It’s not true that no one got sacrificed at the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. Someone did get sacrificed –Sarah.
Sarah’s death at the beginning of our parsha immediately follows the story of the Akedah, and Rashi famously explains the connection as causal: When an angel came to inform Sarah that her son had been taken off to be slaughtered, and almost was slaughtered, parha nishmata vemata, “her soul flew out and she died.”
My father, z”l, pointed out that Rashi makes this comment not on her death, but on the phrase – lispod lesarah velivkotah – Avraham came “to eulogize her and to cry for her” (Genesis 22:2), which, my father discovered, is actually an unusual act for the Torah to mention. The implication is that all that crying and eulogizing was due to Avraham’s guilt over her death; he understood that her death was on some level his responsibility. Why hadn’t he shared with her ahead of time the command to sacrifice Yitzhak? Why hadn’t he consulted with her? She was left to receive the information suddenly from some other source, totally left out of the picture.
There is a sense earlier in the text, too, that Avraham does not fully appreciate and honor Sarah’s role. When the three angels come to deliver the good news that Sarah will have a baby, they ask Avraham – ayeh sarah ishtekha? “Where is Sarah your wife?” The question ayeh, “where,” carries with it a tinge of criticism, as in the two earlier ayeh questions in the Torah, God’s question to Adam and Chavah – ayeka, “where are you” – after eating of the forbidden fruit, and God’s question to Kayin – ey Hevel akhikha, “where is Hevel your brother” – after murdering his brother. In each case there is a sense of implied judgment – who are you not seeing or paying attention to? Who is being hidden here? And so, too, with reference to Avraham, “where is Sarah your wife” means: Why aren’t you seeing her and paying attention to her? Where is she for you – why isn’t she more present for you?
Indeed, Sarah herself complains of not being listened to in an earlier incident, and God tells Avraham: kol asher tomar elekha Sarah, shma bekolah. “Everything that Sarah tells you, listen to her voice” (Genesis 21:12). Shma bekolah. “Listen to her voice.” Rashi comments that God was telling Avraham that he should listen to the ruah hakodesh, the divine spirit, in Sarah because, of the two of them, it was actually Sarah who had the greater prophetic abilities, the greater nevuah.
Avraham did not properly value Sarah’s voice, her essence, her prophetic knowledge, and in not listening to her and attending to her, he lost her. She dies from a lack of honoring. And for Avraham, this loss has significant consequences. As Rabbi Shlomo Riskin has pointed out, after Sarah’s death, Avraham never again receives any communication from God. His prophecy, too, dies with hers.
I want to take this all inside, and ask: Who on the inside are we not seeing and valuing and listening to? Who is the Sarah inside us, the voice of ruah hakodesh, of our connection to the divine, the voice that knows our own divine truth – who is that Sarah inside us – and how can we learn not to ignore her, but to listen to her, so that she does not die, but lives and guides us?
We all have Avraham parts. They are fantastic parts, outward facing and energetic, running from place to place, inviting guests into the house, making treaties and endlessly trying to save people, to fix the world. Our Avraham parts sit at the four open doors of our tent, facing outward, looking out, always out, to see who and what is on the horizon so that they can run out to take care of it.
Feel that external facing energy inside you, and then ask yourself – where is Sarah – where is the Sar – the one in charge here, the inner Self? Avraham knew the answer: ba’ohel, “in the tent.” The one in charge of each of us is indeed inside the tent. Not sitting at the door, but sitting quietly deep inside us, protected from all that noise, deep inside our tent, our inner sanctuary.
This one inside sees and understands things. Sarah’s other name is Yiskah, which means Seer. Avraham goes outside and sees the endless sky and all its stars. But Sarah is an internal Seer, a knower, connected and aligned with the internal truth of her own inner divine voice. The divine speaks to each of us through our own Sarah, through this place of intuition and wisdom, prophecy, even. We can trust this knowing, and honor it by listening to it. Shma bekolah. Listen to her voice.
Maybe there is an issue on your mind. Should you sacrifice Yitzhak on an altar as God seems to have commanded? Should you pursue this path that everyone is telling you is right? We can learn to listen to our Sarah voice, to check in to this inner place and honor it, even if it says surprising things, things that seem to go against the grain of what is outwardly acceptable.
Because the thing is, so much of the time, we don’t listen. We are busy. There is a lot of noise, the noise of doing and the noise of expectation and of communal obligation and even, sometimes, the noise of morality, of what we “should” do. Our Avraham parts have all the flaps of our tent wide open and are constantly taking all that in from the outside. And that’s fine, good, even. But at least once in a while, we need to stop and really listen to Sarah. She is Sarah, the one in charge. It is she who should be directing our Avraham parts, helping us figure out how to use that energy in the world, where to run and what to do, so that when we act, it comes from this deep calm knowing place inside us, so that when we act, we are fully aligned with the divine, not someone else’s perception of the divine, but our internal divine voice.
Because if we don’t listen, she will die. That’s what happened to Avraham’s Sarah. She died from inattention, from being ignored. He wasn’t even with her when she died, but had to come from afar to bury her. That’s how far we are often from our own Sarah. We have left her, abandoned her, a thousand times a day we abandon her, we abandon that internal truth inside us, we don’t want to hear it. But if we don’t listen, she will die. We will die in some way. Who are we without her? Who was Avraham after Sarah died? No prophecy. No more great visions or instructions or miraculous events or conversations.
It reminds me of a story told in the gemara (Ketubot 62b) about the rabbinic practice of staying away from home for long periods of time to learn Torah. One such story is told of Rabbi Hananya ben Hakhinai who left his wife and children to sit and study Torah for 12 years. When he returned home, the gemara says, all the paths in his town had changed so that he didn’t know how to get home. He sat by the bank of the river and heard people calling to someone – “daughter of Hakhinai, daughter of Hakhinai.” He said to himself – oh, that must be my daughter. If I follow her home, I will find my home. He followed her home, and when he arrived, his wife was sitting and sifting flour. She looked up and, seeing him with shock, her soul flew out, parha ruhah, like Sarah.
That’s what happens when we stay away from our Sarah, from the deepest most internal part of us, for a long time and are off on business, busy with the world, never returning home, ostensibly for good things like Torah, but still never coming home. What happens is that we lose sight of who we are. We no longer even know how to get home. We don’t recognize our own offspring. Something in us dies. The part that represents home inside us, if we don’t come back often enough, don’t honor and listen to it, it dies.
The gemara’s story, unlike Sarah’s, has a happy ending. Rabbi Hananya ben Hakhinai prays and his wife is returned to life. And the truth is that I think we always have the opportunity to return. We can be away for a long time – and we often are – but we can learn to return, again and again, to make a practice of returning, to get to know this part of ourselves, to learn to listen to this, our Sarah voice, and to honor it.
And when we do listen, there is an aliveness that returns to us, so that it makes sense that, in speaking of Sarah’s death, the Torah uses the term, not once, but twice, chayei Sarah, “the life of Sarah.” There is an aliveness to this Sarah voice inside us, our own aliveness that wants to be heard and lived into.. Shma bekolah. Listen to her voice.
Photo by Max Andrey at Pexels
