations, they were accepted as “Americans.” Jews remains “the other” and objects of scorn who allegedly conspired secretly to undermine America. Henry Ford published antisemitic screeds which were circulated to all Ford dealerships, and for a time Father Coughlin, a vicious antisemite, was the most popular radio personality on the airwaves. Charles Lindberg, the American hero, was a leader of the pro-Nazi “America First” organization.
Even the Holocaust failed to end American antisemitism. My own father told me how he could not obtain a job as newly graduating electrical engineer in the late 1940’s until he changed his name from Rubin Simonoff to Robin Simms. As a child, he saw signed in his upstate New York town on hotels saying “No Negroes, No Dogs, No Jews.”
We of the baby boom era and our children have been largely immune from overt antisemitism. In recent years, the evil doers who have hidden under the rocks have felt safe enough to come out and espouse their hatred and violence openly.
Our tradition teaches us that Sarah’s greatest attribute was “hishtavut hanefesh,” usually defined as “equanimity, inner calmness, maintenance of an even keel.” Can we find equanimity, inner calmness, or remain on an even keel after the hateful experience off last week? Perhaps, with God’s help and with our own commitment to seek a means to end the hatred which is tearing us apart.
