I have the privilege now of offering some words of Torah, reflecting on the same parashah, the same Torah portion Alexander and Jenavive will speak about tomorrow, as they share with you all — their family, their community — the results of their process of Yisrael, wrestling with God, as that word Yisrael means; wrestling with the words of Torah—words which, for the Jewish people, serve as the fabric of life, holding space for us to seek to understand from whence we come, and towards what we are called. Jenavive and Alexander will generate their own branches on this etz chayim, this tree of life, as the Torah is known, flowing from the same source and contributing their own entries to it.
Their parashah is known as Hayei Sarah—the life of Sarah, our foremost matriarch, or perhaps a more accurate translation, the lifetime of Sarah, for the portion begins by recording her death, reflecting back on the years she had lived.
But while the portion begins with a mother, the mother from whom all Israelites ultimately are understood to descend, including those who choose to become Jewish—while the portion begins with it a mother, it offers teachings perhaps more indelibly on a different familial unit: siblings.
As Alexander and Jenavieve will share tomorrow, much of the Torah portion centers around the desire of the father Abraham to find his and Sarah’s son Isaac a wife, to ensure the legacy is passed down for subsequent generations—something that motivates Jewish parents helping steward their children through the b;nei mitzvah experience and beyond to this day.
And as we know from the Torah portion we read each year on Rosh Hashanah, Isaac has a sibling, his brother Ishmael—son of Hagar, handmaiden to Sarah who bears a child for Abraham when Sarah and Abraham are unable to conceive. We know the heartbreaking circumstances where Sarah—for reasons not entirely clear to us—calls upon Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael from his household, a decision God God’s self endorses. God then proceeds to nourish Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness. The story of Isaac and Ishmael resumes in this parashah, which I’ll return to in a minute.
But wouldn’t you know, these two are not the only siblings invoked in this parashah.
The rabbis read the verse which says וְאַבְרָהָ֣ם זָקֵ֔ן בָּ֖א בַּיָּמִ֑ים וַֽיהֹוָ֛ה בֵּרַ֥ךְ אֶת־אַבְרָהָ֖ם בַּכֹּֽל׃
“Now Avraham was old, advanced in days, and YHWH had blessed Avraham in everything,” and they wonder what exactly bakol —in everything — means. What does it mean to be blessed in everything? For the ancient rabbis—and we might understand it differently today—the commandment from Genesis to p’ru ur’vu, to be fruitful and multiply, is fulfilled only through the birth of a son and a… daughter. One of each.
To the rabbis, therefore, the verse’s suggestion that YHWH had blessed Avraham bakol, in everything, means that he had, unbeknownst to those of us reading just the peshat, the plain meaning of the words, a daughter. Abraham had a daughter.
I’m reminded of a different sage—one master yoda, when, at the end of empire strikes back, luke skywalker goes to save han solo and princess leia before his training is over against the advice of Yoda and Obi-Won Kenobi, and Obi Won Kenobi laments to Yoda, that boy is our last hope, and Yoda responds with, “no—there is another,” referring, we believe to Luke’s sister Princess Leia.
Here, too, in Torah, there is another. Isaac’s sister.
“Just who this [sister] was,” writes midrash anthologist Howard Schwartz, “remains a mystery. Only this much is known: Abraham loved her dearly, and taught her all that he had learned, and she was the center of Abraham’s household. And when Abraham took leave of this world, his daughter carried his teachings to the ends of the earth, she joined him on high, and she still accompanies him in the world to come.”
Of course, as is often the case, in Jewish, and in human history, the record of women’s roles and contributions is sparse.
Yet, just because a record is not there doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. What are the ways we might imagine we’ve been touched by the contributions of Abraham’s daughter, even if we didn’t realize it until now?
Still there is one moment in this Torah portion that involves siblings being with one another. “Now these are the days [and] years of the life of Avraham, which he lived:” the passage begins “a hundred years and seventy years and five years; then he expired. Avraham died at a good ripe-age, old and satisfied and was gathered to his kinspeople. וַיִּקְבְּר֨וּ אֹת֜וֹ יִצְחָ֤ק וְיִשְׁמָעֵאל֙ בָּנָ֔יו Yitzhak and Yishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Makhpela.
Isaac and Ishmael, the sons whose rivalry led Sarah to banish Ishmael and Hagar from their home family, came together at the end of their father’s life to bury a loved one.
This moment hits too close to home today, with Jews and Arabs, who are traditionally understood to descend from Ishamel, torn apart by war.
Still siblings can hold out a model for us of what it means to hold one another in relationship while still in conflict.
The Tanakh, the Hebrew bible, is rife with sibling rivalries—Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his 11 brothers.
And yet there are also indelible words from the same text which state, הִנֵּ֣ה מַה־טּ֭וֹב וּמַה־נָּעִ֑ים שֶׁ֖בֶת אַחִ֣ים גַּם־יָֽחַד, how How good and how pleasant it is that achim, that kindred, that siblings dwell together.
Alexander and Jenavieve, you have your own challenges before you as two siblings, close together in age. I’ve got two sisters myself—I know it’s not easy.
And yet through this process of preparing to celebrate your b’nei mitzvah together, you’ve already demonstrated some of the grace and equanimity that is called for when sharing a stage, a platform, a bimah, with a loved one—a sibling.
I don’t want to sound grandiose, but it’s not wrong to suggest the world could take a lesson from you. We have to share—that is one of the lessons of living on this finite planet. We have to share and, as siblings, you’re already modeling that for us in gracious ways.
I picture Isaac and Ishmael standing there, perhaps alongside their sister, whom history has forgotten. I picture the three of them there, each bearing the scars of life as they mourn their father.
Isaac, who experienced the trauma of having his father wield the knife above his head, his father who loved him deeply, sensing that but for God’s intervention, he might have gone through it—forever feeling life’s precariousness, forever wondering the trustworthiness of life if those so close to you would do you such harm.
It’s not altogether different from Ishmael’s experience: Ishmael—the one rejected by his father—banished along with his mother to make his way in the wilderness, wondering if he ever trust anyone.
And the sister, whose name some say was bakol, “in everything”—in everything Abraham had been blessed—the sister who was forgotten to everyone else if not to her father.
The three of them, scars in tact, came together to bury their father, their father with whom they each had deeply complicated relationships, and yet in doing so they did what we are saying is so important: as siblings putting aside their differences, even if only for crucial moments, to come together to participate in the core stuff of life: to grieve, to be, to love.
May siblings forever teach us these lessons. Shabbat Shalom.
