Chayei Sarah
“Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of Machpelah” Genesis 23:19
MOST OF Genesis 23 is a description of financial negotiations with the local Hittites around Abraham’s purchase of a burial plot. The Hittites invite him to bury his wife in any of their graves; they don’t want his money. Abraham however wants to buy the cave of Machpelah and he wants to pay for it; he does not want it as a gift that can be taken away.
There is a raw urgency in the language used between Abraham and Ephron, the Hittite chief. Abraham says: “If only you would listen to me! I am giving you money. Take it from me and I will
bury my dead there.” And Ephron, recognising the pain behind the words, accepts the money and replies: “Bury your dead.” Abraham’s heart has been ripped apart and he needs to accomplish this one thing for his beloved wife, to have somewhere physical to bury her and, perhaps, to visit and remember.
The tension between the need to grieve and the need to deal with practicalities will be familiar to anyone who has had to organise a funeral for a loved one. There is something profound about the purchase of land for burial, particularly for an immigrant community. Once we have buried our loved ones in a particular place, we have roots there. There will always be something of ourselves in that place. It’s why we feel so viscerally about the protection of cemeteries and why their occasional desecration is so painful. The first burial in a land means we have been here for one generation. It is a marker in time as well as a personal loss. Abraham is grieving for his wife, who has shared a long and extraordinary life with him. But he is also purchasing land and giving himself and his descendants a stake in the future.
Lifelong relationships are complex infrastructures. Establishing a family, a home, a place to live, a way of living together and in the world is multi-faceted — economic, social, practical as well as emotional and spiritual.
Hidden in the layers of this week’s parashah is a lesson about the reality of a long life shared: the compromises over money, the building of a home, the children or lack of them, the joys and the disappointments, and the knowledge that the likely price of a lifelong love is that, one day, one of you will have to bury the other. It is the final act of love that we can perform. No wonder the Torah devotes a whole chapter to Abraham getting it right.