By Sarah Kravinsky

This week’s parsha is called Chayei Sarah. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat points out that while Chayei Sarah is usually translated as “the life of Sarah,” the Hebrew more accurately refers to her lives. Yet the parsha actually opens with Sarah’s death and burial, and the rest of it is about her husband Abraham and their descendants and servants— in short, the other people that make up the branches of her tree.

How can we say that her death, or her descendants, make up the lives of Sarah? Isn’t the content of Sarah’s life her actions, dreams, relationships? Instead, the rest of the parsha describes how Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac and then goes on to detail Abraham’s many descendants. The parsha describes Isaac and his wife Rebekah’s first encounter and their subsequent marriage. We follow our cast of biblical characters as they remarry, have sons, and leave their children inheritances (Abraham), and as their sons (Ishmael) have sons. Eventually, the parsha describes Abraham’s death and his burial beside Sarah in the Cave of Machpelah in present-day Hebron.

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I signed up to write this dvar even though the Torah weirds me out. I don’t love the human relationships described in the bible (in my opinion, lacking in consent and empathy) or the way the text describes people themselves (often merely by their place in a lineage, or as servants to their husbands). But I did it anyway, in an attempt to prove once more to myself that tradition + my values are not irreconcilable.

I wish this week’s Torah portion was intensely meaningful, that it would tell me how my namesake shared my struggles. I wish it had struck me like a favorite poem, or the insight of a close friend. Instead— at least in this parsha— Sarah is silent.

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Maybe this email finds you exhausted after a long week (and a long fall, a long summer) spent doing all the work that you do, for all the people and communities you care about. Maybe you, like Sarah— like me— know how it feels to experience the tension between your function in the world and your self. What I took from this week’s parsha is that we can’t tell the story of our lives just by listing the people we are responsible for, even though caring for the people around us (in whatever form that takes) can bring us meaning and wholeness.

Just as Sarah’s life is more than her lineage, our own lives transcend the jobs and tafkidim and activism and organizing and classes and everything else that we do. We do all of this because we know society is lacking in so many ways. And though it is, and though the work can consume us, the story of our life must be broader than our fight against a very unjust world.

Sarah’s silence in this week’s parsha speaks loud and clear, bringing me, as always, to the meaning I doubted I would find in this text. So I’ll end this dvar with a hope for you, tnua sheli, and for me, and for our matriarch Sarah, and for all the Sarahs: that you will speak for yourself even as you find meaning in those who receive your attention. As Rebekah’s parents blessed her, “may you become thousands of myriads” (Bereishit, 24:60), and may those myriads include both the work that you do and the doer herself.