Finding the Joy · Parashat Chayei Sarah
I Will Go
I Will Go
On Thursday afternoon I was at the grocery store picking up a few things for Shabbat. The woman in front of me in line was buying challah ingredients: flour, eggs, honey, yeast. Not a mix. The ingredients. She had a handwritten recipe card in her hand, the kind with old stains on it and one corner curling up.
She said she hadn’t baked challah in years. The recipe was her grandmother’s, from a kitchen in Cleveland that doesn’t exist anymore. The grandmother died a long time ago. But this woman’s daughter — four years old — had seen someone braiding challah at a friend’s house and came home asking to learn. So she dug the card out of a drawer.
A recipe card that sat in a drawer for years. A four-year-old who wanted to learn something she didn’t know was hers. That is the whole story.
The parsha this Shabbat is Chayei Sarah — “The Life of Sarah.” It is, by any measure, a strange name for what it contains. The very first thing that happens is that Sarah dies.
וַיִּהְיוּ֙ חַיֵּ֣י שָׂרָ֔ה מֵאָ֥ה שָׁנָ֛ה וְעֶשְׂרִ֥ים שָׁנָ֖ה וְשֶׁ֣בַע שָׁנִ֑ים שְׁנֵ֖י חַיֵּ֥י שָׂרָֽה׃ Sarah’s lifetime—the span of Sarah’s life—came to one hundred and twenty-seven years.
She dies in Hebron, and Abraham mourns her, and then the text does something remarkable: it keeps going. Not into grief. Into action. Abraham negotiates the purchase of a burial cave at Machpelah. The first Jewish real estate transaction in the Torah. The first permanent claim to the land.
And then, before the grief has even settled, Abraham sends his servant Eliezer on the most important errand in Genesis: find a wife for Isaac. The servant arrives at a well outside the city and prays for a sign:
וְהָיָ֣ה הַֽנַּעֲרָ֗ אֲשֶׁ֨ר אֹמַ֤ר אֵלֶ֙יהָ֙ הַטִּי־נָ֤א כַדֵּךְ֙ וְאֶשְׁתֶּ֔ה וְאָמְרָ֣ה שְׁתֵ֔ה וְגַם־גְּמַלֶּ֖יךָ אַשְׁקֶ֑ה אֹתָ֤הּ הֹכַ֙חְתָּ֙ לְעַבְדְּךָ֣ לְיִצְחָ֔ק וּבָ֣הּ אֵדַ֔ע כִּי־עָשִׂ֥יתָ חֶ֖סֶד עִם־אֲדֹנִֽי׃ let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’—let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac.
Rebecca appears. She offers water. She waters the camels. Eliezer brings gifts. Her family asks for a delay. Eliezer says no. So they call Rebecca and ask her directly. One verse. One word.
וַיִּקְרְא֤וּ לְרִבְקָה֙ וַיֹּאמְר֣וּ אֵלֶ֔יהָ הֲתֵלְכִ֖י עִם־הָאִ֣ישׁ הַזֶּ֑ה וַתֹּ֖אמֶר אֵלֵֽךְ׃ They called Rebekah and said to her, “Will you go with this man?” And she said, “I will.”
Elech. I will go. She is leaving her family, her city, her country, everything she has ever known — to marry a man she has never met, in a land she has never seen, to join a family whose matriarch just died. And her answer is one word. No conditions. No negotiation.
I think about that word more than I probably should. I am a convert. I chose this. There was a moment, not unlike Rebecca’s, where the question was put plainly: will you go with this? And the answer was the same one-word answer, though mine was less elegant and involved a lot more paperwork.
What strikes me about Rebecca is not her courage, exactly. It is her clarity. The text doesn’t say she deliberated or asked for a sign. She said elech and got on a camel.
The parsha closes with Isaac bringing Rebecca into his mother Sarah’s tent.
וַיְבִאֶ֣הָ יִצְחָ֗ק הָאֹ֙הֱלָה֙ שָׂרָ֣ה אִמּ֔וֹ וַיִּקַּ֧ח אֶת־רִבְקָ֛ה וַתְּהִי־ל֥וֹ לְאִשָּׁ֖ה וַיֶּאֱהָבֶ֑הָ וַיִּנָּחֵ֥ם יִצְחָ֖ק אַחֲרֵ֥י אִמּֽוֹ׃ Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife. Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.
Rashi says that when Rebecca entered Sarah’s tent, three miracles returned: the candles burned from Shabbat to Shabbat, the challah dough was blessed, and the cloud of the Divine Presence rested over the tent again. All three had ceased when Sarah died. Rebecca walked in and the light came back.
That is why the parsha is called “The Life of Sarah.” Not because Sarah is alive in it — she dies in the first two verses. Because everything that follows is her life continuing. The land Abraham purchases is for her. The wife Eliezer finds is her successor. A life measured not by its duration but by what it set in motion.
This past Tuesday, the Genesis Prize Foundation named Gal Gadot as its laureate. Gadot, who organized private screenings of October 7 footage for Hollywood leaders when most of the industry stayed silent, announced she would direct the entire $1 million prize to Israeli organizations working to heal the physical and psychological wounds the war inflicted. Elech, in her own idiom.
A woman in Atlanta digs a recipe card out of a drawer because her four-year-old asked to learn to braid challah. The handwriting on the card is her grandmother’s. The dough hadn’t been made in years. Now it will be again, because a child reached for something she didn’t know was waiting for her.
The light comes back because someone walks in and lights it.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham