Dear Leah,
It humbles me now to think of how I acted when we were young. I was desperate and childless, and children are the blessing of God and the hope of our inheritance. I pleaded with Jacob, our husband, for a child.
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This week’s Torah portion presents a most difficult dilemma: Are there situations in life where it is acceptable to be dishonest and deceptive? Oy vey iz mir . . . Let’s dive into this parasha a bit and see what we can come up with.
This week’s portion, entitled Chayei Sarah, which literally means the life of Sarah, chronicles the matriarch’s death and burial, and her husband’s contemplative mourning. It begins, though, with a one-sentence retrospective of her life. “Sarah’s lifetime was one hundred years, twenty years, and seven years: the years of Sarah’s life.”
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Our world is perhaps more divided today than it’s ever been. But when we encounter people we presume to be far from God, we might do well to remember the lessons of Abraham and Abimelech, and the wisdom of Paul among the Athenians. “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.”
Jews, Christians, and Muslims as well call ourselves “children of Avraham.” And in the Christian and Messianic Jewish tradition, when we call ourselves children of Avraham, we usually focus on having the same kind of faith as Avraham. But do we have that kind of faith?
As I read this week’s parasha, I am reminded that our great problems in the world today are not new. They are the same ones as in ancient times, recycled into our current generation. Our parasha opens with a view of human life from over 4,000 years ago: “The earth was corrupt in its relation to God and was full of wanton violence.”
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Every person is made in the image of God, and therefore to be treated with respect and dignity. This claim might sound obvious, or even a bit sentimental, but we need to hear it afresh amidst current views like these: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-size planet . . . just a ripple within the cosmic data flow.”
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As if to reinforce Rosh Hashanah as the beginning of our new year, Simchat Torah concludes our reading of the Torah (Deut 33–34) by immediately launching us into reading the Torah from the beginning (B’reisheet) again. So, we begin again immediately, not at some indistinct time in the future, but right now.
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It’s entirely possible to do good, without being good. I think of the quote from the controversial central character of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Jordan Belfort: “See money doesn’t just buy you a better life, better food, better cars . . . it also makes you a better person.”
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When I teach or counsel about forgiveness, this is a question I hear more than any other: How do I forgive myself? I’ve searched the Scriptures for verses on forgiving yourself and can’t find any. You can repent (with God’s help) and you can receive God’s forgiveness, but you can’t forgive yourself.
And realizing this fact can be liberating, an essential step in the right direction.
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