Honor and Holiness

This week’s torah portion is Chaye Sara, the life of Sarah. It begins with Sarah’s death. Abraham mourns her and then he purchases a piece of land as a burial plot for her. He then arranges for their son Isaac to have a suitable wife, marries a concubine and has more children. Finally he sends them away with gifts. Abraham dies, old and content, and is buried by his two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. It is fitting that this portion, which has so much to do with death, is called the life of Sarah. Abraham honors Sarah in death, as he did in life. He begins by instituting the Jewish custom of the eulogy: a formal speech presenting the life and attributes of a person. He then honors her by mourning for her and by purchasing his first piece of land in Canaan, the cave of Machpeleh in Hebron, where he and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah will be buried, and which is a holy site to this day. He honors her further by making sure that Sarah’s line will continue: sending his steward Eliezer to his and Sarah’s family in Mesopotamia, to select a wife of whom Sarah would approve. He honors her again by sending his concubine and her children away, in accordance with Sarah’s wishes that Isaac be Abraham’s sole heir. His example is taken up by Isaac and Ishmael, who honor Abraham by coming together to bury their father, and again by Isaac who honors Sarah by bringing his wife Rebecca into Sarah’s tent, remembering his mother, and keeping her memory and influence alive and present in his heart and his actions. There is a wonderful midrash in the Zohar that says that if the parent of a bride or groom has passed away, God personally brings the soul of that person under the chuppah, the wedding canopy. This is what Isaac symbolically did by marrying Rebecca in his mother’s tent. What and who we honor shows our ability to create the holy. Holiness, Kadosh in Hebrew, means to set apart, to separate. What we separate are actions but also feelings. We separate acts, the sacred from the profane: objects, the holy from the mundane. But we also separate feelings to do honor to someone else. The S’fat Emet wrote that by showing honor, we attach ourselves to the Root, by which he means God’s holiness or Presence. And this is the way we feel and maintain a connection with the Divine. It is the way we refine ourselves and promote fineness of feeling: allowing that which is greater than ourselves to come to the fore and allowing our ego to bear witness to its proper place, using it to promote our will to create holiness. We honor values by living them. We honor people and God by loving them. By showing honor to others, we demonstrate our best qualities, the innate holiness we have been given by the Eternal. It is this ability to attach ourselves to God’s infinite Oneness that we experience as love.

The World and How It Works

This week’s Torah Portion is Noach, or Noah, and the Flood. Because of the corruption of humankind, God brings a flood to destroy all life except Noah, the righteous man, his family, and the animals in the ark. This quasi history, mostly parable teaches us about the principles of life and how our world works. It gives us answers to some of our most heart wrenching questions: why is the world so imperfect? Why are there disasters, disease, tragedy. Why do we have good days and bad days? We may not like the answers, but this portion does at least seek to give us some insight into these questions.
Originally there was no disease and few natural disasters. The parable says that we lived to unimaginably advanced ages. Methuseleh we are told, lived 969 years. Noah lived 950 years. There were no checks on human corruption. The world became worse and worse. Like a financial system with inadequate regulation, the system, which is all of a unity, could not sustain that amount of greed, selfishness, untruth, rapaciousness, impurity, and crime. So God put in place a new system: a system of automatic regulation. God would sweep away the old system. In this new system the maximum life span was 120 years. Under the new system human imperfection that led to selfish or sinful acts, would be worked out and expiated little by little, constantly, in small and large ways. No one person would be allowed to accumulate too much of a burden of negativity. Less worthy acts would be taken care of in the course of a life. God would constantly communicate with us through the circumstances in our lives, letting us know how we are doing. We would not have to ask, as former Mayor Ed Koch did, “How am I doing?” We would be able to take an honest look at our lives and know how we are doing because of, what is called by Rabbi Noson Weisz, the feedback loop: we do something good and are blessed; we miss the mark and do something less worthy and are sent a correction. But it’s not always so clear when and why the negative things occur, or why terrible things happen to people who seem to be virtuous. We may ask: why in the story of the flood did so many have to perish? Why the animals, why the plants? The story teaches us that what we do affects everything else. We are all connected to all existence, all being, and to God. When we choose only for ourselves, God is hurt, and the world cannot continue in that pattern. Rashi comments on the first verse of the portion: These are the generations of Noah; Noah was a righteous man; perfect in his generations; Noah walked with God. Rashi says the offspring of the righteous are good deeds. Our sages agreed that the more righteous deeds a person does, the clearer is the correspondence between what happens to that person and their deeds. The sages knew this because they each experienced it in their lives.
But this story teaches us not only how our world is constituted but also about our power to promote goodness. When we do our part we need not be overwhelmed by destructive forces. We participate in our own salvation by choosing that which helps the world to be a better place. As our sages taught, the evil impulse and the good impulse, the yetzer hara and the yetzer hatov, are both within us. It is up to us to broaden the good impulse for our own good and the good of the world. A prophet of God reported God’s words: “The world at times is like an open wound that needs to be mended with the thread of Love. The needle is intention and the thread is kept alive with prayer.” It is up to us to pour the balm of love upon that which is wounded and to be of those who repair what is rent; to be menders and not destroyers. It is also up to us to communicate with God when we are in need. The Eternal God hears us and knows our intention, sending us blessings and allowing us to live even when we fall down, judging us in mercy and helping us to improve. May we be worthy of the power for good given to us and the faith and respect for us that has been accorded to us by, in the words of God through the prophet, “God of the Pure Light.” Our world is beautiful, and we can have an enormous effect on our lives and also on the world. The system works in our favor. God wants to bless us. May each of us broaden the goodness within us, the Godliness within us, and experience how much blessing we may create.