Shabbos Table

Dear friends,

Life and death are the bookends of our realities. Think through what you felt when you stood at a funeral of someone you know, someone who is real and part of your world. Step back to an entirely different moment: you know that your sister/mother/best friend called you from the delivery room and said mazal tov. Your life began and will end; we are all living the same drama. Nothing says this more clearly than the beginning of the parshah that tells you that “this is the life of Sara” and goes straight on to tell you about her death and the mini-monuments of her life’s stages that gave it meaning.

The place that mirrors the two ends is Chevron. The root of the word is “chibbur,” which means connection. The cave that Avraham purchased connects life and death. The soul passes through it when leaving this world, while the prayers of the living pass through it on their way upward. It is a meeting point between the world in which we live and the world beyond it. Once you know this, things change for you on the inside.

You aren’t alone. You are in transit, just like the rest of us. Each individual Jew has a connection to our spiritual history, that began with Adam and Chava, who are buried there. What does that mean for you? This tells you that you don’t have to be a spiritual giant to daven in the Me’ara. Your tefillah doesn’t have to be super tefillah. You are an ordinary person, whose prayers are ordinary, but they are never excluded from this gateway to the passage of a world that you can’t know when you are still alive. You are a descendent of Adam and Chava.

The connection between Adam, Chava and you may feel a bit, shall we say, tenuous. They didn’t go to camp with you or attend your schools or even live in the Hood (called either in-town or out-of-town). When you learn about them, there is a possible overlay of subconscious distancing, as though they are part of a fabulous epic, rather than the source of what we all have in common-our core humanity.

The Avos and Imahos who are there are the foundations of the world. They aren’t just historical ancestors; their larger-than-life lives grew roots. They restored the potentials that went into exile when Adam ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Their lives were lives in which good was good to be embraced, evil was evil-to be rejected and to fight with no mercy. If you look honestly, you will see that your struggles and theirs have more in common than you may have thought.

YOU, THE AVOS, AND THEIR GUESTS

That takes us back to talking about how Avraham came to recognize the powerful nature of the cave. The Midrash tells you that the beginning of his discovery took place on the day that the three angels came. The Baal HaTurim tells you that what they were on the outside were itinerant Arabs. What they were on the inside were three angels: Michael (literally, Who is like Hashem), who was sent to rescue Lot from the forthcoming destruction of Sodom; Gavriel (literally, Hashem is my power), who was sent to bring about this destruction; and Rafael (literally, Hashem heals), who was sent to heal Avraham after his bris. They are frequent visitors in your lives too, sent my Hashem as His agents of mercy, challenge, and healing. They don ‘t let you see who they really are…

Avraham, like the rest of us, saw the outside of the “men.” He offered food, and since his strongest desire was to bring Hashem down to us, and to unite Him with His world, he had chosen love and kindness as his method. He would feed his guests, and then tell them to bless Hashem, who is the true Provider. This wasn’t just a great strategy for kiruv; it was also an act of love in the strongest and most honest sense of the word. He wanted to share his recognition of everything in the world being a gift from the One God, and open the door for his guests to enter into a new life, one that is full of meaning, the way it is when you want to be part of something bigger than yourself, which as Jews, we all do.

He also wanted to give them a great meal, because to him the world was a beautiful concert, and he wanted everyone to hear it. In those days, tongue was considered a delicious treat, so he wanted to serve each of his three guests an entire tongue. He went out to the corral to fell three animals, but one escaped. He ran after it (yes, at 100 years old and three days after his bris). It ran into a cave, and headed deeper and deeper into its interior, and down into its bottom level. It was there that Avraham saw a brilliant spiritual light that let him recognize the true nature of the Cave of Machpela. He saw Adam and Chava’s remains, and their unfinished mission, which he saw as the beginning of his journey and the end at the same time.

This is why it was so important to him to buy the cave to bury Sara. She had a life in which her beauty and innocence at 20 was like that of child of 7, for whom beauty is never a weapon or a substitute for having a self. This was in spite of her being one of the most beautiful women in the world. At 100 she was as sinless as a woman of 20, and age in which real accountability to Hashem is already there. Avraham knew that it was a place where connection to the original inner spiritual root could take place with the burial of the mother of our people (for whom maternal parentage is definitive). Rav Moshe Shapiro explained that this is “stop one”- stop two is the unity of the Avos and Imahos with Klal Yisrael, who were yet to be born. The third stop is the ultimate future.

This is also accomplished in a different way (he explained) when we daven every day. We connect present reality, which has its roots in the past, to the gateway to heaven. That is why we begin our tefillah by referring to Hashem as the God of the Avos.

A friend of mine had a genuine “Me’ara” experience. She is the child of Holocaust survivors, and to her the feeling of being a link on the chain is in her blood. Her daughter is different. She was brought up in America, the golden child of doting grandparents and parents who took her love of being Jewish as being natural, sort of like breathing. Her dream was Success and Validation and the stuff that buys them both: money.

Her husband got a prestigious job in international banking in one of Europe's capitals. The Jewish school was not what they wanted when the International School was so much more attractive in terms of S and V. They enrolled their six-year-old daughter, and after settling up in the office went to observe a class. The children were seated, and their daughter's seat partner was a little sweetie from Pakistan. That did it. They realized that this is not their world, nor was it the world that they wanted to be part of, even with S and V as the prize.

My friend had trained herself not to say anything negative to her daughter, and was silent in the face of their decision to send their Denise to the International School. She was not silent when they told her that they had decided to send her to the local Chabad school, a decision that was made when my friend was busy davening Bizchus Avos.

My dear, dear family and friends, may we always feel that we are connected, and those of us who can, let yourself have the treat of going to Chevron!

For those of you who may be interested in joining a once-a-week class where some friends and I are studying in an online Chaburah (now on Bitachon in Hashem) that takes place in Chutz La'aretz, but with Zoom there is no geography, email my friend Tamar Bauman at [email protected].

Love
Tziporah