Disappearance and Emergence: Desperately Seeking Isaac Parshat Chayei Sarah November 23, 2024/22 Heshvan 5785

A Remoteness from the Sunlit World of Chesed

What Rebecca sees in Isaac is the vital anguish at the heart of his prayers, a remoteness from the sunlit world of chesed (kindness) that she inhabits. Too abruptly, perhaps, she receives the shock of his world. Nothing mediates, nothing explains him to her. “Who is that man walking in the field toward us?” (Genesis 24:66) she asks, fascinated, alienated. What dialogue is possible between two who have met in such a way?

A fatal seepage of doubt and dread affects her, so that she can no longer meet him in the full energy of her difference. She veils herself, obscures her light. He takes her and she irradiates the darkness of his mother’s tent. She is, and is not, like his mother; through her, his sense of his mother’s existence is healed. But the originating moment of their union is choreographed so that full dialogue will be impossible between them (Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis, The Beginning of Desire, pp. 142-143).

Rivka’s veil has been handed down to us as part of the traditional Jewish wedding ceremony. But what does it mean? Why do we lower the veil at the bedecken -- just before the moment of great intimacy beneath the huppah?
Perhaps to teach us that the lifted veil and the lowered veil are both part of any relationship.The lowered veil conceals and protects. The lifted veil exposes and reveals.
We each have a deep yearning to see and to be seen, but relationship also demands humility about the limits of our understanding. Just think about the words -- “I know what you’re thinking; I know what you’re going to say.” These words can be comforting, but they can also be profoundly dismissive.Relationship is bound up with knowing but also with not-knowing – with the humble capacity to be surprised by the other; with respect for the mystery of another person’s soul – and, for that matter, respect for the mystery of one’s own soul.

Rabbi Sharon Cohen-Anisfeld

Hebrew College, November 18th, 2024

Danielle Dugas quoting Ephraim Rubinger; Sermon "Other or Brother"

Beer-Lahai-Roi is the place where Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac's half-brother, found themselves hungry and thirsty after being sent out by Sarah and Abraham... Now what do you suppose Isaac was doing at this place; specially just before his marriage?... All of this life, Isaac has been haunted by the absence of this half-brother. Why should a brother be expelled? "Maybe it was my fault "the young Isaac agonized, "how could my parents, the epitome of kindness and hospitality, put out a young boy and his mother into the desert?"... But now, with Sarah dead, Isaac could finally explore his brother's agony. And so he goes to the place where his brother suffered so; suffered from not only thirst and hunger, but from the terrible sense of rejection by his father...

Rabbi Shai Held

"Isaac goes to Be'er-lahai-roi........ to rediscover a face of God that has been eclipsed for him-the God of mercy and compassion rather than stern judgment (or sheer inscrutability).

Sometimes we imagine God too intimately, as if God were all sweetness and light. ....... And yet just as often, we imagine God too far away, all distance and unapproachability. Isaac has just experienced the terror of an utterly mysterious God, and now, to preserve both his faith and his sanity, he goes in search of the tenderness of an utterly loving One. Perhaps Isaac can remind us, too, of the possibility of being met by the God who saw Hagar, by the God of compassion who never forgets us, no matter how downtrodden and cast off we may sometimes feel".

https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Parashat-Hayyei-Sarah---Rabbi-Shai-Held.html?soid=1101789466973&aid=TllUnHdy_iY

..... Sarah created a sanctuary space. Indeed, the three features of her ohel, her tent, are reminiscent of aspects of the later communal sanctuary of the mishkan. There was endless light – from one Sabbath to the next – like the eternal light of the Tabernacle’s ner tamid, abundant nourishment like the showbread that lasted all week, and a cloud like the divine Cloud of Glory that also rested on that desert Tent. Sarah created a private, intimate version of this later, more public tent of divine connection.

In our parsha, Sarah’s tent becomes a refuge for Yitzhak, and perhaps can be, in this moment and any moment, a refuge for us as well. Yitzhak has just emerged from the harrowing trauma of the akedah (the binding of Isaac) and returns home to another tragedy, his mother Sarah’s death. The Torah tells us that it was only when he brought his new bride Rivkah into his mother’s tent that he felt comfort as well as love (Genesis 24:67).

We, too, are in need of a matriarch’s comfort and love at this moment, as well as her strength, resilience and faith. We can enter this inner sanctum and feel how we are loved, protected and held in divine light and care. Avraham sat at the entrance to the tent, petah ha’ohel, but Sarah dwelled further in, in the inner sanctum of deepest intimacy with the divine, in a space that is womb-like in its continuous nourishment, embracing warmth and light, and surrounding external presence, like the mother’s larger body. Maybe we can enter such a space and allow ourselves to relax into its care. It is safe here and stable, all your needs are taken care of and there is nothing to worry about.

Entering the Sanctuary of Sarah’s Tent (Parashat Chayei Sarah)

November 10, 2023 /by Rachel Anisfeld

https://rachelanisfeld.com/2023/11/10/essay-entering-the-sanctuary-of-sarahs-tent-parashat-chayei-sarah/

The Soul is Like A Wild Animal

"Being Alone Together” Parker Palmer
The soul is like a wild animal. Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places.

. . yet despite its toughness, the soul is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush, especially when other people are around. If
we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out of the corner of an eye—but the sight is a gift we
will always treasure as an end in itself. Unfortunately, community in our culture too often means agroup of people who go crashing through the woods together, scaring the soul away . . .”

Rabbi Marc Margolius writing for IJS Torah study "Mindful Torah: Engaging the Better Angels of Our Nature" (Chayei Sarah; Ahavah/Love at Second Sight)

We understand ahavah love here not in the emotional sense, but as connoting an awareness of the sacred energy permeating and connecting every aspect of life. To practice ahavah/love in this sense means cultivating awareness of the underlying (or transcending) connectivity of everything out of our experience of brokenness of life. It means waking up to the interrelatedness of all, an insight which, paradoxically, can happens most powerfully in moment when we experience disconnection and alienation, as Rebekah and Isaac do in this parashah.

This is "love at second sight" love as an awareness of wholeness, which surfaces as we move through the veneer of life's fragmentation and brokenness...

Paradoxically, sometimes we grow in awareness of this energy precisely at moments when life feels most broken, when we feel most estranged from others. Such situations can stir up painful and confusing habits of mind and emotion which, if we see them clearly and approach them with compassion, can yield to a deeper level of awareness: that we have been created to clear our minds and hearts enough for ahavah/love to flow through us into the world, making ourselves, like the trees, channels for that interconnecting chiyut/life force.