Sarah dies at the start of the parsha. The parsha then proceeds with a lot of talk, first with a protracted negotiation over the buying of a burial plot and then with lengthy repetitive monologues about the process of searching for a bride for Yitzhak. So Sarah dies and then there is a flurry of activity and noise. Isn’t that how it often is for us with grief or other painful emotions? Our first habitual unconscious reaction is to get busy, to fill the space with talk and commotion, to take on a new project, anything to avoid the underlying sadness, not to feel the pain.
Enter Yitzhak
In our parsha, after all of this noise, there comes a moment of quiet, a balm. It is Yitzhak. Unlike everyone around him, Yitzhak does not utter a single word throughout the parsha. We meet him as he steps out into a field to meditate. Veyetze Yitzhak lasu’ah basadeh lifnot arev. “Yitzhak went out to meditate in the field towards evening” (Genesis 24:63). Vayetze, he went out, from the same root as yetzi’at Mitzrayim, going out of Egypt, leaving behind all the noisy urgent demands of arranging and getting things done, stepping out into the evening air to slow down, breathe and contemplate.
I invite you to join him there in that field, to step out of your own noise of doing and accomplishing for a moment, out of your own Mitzrayim, all the constraints of time and space that make you feel harried and overwhelmed, rigid and tense, unable to fully feel and breathe, leaving all of that behind for a moment, as if you are opening a door and walking out of the narrow cramped hut of your life out into a wide open field, a merkhav yah, a divine expanse, climbing out and stretching your legs and your arms, breathing in the fresh air with its scent of flowers and herbs and grasses, looking out at the expansive scene around you, your view unobstructed all the way out to the horizon. There is space here. Space to breathe and to feel and to be. Breathing in that spaciousness, a deep breath that makes room inside to match the openness of the field around you.
Room For Everything
There is room for everything here in this field. Room for the parts of you that are grieving or in pain, and room, too, for the parts that try to run away from that pain. Room for the overwhelm, the fear and the anxiety, room for the judgment and the shame, and room for the striving that tries to make it all better. Room for the urgency of feeling like you need to get something done – not acting on the urgency, just letting it be here – and room, too, for the skeptics who don’t even believe there is such a field. Room for them all. Noticing each feeling and part that emerges for you, naming it and letting it be here, each one taking a seat in the field, the field so wide and expansive that, as many parts as come forward, it is still not full. That is the nature of divine spaciousness; it is ever expanding (as in the Temple where, no matter how many worshippers arrived, there was always room for all to bow down). Noticing the parts spread across the field, and most of all, noticing the space, feeling yourself as that space, that tolerant open space where anything is welcome and allowed to be here.
No Agenda
There is nothing to get done in this field. Yitzhak went out lasuah. It is unclear what that word means, probably something like meditate or pray, but one thing is for sure: it does not mean to plant or to sow or to reap or to work or to get anything done. Listen to the word: lasuah, la – soo – ahhch. It sounds like the susurration of leaves in the evening breeze, lasuah, like the breeze itself that blows them, whoosh, like the word for breeze, ruah, like the feeling of walking about in that evening breeze as God did at the start, strolling through the Garden of Eden leruah hayom, at that same evening breezy time of day (Genesis 3:8), Yitzhak walking through the field like God, slowly, with presence and pleasure and equanimity. Can you feel and hear that ruah, that wind, in the field? It is God’s own ruah, God’s own spirit, the same one that was hovering over the waters before the world was created (Genesis 1:2), the ruah blowing gently and rhythmically to make the waters rise and fall, like your chest rising and falling with each breath. Letting that divine ruah enter you and breathe you, becoming part of the breeze itself as you stroll.
Or lasuah – It sounds like lanuach, to rest, also a sanctified divine endeavor, to cease action, to let your shoulders drop and relax, to pause all the noise and come into quiet and stillness, like God, just to be, just to breathe and be here now in this open field, ambling about with no rush and no agenda, a wide expanse of time and space all about you.
Evening Time
It is lifnot erev, it is approaching evening when we take this stroll, and there is a bittersweetness to the air. Much has already passed in your day and in your life, much has been lost as well as gained, many difficulties and sorrows and joys and challenges, many people and stages and memories, all of them passing through your consciousness now as you wander through this field, earlier life images emerging and then falling back into the shadows, the dusky twilight lending a softness to it all, fading out the sharp edges. And maybe a tender sweet sadness comes over you now, a thousand small sorrows combining into one, like rivers all flowing into the sea, a single sea of human sorrow and care.
Yitzhak has lost his mother. And he has experienced a terrible trauma with his father through the akedah (binding). The Torah says that just before going out on this contemplative walk he had been to Be’er Lahai Ro’i, the home of Hagar (Genesis 24:62). There had been so much brokenness in his home growing up: tension between his mother and Hagar and between himself and Yishmael, and the subsequent exiling of Hagar and Yishmael. We can imagine that Yitzhak went to Hagar as an attempt, after his mother’s death, to make sense of all that brokenness and to begin to repair it. Indeed, later in the parsha, when Avraham dies, it is striking that Yishmael and Yitzhak are said to bury Avraham together (Genesis 25:9), implying that some reconciliation had indeed occurred.
Processing
So this contemplative walk in the field surely carries some of those threads of Yitzhak’s and of our own experience, the threads of our current grief and of our past brokenness, of our childhood wounds and family ruptures, of all that has passed into our veins from this life as well as from before we were born, all the multitudes we carry inside us. Elsewhere in the parsha, the word sadeh, field, is used for the plot that Avraham bought to bury Sarah (Genesis 23:17 and 25:10). So this field is also a graveyard of sorts, a place where we connect to and honor our losses, where we wander among them and feel the sorrow as well as the quiet solace of the simple evening time knowledge that this is how it is to be human.
And, too, in the seeing and feeling of all these threads woven through our lives, in the strolling amongst them, there is some processing, some integration, some coming back into harmony that happens, going back to Hagar and to Yishmael, mending the breaks, letting it all come forward into our consciousness and be held and allowed to rest in this field of peace. There is sadness and grief here, but also some inkling of restoration as the day begins to wane.
Prayer
How does that happen? How can there be healing here amidst the graves and memories of this field? Note that this field is not a field of striving or analyzing or figuring out. It is not a field of work, even inner work. It is a field of prayer. The rabbis consider this passage the source for the afternoon minchah prayer, understanding lasuah as a word for prayer (Brachot 26b). Rashi cites as a parallel the Psalm verse lifnei Hashem yishpokh sicho (Psalm 102:1), before God a person pours out his sichah, like lasuah, his speech, his thoughts, his lament (Rashi on Genesis 24:63). Yitzhak went out to the field and poured out his heart to God, his grief over the loss of his mother, his concern about his father, all the brokenness within and around him, his terrible loneliness, everything that was weighing on him. Perhaps you’d like to do a little of that too. Speak to God in this field. Pour out your heart. Whatever is weighing on you, let it out, share it with God, or if that feels hard, share it with the universe, with the shrubs and plants around you, with the siach hasadeh (“shrubs of the field,” related to lasuach, see Ibn Ezra here). Let the bushes hold it. Let it all be heard and held here in this spacious field.
Making an Evening Practice
This meditative field is one we can return to again and again throughout our days. It only takes a moment, but it does involve a yetzi’ah, a conscious leave taking of the busy urgent noisy world we live in, an intentional choice to pause and move into a different zone internally, into the open field where there is room for all of it, where we can pour out what is on our heart to an ever listening presence. I find this an especially helpful practice late in the day, a minchah practice, like Yitzhak, lifnot erev, towards evening, when our nerves are taut and our perspective has narrowed, when we feel overwhelmed by things done and not done, when we feel disconnected from ourselves by feelings not yet fully felt or met, in that early evening space, to pause and to sit in that field for a moment and remember the spaciousness, remember the quiet and let all things be as they are, even the sadness.
It Changes Us
This contact with a meditative prayer field, over time, it changes us. Rivka, seeing Yitzhak from afar, falls off her camel (Genesis 24:64), as if she has seen a ghost, as if there was something otherworldly in his appearance, perhaps an aura or an unusual peacefulness, the spaciousness of the field apparent in his bearing. Maybe feeling that possibility for you, too, how being in the field can shift something in you, bringing grace and contentment and comfort even as it also unearths suffering. Sensing who you are when you are in this field, how you hold yourself, the ease, the permission to feel, the open heart, the peace with what is, tasting that possibility for yourself in your body, how it would be to inhabit that spaciousness, for you yourself to become that field.
Camels on The Horizon
What happens next in the Torah is that Yitzhak lifts up his eyes and sees camels on the horizon approaching (Genesis 24:63). That word gemalim, camels, is related to the verb ligmol for divine providence, as in gemilut hesed, the bestowal of kindness. Yitzhak, having made space for his sorrow, now has the pleasant sensation of being cared for by a benevolent God, that all is nonetheless well, trusting that it is so, despite his woes, and opening to what comes next on the horizon, lifting his eyes to see what he could not perceive before – like Hagar with the well – that there is actually still love and joy and life in this world, his bride being carried to him on a camel through the field. Maybe you, too, can look across the field to the horizon, sensing at the edge of the field, at the edge of your consciousness, the knowledge of God’s steady care for you through it all, the continuing camels of kindness that are coming your way always, bringing life and love and possibility.
Photo by mohamed aouni at Pexels
