I belong to a Facebook group of authors and publishers called the Never Alone Book Club. It is a primarily left-wing group whose founders were shocked and overwhelmed at their sudden exclusion from their professional world based on their being Jewish.
A world they thought was accepting them, wasn’t. It didn’t take an Israeli military response for that reality to set in. It happened within hours of the October 7th attacks. Since then, the international community has been routinely condemning Israel. It has grown in his chorus, now issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for defending his people from terrorism. In a joke move towards even-handedness they also issued a warrant for a dead Palestinian.
Even in the US, where polling has made it clear that an overwhelming number of Americans support Israel, many do not. Specifically, many thought leaders in the US, like those in the publishing world, share a hatred of Israel, and an increasingly open hatred of Jews.
Many Jews have been shocked at how alone they really are.
And many Jews have no idea what to do.
As I read it, a similar loneliness forms a core of this Torah reading.
In the beginning of this Torah portion, Sarah dies. Avraham – whose son has left him and whose wife lived in a different city than he did – is suddenly totally alone. He’s left the land of his birth and his family, and he is estranged from his own sons. With the Covenant of the Parts (Brit Bein HaBetarim) he’s been informed that his relationships with his allies, the Amorim, will be shattered. Surely, those relationships didn’t survive such a revelation. To make matters worse, his nephew has vanished with the destruction of S’dom.
The only person in his life is his servant, Eliezer.
At this point, Avraham is a very old man. He is 137 years old, and he is completely alone. Even G-d doesn’t make an effort to comfort him, as the angels did after his brit milah (Circumcision). In fact, after the Akeidah, G-d never appears in Avraham’s life again.
So what does he do? In that moment, he rises before his wife – still weeping – and decides to acquire a burial place for her. One chapter later, he finds a wife for his son. His loneliness is addressed by establishing the legacy of the past and building the reality of the future. Ultimately, he builds relationships not with those in his own time, but with his own people across time.
This simple concept is one that could be applied to us. Our strongest relationships won’t be with other nations. Instead, they will be with those of our people who’ve come before and who are yet to come. In our present climate, we can connect, more strongly than ever before, to those who suffered at the hands of our oppressors in Germany, Spain, Algeria or Iraq. We can learn what they stood for and the ideas and values they suffered for. And we can teach those values to our own children.
We can build relationships across time, just as Avraham did. Many Jews, until recently unaffiliated, are doing exactly this.
However, just as with Avraham, we don’t live in a vacuum. There are people around us. People with fundamentally different values and different worldviews. And Avraham – and Rivka at the end of the reading – all show us how to bridge ideological divides while preserving that which defines us.
Let’s start with Avraham.
In our present day, most readings of Sarah’s burial focus on the purchase of a piece of the land of Israel. It is a very Zionist approach. However, it seems quite odd to me for a few reasons. First, the purchase is a personal one and Avraham doesn’t retain control over the land in any way our national desire to settle and govern the land would seem to relate to. Second, Avraham acquires a title, but that title isn’t explicitly timeless. Finally, to suggest that a purchase of land is somehow paramount as a method of acquisition would be to suggest that the way we actually acquired the land after the Exodus to Egypt was invalid so long as the prior residents had purchased their properties. If Bob the Canaanite laid down 40 shekel for a half-hectare 5 years before our arrival, surely his claim should take priority over our conquest. Of course this isn’t how we regard Bob’s claim. Purchasing isn’t paramount, so Avraham’s purchase is meaningless in the long term.
This focus on this purchase as a great holy and Zionist act seems to be great for Israeli real-estate brokers, but perhaps also a misreading of the text. The text can’t really be about acquiring an unbreakable title to a piece of the land.
Nonetheless, the purchase does reinforce our own claims. It just does so in a very different way that a cursory reading would suggest.
Three times in this story, the Torah says the Bnei Cheit (otherwise known as Hittites) are the Am Haaretz (effectively the people of the land). The problem is that they aren’t.
The Hittites came from northern Anatolia (Turkey). At its greatest extent, well after the period of Avraham, their empire extended to Lebanon – but never into modern-day Israel, much less Hebron (they did control territory in the north that would be part of Biblical Israel). When Avraham settled in Hebron shortly after separating from Lot, the place was called Mamre and Hevron, but the name Kiryat Arba was nowhere to be seen. It shows up here for the first time. Kir means wall. The ‘yat’ at the end implies a place. This is the fortified settlement of Arba (in Yohoshua, Arba was identified as one of the giants who built fortified cities. His grandchildren were alive in Yohoshua’s day).
This idea of a fortress only recently named suggests the arrival of new people. We know from the archeological evidence that the Hittites, in this place, are outliers. They aren’t part of any centralized Hittite empire, but they also don’t really belong this far south. The Torah is not reinforcing Avraham’s purchase. It is validating the Hittites right to sell. They get to be the Am Haaretz despite apparently being conquerors themselves. Their conquest is sufficiently legit to transfer their title Avraham for money.
By buying from them, Avraham is recognizing their claim to the land.
But more is happening here. Who does Avraham buy from? As anybody with an elementary experience of the text could tell you: Ephron the Hittite.
That makes sense. But doesn’t it seem odd that Avraham knows Ephron has title to the cave? He’s sitting there at the gates, all the Bnei Chait are there, and he says to them: “Hear me and meet, on my behalf, Ephron ben Tzochar.”
Ephron seems to be sitting right there, but Avraham doesn’t know who he is.
Did Avraham go to the land registry, look up the plot number and work it out? I wouldn’t be at all surprised at their being a land registry. But Avraham was literally sitting with his deceased wife. He didn’t have time to look one up.
So how does he not recognize Ephron and still know to buy from him.
The answer is screwy.
Ephron’s name means: Exalted Earth, son of Radiance. (aphar – dirt, ronan – exalt, ben – son, tzochar – white, dedicated, pristine).
It’s a name that sounds a whole lot like a god’s name. And low and behold, the Hittite god of farmland was: Telipinu (Exalted Son) son of Arinniti (Radiant Solar Goddess).
All the elements are there.
Reading it this way, the odd language suddenly fits. Avraham says: “Hear me and meet, on my behalf, Ephron ben Tzochar.”
Why can’t Avraham meet him? Why can’t Avraham ask whether he’s there? I believe Avraham’s asking the Hittites to act as intermediaries, talking with a god who doesn’t exist.
Next, Ephron speaks, so he must be there, right? But the language is weird:
וְעֶפְרוֹן יֹשֵׁב, בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי-חֵת; וַיַּעַן עֶפְרוֹן הַחִתִּי אֶת-אַבְרָהָם בְּאָזְנֵי בְנֵי-חֵת, לְכֹל בָּאֵי שַׁעַר-עִירוֹ לֵאמֹר
Ephron dwelled (or sat) in the midst of the Hittites. And Ephron the Hittite answered Avraham IN THE EARS of the Hittites, to all who came to the gates of HIS city.
Ephron doesn’t just speak to Avraham. He speaks to his people. Quite possibly through his people.
And when Avraham responds:
וַיְדַבֵּר אֶל-עֶפְרוֹן בְּאָזְנֵי עַם-הָאָרֶץ
And he spoke to Ephron, in the ears of the people of the land.
Avraham seems to speak to their god through their people.
Now we knew basically nothing about the Hittites until the 1900s. What clued us into the vastness of their empire was texts in Assyria and Egypt that seemed to reference them. We found their capital in 1887 and translated their language in 1915. We then found 10,000 cuneiform tablets within their empire and pieced together a pretty detailed idea of who they were. Relevant to us, the later Hittites formed the first constitutional monarchy in history. They had a high court/parliament of sorts called the Pankus that could even judge the King himself. This suggests a society that ran through consensus.
Perhaps the people, collected, could ‘hear’ their god and speak for them.
If we see Ephron as a Hittite earth god then Avraham is paying a form of recognition to the Hittite beliefs. When Avraham says twice that he wants to ‘bury his dead מִלְּפָנַי’ or (from before me) he seems to be connecting to Hitte belief. The Hittite afterlife seems a bit unclear (but unbelievably gloomy). Generally, though they wanted to hasten the dead on their way to the underworld. They didn’t want them to hang around, and perhaps anger the gods of the underworld. In this context, Avraham’s desire to get his wife away from before him is another acknowledgement of the Hittite way of life.
If so, what is Avraham doing here? Is he, and the Torah, really creating a space for this sort of pagan religion? The Torah explicitly references other gods in other places, so it wouldn’t be unheard of. But Avraham seems to be negotiating with this god.
I think the answer comes down to the price paid. The ‘god’ wants to honor Avraham by providing the burial place for free. The level of that honor is made clear by the apparently exorbitant price. Avraham is having nothing of it. He’s going to pay full price, in fully fungible and negotiable currency, so that their god can make no claim to Sarah’s legacy. This is the same thing as refusing a shoelace from S’dom.
How does he do it?
וַיִּשְׁמַע אַבְרָהָם, אֶל-עֶפְרוֹן, וַיִּשְׁקֹל אַבְרָהָם לְעֶפְרֹן, אֶת-הַכֶּסֶף אֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר בְּאָזְנֵי בְנֵי-חֵת
And Avraham harkened to Ephron and he measured to Ephron the silver that he had spoken in the ears of the Hittites).
Again, the price is what the Hittites heard from their god.
(this verse explains the earlier one where the people don’t seem to be intermediaries. That earlier verse doesn’t reference them or their ears, but it concerns this price and we know here that Ephron spoke into their ears when ‘he’ answered with a price).
Finally, we have the very last verse of the story:
וַיָּקָם הַשָּׂדֶה וְהַמְּעָרָה אֲשֶׁר-בּוֹ, לְאַבְרָהָם–לַאֲחֻזַּת-קָבֶר: מֵאֵת, בְּנֵי-חֵת.
And the Hittites established the field and the cave that was within it to Avraham as a burying place.
Not Ephron, the Hittites. They are the actors when the deal is done. It never actually says Ephron sold the land, or took the money into his hand. The money went to Ephron and the Hittites delivered.
There’s one other thing I didn’t mention about the Hittites. They appear to be the first empire to make international treaties. Deal doing, almost as an international extension of their internal governance, was a part of their way of life.
So, what has Avraham done? By talking about getting his dead away from in front of him, by negotiating with the Hittite god, Avraham is allowing them to see him as speaking their language. He even seems to make a massive donation to their deity. But Avraham is not in any way abandoning his principles. As far as he’s concerned, he’s purchased land and kept his wife’s legacy out of the hands of those who might hijack it by claiming their god contributed to it.
He’s bent on the form of things, but not the function.
A beautiful illustration of this comes in the middle of the story. Avraham is about to answer Ephron. And what does he do?
וַיִּשְׁתַּחוּ, אַבְרָהָם, לִפְנֵי, עַם הָאָרֶץ
And Avraham bowed before the people of the land.
He’s in the middle of his negotiation with their god. THEY can see Avraham bowing. As far as they are concerned, he’s bowing to their god, with whom he’s speaking. But Avraham knows that it is the Am Haaretz he’s actually negotiating with and the Am Haaretz he’s bowing before. The Torah seems to make a point of not saying that Avraham bowed before Ephron.
Avraham is alone. Utterly alone. He understands that to build relationships across time, reinforcing the past and establishing the future, he needs to make concessions to the forms and the language of those around him. At the same time, he can concede nothing in terms of giving real honor to their god and their values.
—
If we fast forward to near the end of the reading, we see another deeply lonely man. Yitzchak has gone to Be’er Lachai Ro’I, the place where Hashem heard Hagar’s affliction and promised her that her son would be greatly multiplied. She named it Be’er Lachai Ro’i because it was there that she saw G-d. It was there that her unspoken prayer was answered.
Yitzchak has travelled to the same place, possibly for his own divine intervention. But he has left, his prayer unanswered. G-d hasn’t spoken to him. As he is travelling, we read in English that “Yitzchak went out to meditate in the field at twilight…” A more literal translation might suggest that he went out to meditate in the field “in the face of twilight.” Twilight, erev, is mixing and uncertainty (from Meier Soleveichik).
Yitzchak is a man who is facing twilight – he is meditating in the face of uncertainty. Like his father, he is alone. Yitzchak, like so many survivors, was sacrificed for the relationship to G-d. That sacrifice has severed his relationship with what came before. He has nothing. G-d isn’t there. His father isn’t there. He has no partner. He has no children. He know of only one possession: his mother’s tent.
He wasn’t there to bury her – he needed to leave his father – but he took her tent. A physical reminder of his mother.
We’ll learn later that Yitzchak was the most physical of forefathers. He loved Esav for his meat, he ‘played’ with his wife. He farmed, always seeking someplace to call his own. He was desperate for the physical.
But it wasn’t what he really needed.
He only becomes a blessing in his own right when he realizes that connecting from the past to the future – giving the blessing of Avraham to Yaakov – is what really matters.
In this early stage of his life, though? He just wants something concrete to hang on to. Then he looks up and Rivka is there.
If we rewind a bit, Rivka demonstrated her connection to Avraham’s middot by watering the camels of a traveler without being asked. She was clearly ready to leave her money-hungry family behind for the greater vision Avraham had to offer. But Eliezer said nothing about Yitzchak himself. She must have known she had a challenge in front of her. Yitzchak was not his father.
When Rivka comes on her camel, Yitzchak is lonely and desperate for something concrete. All he has left is his mother’s tent. Rivka sees him and she falls off her camel. She’s shocked, one way or another. I believe she’s shocked by how lost he is. Those tragic eyes and all… With Yitzchak’s identity confirmed, she does something remarkable.
She veils herself.
Millenia of Jewish scholars have suggested great modesty in this action. But this act of veiling – using the word צָּעִיף – occurs exactly one other time in Chumash. It is when Tamar dresses as a prostitute to seduce Yehuda. This veiling (don’t tell any Muslim stuck in a Chador) isn’t a modest act. It is a deeply deeply sexual act. Indeed, straight away after being told who she is, Yitzchak brings her into his mother’s tent and takes her. Only afterwards does she become his wife, and he loves her.
What is Rivka doing here? She is doing exactly what Avraham did. She’s speaking the language Yitzchak needs in order to be rescued. Physical first, and then marriage and love. But that isn’t really the destination. It takes the rest of Yitzchak’s life before he can speak her language, the language of his own father. It takes her deception and the crying of the physical Esav over the loss of a purely physical blessing before Yitzchak recognizes what is truly valuable in the world and blesses his son in his father’s name.
Through the use of the language, even the body language, that Yitzchak needs in this stage of his life Rivka draws him back to the legacy of his parents and creates the future.
Again, in the face of loneliness, we connect to the past and we build the future. But in order to get there, we pay homage to the forms and the language that others need honored. Nonetheless, we never give up on our fundamental principles. Instead, we hope to lead others to honor what we honor.
What relevance does this have for us today?
We are in open-ended wars and, with the exception of the United States, we are alone. To end our conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon we need more than just military might. We need to turn people towards the servicing of our needs, people who don’t exactly share our values.
To survive, and to build our bridge between the past and the future, we need to honor the language and forms of those around us – even as we stay true to our values. In this sort of situation, everybody knows what is being done – but the act of carrying out the forms is enough to bridge the gaps between those who are involved.
For Israel and the Jews, there is no negotiating with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ayatollahs. But there are others, the Lebanese government (such as it is), the US, the Saudis, the Persians, even the Europeans, for whom our honoring of form can forward our needs and actually reinforce our principles. With a vision laid out that speaks to their language, we can close the noose around the necks of our enemies.
As one example, the North Gaza Project can speak to a path towards Palestinian self-governance, satisfying the forms Saudi Arabia and the Europeans need to have honored. At the same time, achieving that self-governance can be built into a system that requires a reform of Palestinian society, meeting the very real security needs of the Jewish people in Israel.
Likewise, a ceasefire in Lebanon can see the Lebanese Army emplaced in the south as a bulwark against Hezbollah. But the Lebanese Army isn’t strong enough to serve this role. So, Israel can retain the right to strike against Hezbollah where they crop up. This honors the forms the Lebanese need to pay homage to – their sovereignty, their sense of power – even as both the Lebanese and the Israelis would welcome Israeli attacks that limit the power of Hezbollah.
We can speak to the beauty and tremendous history of the Jewish-Persian relationship. At the same time, we can support the Kurds – the world’s largest stateless people – in their pursuit of self-determination; a goal we fundamentally value.
Years ago, my mother said that French was the language of diplomacy because you could write one thing, and it could mean two diametrically opposed realities. In a way, this is diplomacy. You build enough of a false reality, established in language, to allow an actual future to emerge. Done right, everybody wins – the Hittites get their cash and we get our cave. Yitzchak is brought to his true potential. Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Europe are blessed not only with peace, but with our technology and eventually a dose of our values.
A lesson of this reading is that we should allow, or even embrace, a little shared fiction precisely because it can enable a greater truth to emerge.
No, we’ll never embrace the values of the Saudis or the Europeans. Nonetheless, I believe that together we can build a future that all of humankind can celebrate.
Shabbat Shalom
Shabbat Shalom
Joseph
p.s Just as Rivka eventually brought Yitzchak around, Avraham’s people eventually brought the Hittites around. One of David’s elite soldiers was Uriah (my light is G-d) the Hittite. It is Uriah who is set up by David in the affair of Batsheva. David tries to cover his own sin by using the form of commanding Uriah returning to his wife in the midst of war so that the underlying moral violation can be hidden. But Uriah refuses. He won’t abandon the form of being a soldier in battle, despite being temporarily home. For him, the form and the reality must be aligned. David ends up using battle to kill Uriah in a way that looks appropriate in terms of form but is in fact in violation of what Hashem wants. In other words, David is using honorable form to cover a dishonorable reality while Uriah refuses to separate the two. This leads to Uriah’s death, but it also speaks to a fundamental, honorable, and unrealistic, sense of morality.
