ESSAY: Come Rest in Sarah’s Tent (Parashat Chayei Sarah)

I want to focus on Sarah’s tent.  Not on Sarah, who dies at the beginning of the parsha, but on her tent, her ohel, the sanctuary she left behind that perhaps we can still enter.  

Talk

The parsha is filled with talk.  Sarah dies and Avraham negotiates to buy her burial plot, a negotiation that takes up a surprising number of verses.  And then Avraham sends his servant back to the old country to find a bride for Yitzhak and the servant’s repeated narration of this experience takes up much of the rest of the parsha.  

Quiet Sanctuary

Alongside all this talk, one quiet verse takes place in Sarah’s tent, closed off from the rest of the world and from the rest of the parsha.  The verse tells us that Yitzhak brings his new bride, Rivka, into his mother’s tent and she becomes his wife.   And then the verse continues:  vaye’ehaveha vayenachem Yitzhak aharei imo.   He loved her and he was comforted after the loss of his mother (Genesis 24:67).   

This tent of Sarah’s is a place of wedding and joining together, a place of meeting and connection, like the later ohel mo’ed, the tent of meeting which was a meeting place with God.  It is a place of ahavah and nechama, of love and of comfort.   And it is a quiet place. In contrast to the wordiness of the rest of the parsha, here in the tent there is no dialogue, no words exchanged, just a quiet coming together.   

Invitation to Enter

I invite you to enter this tent of Sarah’s, to leave behind the talk and the worry, the negotiations and the arrangements of the world spinning around you, and, maybe too, to leave behind the noisy thoughts of your own mind, the constant chatter that occupies us so completely – not fighting it, letting it be there – while you move your attention into this tranquil sanctuary of our ancestral mother Sarah.  Entering and resting in the silence for a moment, letting your nervous system unwind from all the activity and stimulation, maybe letting your breathing slow down, letting the deep eternal stillness of this place enter all your tense and restless areas and soothe you, as if you have stepped out of the busy traffic of a modern street into the thick stone walls of an ancient monastery or temple –  because that is indeed what you have entered by coming into Sarah’s tent. 

Divine Presence

Indeed, the sacredness of Sarah’s tent is clear from the way the rabbis describe it.  They say that there were three special miraculous things that happened in that tent.  The Shabbat candlelight lasted through the week from one Sabbath eve to the next one, there was blessing and abundance in the bread dough, and the clouds of divine presence rested on the tent (see Rashi on Genesis 24:67). These are all features of the later mishkan, the desert tabernacle.   Sarah’s tent was a kind of proto-temple, a sanctuary where one could go to encounter and rest in divine presence.  

So returning to your own experience of this tent and sensing the sacredness of the space, how it is infused with the shechinah, with the divine presence.   This is a tent of meeting, of reclaiming your alliance with God.  Maybe feeling into that possibility for you, the possibility of meeting God here, sensing God all around you, hovering in the clouds and in the light that shines upon you and in the drops of sustenance that are seeping into you like honey.   God is right here with you in this tent.  Let yourself feel surrounded by that aura and connected to your source.  

Love

This is also a tent of love.  Vaye’ehaveha.  He loved her. Yitzhak loved Rivka. Love is part of the fabric of this tent.   What do you need in the way of love as you enter this tent?  Maybe checking inside for the places in you that hold wounds around love; even if you have loving relationships in your life, still, I believe most of us have a love deficit, often a deep unquenchable thirst, a wanting so profound and desperate and primal that it feels like a gnawing ache sometimes, an existential loneliness, a hunger that is as old as we are and therefore quite young, the cry of a baby to be held, the yearning to be loved just as you are with no strings attached.  And maybe sensing the desire to offer love more fully as well; perhaps there is a block to your expression of it sometimes, and yet you deeply want to give and receive love more fully and freely, to really trust it and live into it with an open heart.   Checking in your heart for your particular relationship to love, for anything that makes your heart feel either starving or closed sometimes.  

Love is the nourishment offered in this tent.  Love is the bread dough that is blessed and abundant here, the sustenance that searches out all the tired, hungry places in us, all the holes that have been empty for so long, and fills them, slowly and steadily fills them.  The love on offer here is divine love – even when it appears in human form, it is divine – because it is love that is not based on anything at all, not conditioned on our being good or doing the right thing or even staying in the relationship.  It simply loves us for nothing, for free, hinam, just because we are here, not for our performance or accomplishments and not even for our neediness or the dependence that might make others feel useful.  This love comes to us just because we exist.  It is in fact this love that brought us into existence in the first place.   

Taking a minute to really let in that love, to sense how this tent you are in is suffused with it.  It’s like the air is supercharged with it and any time you need an infusion, you can enter this tent and breathe it in.  So maybe doing that right now, taking a deep breath and breathing in this divine nourishment and letting your breath carry it to all the far flung places inside you that need it right now.   Loved just as you are, feel that seeping in and healing you, sewing up your gaping wounds, weaving you back together, making you whole, 

A Steady Light

Sarah’s tent says to you: Come in out of the cold.  It’s bright and warm in here, and the light is steady, this ner shabbat that lasts all week.  The light and the love, they don’t go out, you can’t mess up and lose them.  Come in for a moment out of the cold world with its demands and expectations and conditions and bask in the warmth of this steadiness, this unconditional holding.  Warm your hands and warm your heart, unchill your reactions and judgments and facial expressions, open yourself to the flow.   You can trust this love.  Let it in, just taste it.  Ta’amu ure’u ki tov Hashem.  Taste and see how good God is (Psalm 34:9), how good it feels to be loved like this. 

Comfort

This tent is also a tent of comfort for those who are grieving, and we are all grieving in some way.   Vayenachem Yitzhak aharei imo.  Yitzhak was comforted after the loss of his mother.  Surely Yitzhak was deeply grieving.  His mother died suddenly while he was off being almost slaughtered by his father, and he came home to find her gone.  She died at 127, not an old age at the time, compared to Avraham’s 180 and Yitzhak’s 175.  So it was unexpected and early, following a traumatic family event which surely also damaged Yitzhak’s relationship with his father. There was a lot to grieve.  We can see Yitzhak, sad and alone and forlorn, before he enters the tent with his bride.  

Your Grief

Maybe checking inside for any touches of grief you are experiencing.  I think we underestimate the prevalence of grief in our lives.  Our lives are constantly in flux, and even if the changes are mostly for the best, inevitably, there is also loss in each transition, in each new phase of life, as we age and grow older, and of course there are also always losses of people and relationships. And there is grief, too, in seeing the difficult things that inevitably happen to us and to our loved ones, and then, if we look out at the world’s suffering, there is so much that is just unbelievably sad.  We try to avoid feeling this sadness, this grief, either by looking for someone to blame or by doing our best to fix things.  But to some extent, there just is suffering and loss in this life, a tremendous amount of it, and it is just plain sad, so hard to bear.   I invite you to touch into whatever experience you have with such grief, to at least acknowledge it, to sense its depth and contours, what it’s made of, what it feels like to carry it in your body.  

Bringing it into the Tent

And then maybe bringing that grief into this tent of Sarah’s, this holding container.  When we speak of God’s ability to offer comfort to mourners, we say hamakom yenachem, calling God by this hamakom name which literally means “The Place.”  Because grief needs space, a place, a container.  And this sacred tent is such a container for grief, a sanctuary where we can safely bring the sadness that we don’t often touch.  So inviting your grief to be with you in this tent and letting it be held here by the love that suffuses this place.  Love and grief are deeply intertwined.  We grieve because we love.  And we are also comforted in our grief by love, by the presence of love around us, as Yitzhak was here.  He loved and then he was comforted.  Love is both why we grieve and how we are comforted from that grief.   

So maybe feeling the comfort of letting the grief be here with you in this tent, accompanied and surrounded by love, both divine and human, yours and others.  That’s all it needs.  There is nothing to do for grief other than lovingly accompany it.  And somehow, in that love, there is comfort, great comfort, like the comfort of being wrapped in a warm blanket when you are cold and shivering and sick. We are so often told to get out of our comfort zone.  I invite you in this moment to enter into your comfort zone, the comfort zone of this maternal tent, to enter it with all your grief and sadness and loneliness, and to let yourself curl up and sink into it like a soft couch with a fuzzy blanket in front of a warm fire.   Vayenachem.  Be comforted.  

Come Back Any Time

Of course this scene in Sarah’s tent is only one verse among many, only a dot in the universe of places.  But it is our lifeline, our center, the place from which we derive the ground and the nourishment to move in the world.  Shabbat comes only once a week, but this tent has the shabbat lights on all week so we can come in any time we need and rest and refuel before we go back out, girded by the love and comfort and support of our divine connection.   

Maybe taking a moment to anchor your sensory experience of this tent, the tranquil quiet, the hovering cloud of divine presence, the unconditional love, the warm light that does not go out and the blanket of comfort.   Anchoring this experience in your body and mind and heart before you go back out to the noise of the rest of the parsha and the rest of the world, knowing you can drop back into Sarah’s tent whenever you need nourishment.  It only takes a micro-second to return.  

Image by Seidenperle from Pixabay