Timeless Torah

This week’s Biblical reading focuses on two episodes, both narrated at length and in intricate detail: A) Abraham buys a field with a cave as a burial place for Sarah, and B) he directs his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac. Why these two events? The simple answer is because they happened. That, however, cannot be all. We misunderstand Torah if we regard it merely as a Jewish history book. ‘Torah’ defines its own genre, and in the process often breaks every known rule of literature, grammar, sentence structure, and syntax if it aids in its primary role of ‘teaching’ us how to live a meaningful life in the service of G-d. As such, only those occurrences that are instructive are included in the world’s all-time best-seller. So what is the Torah teaching here?

Abraham, the first Jew, receives two promises, both stated five times. The first is of a land. Time and again he is told, by G-d, that the land to which he has traveled, Canaan, will one day be his:“To your offspring I will give this land,” (12:7) and “Look north, south, east and west. All the land that you see, I will give you and your offspring for ever.” (13: 14)

The second was the promise of children as in, “I will make you into a great nation,” (12: 2) and “I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth.” (13: 16) These are remarkable promises. The land in its length and breadth will be Abraham’s and his children’s as “an everlasting possession.” Abraham will have as many children as the dust of the earth, the stars of the sky, and the sand on the sea-shore. What, though, is the reality by the time Sarah dies? Abraham owns no land and has only one son (his other child, Ishmael, will not be the bearer of the covenant and thus cannot be the fulfillment of G-d’s promise).

The significance of the two episodes can thus be glimpsed. First, Abraham undergoes a lengthy bargaining process with the Hittites to buy an appropriate burial plot for Sarah. It is a tense, even humiliating, encounter. The Hittites say one thing, but mean another. As a group they say, “Sir, listen to us. You are a prince of G-d in our midst. Bury your dead in the choicest of our tombs.” Ephron, the owner of the field Abraham wishes to buy, publicly declares, “I give you the field, and I give you the cave that is in it. I give it to you in the presence of my people. Bury your dead.” However as the narrative makes clear, this elaborate generosity is a facade for some extremely hard bargaining. Abraham knows he is “an alien and a stranger,” meaning, among other things, that he has no easy way to acquire land. He can request it, demand it, even fight for it, but he already understands from their words that he will have to negotiate with the locals. Indeed, that is the true intent of their reply which, stripped of its overlay of courtesy, means, “You are forced to use one of our burial sites as you have none of your own.”

Abraham is not deterred. He insists that he wants to buy his own. Ephron’s reply, “It is yours. I give it to you,” is in fact the prelude to a demand for an inflated price: four hundred silver shekels. At last, however, Abraham owns the land. The final transfer of ownership is recorded in precise legal prose to signal that, at last, Abraham owns part of the land. True, it is a small part; one field and a cave; a burial place, bought at great expense. But that is all of the Divine promise of the land that Abraham will see in his lifetime.

The next chapter, one of the longest in the Torah, tells of Abraham’s concern that Isaac should have a wife. After all, the young man is already forty years old and still unmarried. Abraham has a child but no grandchild, in other words, no posterity. As with the purchase of the cave, so here: acquiring a daughter-in-law will require money and difficult negotiation. The servant, Eliezer, on arriving in the vicinity of Abraham’s family, immediately finds the girl before he has even finished praying for G-d’s help. Securing her release from her family is another matter. He brings out gold, silver, and clothing for the girl. He gives her brother and mother costly gifts. They celebrate with a meal. But when the servant wants to leave, the family obfuscates by arguing, “Let the girl stay home for another year.” Just as with Ephron, the show of kindness conceals a tough, even exploitative, determination to make a profitable deal. Eventually patience pays off. Rebecca leaves. Isaac marries her. The covenant will continue.

These then, are no minor episodes. They tell a difficult story. Yes, Abraham will have a land. He will have many offspring. But these things will not happen soon or easily. Nor will they occur without human effort. To the contrary, only the most resolute willpower will bring them about. The divine promise is not what it seemed at first: a statement that G-d will act. It is in fact an invitation, from G-d to Abraham and his children that they should act. G-d will help them. The outcome will be what G-d said it would. But not without total commitment from Abraham’s family against what will sometimes seem to be insurmountable obstacles.

A land: Israel, and children: Jewish continuity. The astonishing fact is that today, four thousand years later, they remain the dominant concerns of Jews throughout the world, the safety and security of Israel as the Jewish home, and the future of the Jewish people (“Will we have Jewish grandchildren?”). Abraham’s hopes and fears are ours. (Is there any other people, whose concerns today are what they were four millennia ago?) Now as then, the divine promise does not mean that we can leave the future to G-d. That idea has no place in the teachings of Torah to man. To the contrary: the covenant is G-d’s challenge to us, not ours to G-d.

Faith does not mean passivity. It is having the courage to act and never to be deterred. What Abraham realized then, and what we had better recognize now, is that G-d is depending on us. The future, as G-d promised, will happen, but it is we - taught, inspired, empowered, and given strength by Torah - who must bring it about.