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.