Shabbat Shalom Weekly

Torah Portion:  Chaye Sarah

The Imprint of One Act
by Rabbi Noah Weinberg (z”l)

His beloved wife Sarah has just died, and after eulogizing her, Avraham wants to give her a fitting burial. But first he has to contend with the children of Cheis, the Hittites, and the greedy, manipulative Ephron, in order to acquire a suitable burial plot.

If you look at the entire chapter carefully, you will see that one group of people is mentioned repeatedly:

Avraham rose up from the presence of his dead, and spoke to the children of Cheis…  And the children of Cheis answered Avraham…  Then Avraham rose up and bowed down to the members of the council, to the children of Cheis…  Now, Ephron was sitting in the midst of the children of Cheis, and Ephron the Hittite responded to Avraham in the hearing of the children of Cheis…  And Avraham weighed out to Ephron the price that he had mentioned in the hearing of the children of Cheis…  And Ephrons’ field…was confirmed as Avraham’s as a purchase in the view of the children of Cheis…  Thus, the field with the cave that was in it, was confirmed as Avraham’s as an estate for a burial site, from the children of Cheis.  The field that Avraham had bought from the children of Cheis, there Avraham was buried, and Sarah his wife.

The Torah is very exact; there are no extra letters or words. The repetition of the words bnei Cheis, the children of Cheis, is striking – they are mentioned nine times here in this week’s Torah portion, and once later on in Parashat Vayechi (49:32). We know who the people in this story are. Why repeat their names ten times?

The Midrash explains: “Rabbi Elazar said: How much ink is spilled, and how many quills are broken, in order to write ‘the children of Cheis’! Ten times [the Torah] writes, ‘the children of Cheis, the children of Cheis.’ These ten mentions correspond to the Ten Commandments, in order to teach you that whoever assists in the business dealings of a righteous person, it is considered as though he has fulfilled the Ten Commandments” (Bereishis Rabbah 58:8).

Bnei Cheis are not just recorded once for posterity in the Torah – they are written ten times! Just think how much ink has been used in writing those ten phrases over the course of 3,300 years in the world’s top bestselling book. Why the repetition?

One Act Can Define Your Life

The Midrash is pointing out that one act can make history. The Hittites were a fierce nation whom everyone feared (according to some commentaries, the name “Cheis” comes from the Hebrew word for “fear”). Despite their barbaric nature, the children of Cheis helped Abraham acquire the Cave of the Patriarchs from Ephron. They did one good deed – they helped a tzaddik, a righteous person whom they recognized as a “Nesi Elokim,” a prince of God. On account of this single action, they are considered to have fulfilled the Ten Commandments. What does that mean? It signifies that they made their life worth living.

Through one deed, a person can impact the world in a way that justifies his existence and makes him worthy of being remembered for all of eternity. He can make his mark in history.

Imagine seeing a toddler fall into a swimming pool. You jump in, fully clothed, and rescue the child. Your clothing is soaked, your cell phone is ruined, and yet you feel, “Wow, I just saved this kid’s life.”

The fact that you did something heroic does not mean you can now stop living, or that you have attained greatness. There is always so much more to accomplish in life. Yet you recognize that you did something that will forever give meaning to your existence. Your act is worth remembering, and deserves to be recorded for posterity.

Reaching Out

We all have opportunities every single day to add immeasurable meaning to our lives and the lives of those around us. But to access them we have to be alert. We may not even realize at the time just how consequential a single act could be.

To illustrate, here is one true story. Eric Coopersmith was 19 years old, volunteering at Kibbutz Shaar Ha’amakim in Israel. During a visit to Jerusalem he stumbled across Aish HaTorah, where he met Ephraim Shore, a fellow Canadian who had been learning in the yeshiva for several months. Eric enjoyed his conversation with Ephraim and began to think that perhaps there is more to Judaism than what he was exposed to in Hebrew school. He told Ephraim that he would come back to visit in a month or so, but right now he had to complete his stint as a volunteer at the kibbutz.

Back at the kibbutz, Eric shared his impressions of Aish with his non-Jewish roommate. This roommate was a turned-off Roman Catholic, and he convinced Eric that the rabbis were snake-oil salesmen and that religion was empty. Eric subsequently decided to forget about spending any time at Aish and go directly back to Europe after he finished at the kibbutz.

Several weeks later, during the yeshiva break, Ephraim was on a bus heading north. Looking out the window, he suddenly saw a sign for Kibbutz Shaar Ha’amakim. “Hey, isn’t that the kibbutz where that guy Eric is?” Ephraim said to himself.

He quickly pressed the stop button and got off the bus. He tracked Eric down at the kibbutz and re-convinced him that it would be worthwhile to come back to Aish HaTorah to check out the wisdom of Judaism before continuing his year of travel in Europe.

To make a long story short, a few weeks later Eric returned to Aish HaTorah, where he eventually became a rabbi and one of the rosh yeshiva’s closest confidants, responsible for developing many of Aish HaTorah’s most successful and influential programs worldwide.

Ephraim could easily have stayed on the bus, which is what most of us probably would have done. After all, he had only met Eric once, for a few hours. But instead he seized the opportunity to reach out, not knowing the impact his actions would eventually have on the Jewish people.

Leave Your Imprint

History is being made every day, and each one of us has the opportunity to leave our imprint for eternity. How? Every person can make the effort to reach out to a fellow Jew. You can change the course of someone’s life and make your mark on history – and you never know when the person you touch will himself become an impetus to making history.

One decision to reach out and help, one act, can leave your imprint forever and add immeasurable meaning to your life and the lives of your family. The opportunities surround us.

Take that one step today and make your mark for posterity.

 

The World’s Oldest Man
by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (z”l)

To survive tragedy and trauma, first build the future.  Only then remember the past.

On 11 August 2017, the world’s oldest man passed away, just a month short of his 114th birthday – making him one of the ten longest-lived men since modern record-keeping began. If you knew nothing else about him than this, you would be justified in thinking that he had led a peaceful life, spared of fear, grief and danger.

The actual truth is the opposite. The man in question was Yisrael Kristal, Holocaust survivor. Born in Poland in 1903, he survived four years in the Lodz ghetto, and was then transported to Auschwitz. In the ghetto, his two children died. In Auschwitz, his wife was killed. When Auschwitz was liberated, he was a walking skeleton weighing a mere 37 kilos. He was the only member of his family to survive.

He was raised as a religious Jew and stayed so all his life. When the war was over and his entire world destroyed, he married again, this time to another Holocaust survivor. They had children. They made aliyah to Haifa. There he began again in the confectionary business, as he had done in Poland before the war. He made sweets and chocolate. He became an innovator. If you have ever had Israeli orange peel covered in chocolate, or liqueur chocolates shaped like little bottles and covered with silver foil, you are enjoying one of the products he originated. Those who knew him said he was a man with no bitterness in his soul. He wanted people to taste sweetness.

In 2016, at the age of 113, he finally celebrated his bar mitzvah. A hundred years earlier, this had proved impossible. By then, his mother was dead and his father was fighting in the First World War. With an almost poetic sense of fittingness, Yisrael died on erev Shabbat Ekev, the parsha that includes the second paragraph of the Shema with its commands to wear tefillin and teach Torah to your children, “so that you and your children may live long in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors.”

Yisrael Kristal faithfully did both. On his bar mitzvah he joked that he was the world’s oldest tefillin-wearer. He gathered his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren under his tallit and said, “Here’s one person, and look how many people he brought to life. As we’re all standing here under my tallit, I’m thinking: six million people. Imagine the world they could have built.” This was an extraordinary man. His life sheds light on one of the most tantalising verses in the Torah. Describing the death of Abraham, our parsha says that he “breathed his last and died in good old age, old and satisfied” (Gen. 25:8). His is the most serene death in the Torah. Yet consider his life, fraught as it was with trial after trial.

To pursue the call of God, he had to say goodbye to his land, his birthplace and his father’s house and travel to an unknown destination. Twice, famine forced him into exile, where his life was in danger. Promised countless children – as many as the dust of the earth and the stars of the sky – he remained childless until old age. Then God told him to send away his son by Sarah’s handmaid Hagar. And if that trial were not heartbreaking enough, God then told him to sacrifice his only son with Sarah, Isaac, the one whom God had told him would be his spiritual heir and bearer of the covenant into the future.

Seven times promised a land, when Sarah died, he owned not a single square inch of territory in which to bury her, and had to entreat the Hittites to let him buy a field and burial cave. This was a life of disappointed hopes and delayed fulfillments. What kind of man was this that the Torah can say that he died “in good old age, old and satisfied”?

I learned the answer to this question through a series of life-changing encounters with Holocaust survivors. They were among the strongest, most life-affirming people I have ever met. For years I wondered how they were able to survive at all, having seen what they saw and known what they knew. They had lived through the deepest darkness ever to have descended on a civilisation.

Eventually I realised what they had done. Almost without exception, when the war was over, they focused with single-minded intensity on the future. Strangers in a strange land, they built homes and careers, married and had children and brought new life into the world.

Often they did not talk about their experiences during the Shoah, even to their spouses, their children and their closest friends. This silence lasted, in many cases, for as long as fifty years. Only then, when the future they had built was secure, did they allow themselves to look back and bear witness to what they had suffered and seen. Some of them wrote books. Many of them went around schools, telling their story so that the Holocaust could not be denied.[1] First they built a future. Only then did they allow themselves to remember the past.

That is what Abraham did in this week’s parsha. He had received three promises from God: children, a land, and the assurance that he would be the father, not of one nation but of many nations (Gen. 17:4-5). At the age of 137, he had one unmarried son, no land, and had fathered no nations. He uttered not a single word of complaint. It seems that he realised that God wanted him to act, not to wait for God to do the work for him.

So, when Sarah died, he bought the first plot in what would become the Holy Land, the field and cave of Machpelah. Then he instructed his servant to find a wife for Isaac, his son, so that he might live to see the first Jewish grandchildren. Lastly, in his old age, he married again and had six sons, who would eventually become progenitors of many nations. He did not, except briefly, sit and mourn the past. Instead he took the first steps toward building the future.

That, in his own way, is what Yisrael Kristal did – and that is how a survivor of Auschwitz lived to become the world’s oldest man. He too died “in good old age, old and satisfied.”

That is what the Jewish people did collectively when, a mere three years after standing eyeball-to-eyeball with the angel of death at Auschwitz, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the Jewish State in our people’s ancient homeland, the land of Israel. Had world Jewry sat passively and wept from then till now for the murdered generations of European Jewry, it would have been an understandable reaction. But it did not. It was as if the Jewish people had said collectively, in the words of King David, “I will not die but live” (Ps. 118:17), thereby giving testimony to the God of life. That is why the West’s oldest nation is still young, a world leader in life-saving medicine, disaster relief, and life-enhancing technology.

This is a transformative idea. To survive tragedy and trauma, first build the future. Only then, remember the past.

NOTE:  1. For two fascinating portraits of how encounters with the Holocaust and its survivors were transformative for young Americans, see the films Paper Clips (2004) and Freedom Writers (2007).

 

Speaking With Parents
by Nesanel Yoel Safran

From this week’s Torah Portion

A parent is more than just another person and should be treated with special respect. In our Torah portion, the disrespectful way Laban treats his father (Gen. 24:50, Rashi) reveals his poor character. We can show our good character by speaking to and treating our parents respectfully.

In our story, a girl realizes the way to speak to a parent isn’t always so apparent.

“Isn’t that new music store in the mall just soooo cool?” Liz cooed into her cell phone, as she lay sprawled out on her cozy bedroom pile carpet and flipped through a fashion magazine.

“You betcha!” answered her friend-and-all-time-favorite-phone-pal, Jan. “I was there yesterday and they promised me that by Sunday the newest album from…”

“Hold on a second, Jan, okay?” Liz cut her off.

Jan distractedly dangled the phone up to her ear to listen for when Liz would come back on the line.

“Who said you’re allowed to come into my room!” Jan could hear Liz say shrilly in the background. “What, you want to put my laundry away? Okay if you absolutely have to … but fast!”

A moment later Jan heard her friend’s bedroom door click closed.

“Sorry, Jan,” Liz giggled, back on the line. “So what were we talkin’ about anyway? Oh, I meant to tell you, I just saw that there’s a special half price sale coming up at … ugh, I cannot believe this,” she groaned. “Hold on again.”

“Will you stop bothering me!”

This time Jan heard Liz shouting in the background.

“No, I do not want my bed made! Now get OUT!”

“Okay, we won’t have any more interruptions now,” Liz said into the phone as she locked her door so that her mother wouldn’t come in again. “Sorry about that.”

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” Jan said, “You were really hard on her, huh?” Jan said into the phone.

“Well, she deserved it!” Liz laughed.

“I can relate,” Jan said. “Sometimes I get really annoyed by our hired cleaning help, too. You know what I mean?”

Cleaning help? Liz thought, confused, as Jan went on.

“Of course, I could never get away to speaking to our housecleaner like you just did to yours. My mom always tells me we have to treat everyone respectfully – and not only ‘important’ people like her or my dad…”

Important people? Liz pondered her friend’s words, Yes, my mom is important and really nice too … but does that mean I have to speak to her differently?…

“I guess your mom’s not home just now,” Jan continued, “so you figured she wouldn’t get upset by hearing you speak that way to the maid, huh?”

That would have been bad enough! Liz gulped.

Jan expected her normally chatty friend to jump right back into the conversation, but the phone was as silent as a library full of napping giraffes.

“Hey Liz, I’m tired of having a monologue. You still there or what?” Jan laughed into the silent phone line.

“Um … yeah, I’m here,” Liz said, “But listen … I’ve really got to go. I just discovered another big mess that needs to get cleaned up right away.”

Yeah, Liz thought to herself, the mess-up I made by speaking to my mom so disrespectfully – and the big ‘clean up’ I’m about to do right now by apologizing.

Discussion Questions

Ages 3-5

Q. How did Liz feel at first about the way she spoke to her mother?
A. She felt it was okay.

Q. How did she feel in the end?
A. She realized it wasn’t respectful to speak to her like that.

Ages 6-9

Q. What life-lesson do you think Liz learned that day?
A. She hadn’t been aware that she was being so disrespectful to her mother — someone she should be especially respectful to- – but when her friend thought that she had been mouthing off to a housecleaner and not to her mother — Liz realized she had been way out of line.

Q. Is being disrespectful to a housecleaner, or someone like that, any more permissible?
A. Certainly we should be respectful to everyone, and their so-called status, or lack of it should have nothing to do with it. Still. We should go even further when it comes to our parents, to speak and behave with exceptional respect.

Ages 10 and Up

Q. Why should we act respectfully toward a parent?
A. Firstly, we owe our parents a tremendous debt of gratitude for giving us our lives and every bit of effort they put in to raise us. (It’s one of the Ten Commandments!) Besides this, it refines our character, by training ourselves to act respectfully and we’ll eventually discover that the more we treat others (especially our parents) with respect, the more we will come to respect ourselves.

Q. How are some ways to demonstrate that respect?
A. Certainly in the way we speak. Calling parent by their first name, even if no offense is meant or taken, is less than fully respectful. In addition, we can go out of our way to try to help them and do things we know will make them pleased.

 

Quote of the Week

“It’s not how much or how little you have that makes you great or small, but how much or how little you are with what you have.” — Rabbi Samuel Raphael Hirsch

Joke of the Week

Little Moishie was having a tough time adjusting to first grade. At least twice a week, his parents would receive a note from his teacher outlining his latest infractions.

Finally his parents sat him down and said, “Moishie, we’ve had enough! We don’t want any more notes from your teacher!”

Moishe replied, “Alright. Do you guys want to tell her or should I?”