Now it came about, when the camels had finished

two bracelets for her hands, weighing ten gold [shekels].

And he said, "Whose daughter are you? Please tell

me. Is there place for us for lodging in your father's house?"

And she said to him, "I am the daughter of Bethuel,

the son of Milcah, whom she bore to Nahor."

(Bereishit 24:22-4)

the man took It

does not say that he gave them to her yet. In his retelling of the story in

verse 47, he also says that he only gave her the jewelry after she had told him

who her family was. But he thought it was just as well to bring it out already,

to let her see some of the riches which he had with him. He now wanted to ask

for lodging in her home. Eliezer knew the world, anyway, the Aramitic world;

otherwise he would not have found gemilut hesed – acts of kindness – something

special or showing special character. For the readiness to take in ten camels

and the men attendant on them it was necessary to find not merely an

Abrahamitic daughter but a whole Abrahamitic house. The girl was certainly a

pearl in humaneness, but who could tell in what metal the jewel was set? In any

case, Eliezer thought that before he asked about her home and the possibility

of being received there it was just as well to allow some gold to be seen. Who

can say, also, whether Rebecca – as an understanding girl who knew full well

the character of her brother, who ran the home and who would scarcely have

offered a friendly welcome to a number of mere servants and camels – would have

given Eliezer her name at all if she had not seen something shining in his

hand, which, certainly not for herself, but for the ruling spirit of her home,

would have been a somewhat greater attraction than a mere opportunity to offer humane

hospitality.

(Rabbi

S.R. Hirsch on 24:22, based on Levy translation)

The

that Point

Leah

Shakdiel

When humanity was

created, male and female, it was – like the animals – permitted to eat only the

herbs of the field and the fruits of the trees, except for the fruit of the

Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Cain remained faithful

to that command and engaged in raising crops to feed people. When it occurred to

him to make a sacrifice to God, he quite logically offered some of the fruits

of his labors. Abel was a shepherd. Within the framework of the commandment to work

it and keep it, humans led and watched over the animals subservient

to them, perhaps milking them or shearing their wool for human benefit.

When the idea of

sacrificing to God comes up, Abel makes a radical innovation. He does not stop

at offering the milk or the wool of his flocks, rather, he sheds their blood,

killing a nefesh haya – a living spirit – (a term used both in

reference to animals and humans) in order to make an offering to God! Cain, the

older brother, is shocked to depths of his soul by Abel's behavior, and

challenges him.

God, however, tests

Cain by accepting Abel's offering, expecting Cain to successfully contain his

justified anger and thus be galvanized to further spiritual development. Just

as we saw earlier in the case of God's testing Adam and Eve by prohibiting them

from eating of the Tree, God's arbitrary behavior is here intended to teach

humans who is the master of creation. Humans are superior to the rest of

creation, only they are created in God's image, only they possess good

and evil inclinations (that is to say, free will), but nevertheless, they are

not like God.

Now comes Cain's tragic

failure (tragic within the Aristotelian schema of character fault, hubris, and

pride), which necessarily – fatefully – leads to his downfall. Cain mistakenly

infers that if God accepts Abel's offering of slaughtered sheep, He will also

accept a slaughtered human as an offering as well! If both humans and animals

eat vegetation, and the woman is mother of all that lives – the pinnacle

of the pyramid of life on earth – and now it has become evident that one is

permitted to kill animals and that this is acceptable to God, then it is also

permissible to kill people and God will accept them as an offering! God tries

to explain to Cain the difference between Abel's blood, which cries out to Him

from the ground and Abel's offering of sheep. God understands that His working

assumption – that Cain will be able to control his justified anger towards Abel

and God – has collapsed. His expectations were too high. As a result, Cain was

punished with expulsion (similarly to Adam and Eve, who were expelled from the

Garden of Eden) from the settled lands to the wilderness. Now every effort must

be made to counter the terrible idea that murder of people is permissible just

as the slaughter of animals is permitted. Now it is the wilderness-wandering

Cain who is in danger. He might become prey to any passing hunter of animals. In

order to protect him from this threat, he is marked as a creature essentially

different from other animals. (The midrash describes Lemekh as a hunter of

beasts who accidentally kills the human Cain.)

Cain is exiled from

settled land and discovers a way to distinguish humans from animals and to

allow them to sustain themselves in ways completely different from those of

animals. This will grant him a measure of atonement for his sin: Cain builds a

city and his descendants invent technology and the arts. Thus, he demonstrates

that he has understood the essential and profound difference between human and

beast.

Will Cain's solution – the

use of new professions and modes of habitation to mark the difference between

humans and animals and the invention of the city – save humanity from another

round of sinful behavior? No. This becomes clear twice: first in the generation

of the Flood and again in the generation of the dispersal from Babel.

God specifically said

that He was sorry for what He had made, that there were mistakes to be

corrected. The correction would take the form of a covenant, a concept that did

not appear earlier. Again, this happens twice and at two levels: the covenant

with Noah and his children, and the covenant with Abraham and his

children.

God explicitly lays

foundations for the human/animal dichotomy in His covenant with Noah. It is

necessary to permit humans to kill animals for food (while it is also necessary

to mention the similarity of humans with other "living spirits," that

the blood is the spirit, the prohibition against eating part of a living

animal, and the foundations of all the Torah's laws of kashrut). But God

forbid someone should learn from this that the killing of humans is

permissible! Whoever sheds the blood of man through man shall his blood be

shed, for in the image of God He made man. This is the first time that God

explicitly links the unique human status of having been created in the image of

God with the "Basic Law: The Prohibition of the Murder of Humans." From

here on the killing of humans – and not animals – will be referred to with a

special term: "murder" – retzah. Every time people talk about

a justified reason to kill a person they revert to the older term, hereg

– "killing." In other words, in some specific circumstances

(self-defense, capital punishment, war) human blood may be shed as animal blood

is shed.

Humanity strikes out on

a new path thanks to the covenant with Noah and his sons. However, Cain's

innovation – the institution of the city as a means for distinguishing human

culture from the animal world – still fails. The Tower of Babel proves that the

realization of humanity's divine image continues to be based upon the lowest

and most dangerous common denominator – the sin of pride and the aspiration to

be like God. This false realization of human superiority over animals leads

necessarily to a further and related fallacy – the granting of permission to

murder people, that is to say, to kill them just as human beings kill beasts

for their own purposes. The Sages already read this into the story of the Tower

of Babel. In the flood story God distinguishes between humans and beasts by

destroying those people who had lost their divine image and saving alive the

remaining righteous ones. In the Tower of Babel story He uses a new method: He

designates a portion of humanity to serve as guides for the rest. As Abram is

being sent to Canaan, God tells him: "All the families of the earth

shall be blessed through you – you are charged with the mission of teaching

everyone how to preserve human superiority over the other animals (the image

of God) alongside absolute obedience to God, Lord of the Universe." A

delicate balance indeed!

Abraham's stories

include two divine tests: Sodom, and the Akedah.

Like Babel, Sodom is

located in a valley, and, like Babel, it is a sinful city. The plain meaning of

Scripture emphasizes that Sodom deserves to be destroyed thanks to its

disregard for humans as bearers of the divine image. He who erases the image of

God in his fellows hurts God Himself and loses his right to exist in God's

world. This time, however, God does not tell Abraham what to do, rather, He

tests him: Shall I conceal from Abraham what I am

doing?… For I have known him because he

the Lord to perform righteousness and justice. God tells Abraham ahead of time about His intentions to

destroy Sodom and Gomorrah in order to find out what Abraham has come to

understand so far. Abraham passes the test with outstanding success: he

argues with God – as one equal confronting another – about His expectations

from the humans who were created in His image. Indeed, he proves himself worthy

of representing God's path of righteousness and justice in the human world!

One item of business

from the story of Cain and Abel remains unfinished. Now there is a world leader

to teach humanity about their unique value and about how human life is more

sacred than animal life. But what of the notion of human sacrifice? Is it a

justified form of killing and thus excluded from the category of murder,

together with the sacrifice of animals to God?

The Akedah comes to

answer this question. There we are explicitly told that God is testing Abraham.

Abraham is supposed to distinguish between the categorical obedience expected

of him, as a human being, to God, and the clear prohibition against murdering

humans. That is why the test involves your only son whom you loved, that

is to say, he shall select the most choice of humans – from his standpoint – to

be sacrificed to God.

I join those who

believe Abraham failed in this test: God finally had to intervene and

explicitly teach Abraham the difference between Isaac and the ram, between

human and beast, and why his faith in God had be proven beyond any doubt even

without his sacrificing Isaac as a burnt-offering to God. Not only is there no

need to sacrifice a person in order to prove one's faith in God, in fact, the

killing of humans is always prohibited, even when one has been explicitly

commanded by God to sacrifice a fellow human being.

I find here a parallel

between Adam and Noah. They each received explicit commands regarding what they

must or must not do and God simply expects them to follow his orders. Adam

failed, and Noah brought the tikkun, the repair, for his sin. The next

pair was Cain and Abraham. They were expected to figure out how to act by

themselves, to filter the contradictory commands given them by God, and to

choose when to obey and when to disobey. Humans are created in God's image, and

therefore, they are not supposed to obey when they are told that right is left

and left is right. Abraham was Abel's tikkun, inasmuch as one can repair

such a sin.

Abraham understands

that he failed by obeying, without argument, the blatantly illegal order to

sacrifice his son as a burnt offering to God. He knew he had reached the end of

his road. He had made amazing progress but there was nowhere further to go. At

the conclusion of the Akedah story we hear a glimmering of information

regarding Isaac's future wife, pointing towards his emancipation and

independent life without his father. The purchase of Me'arat HaMakhpela

completes the matter: before his death, Abraham sets his life's work upon firm

foundations – a land-holding in Canaan for the prince of God who lives

in the midst of the rest of humanity. Parashat Hayey Sarah ends with Abraham's

death. This is also his legacy for us, in conclusion of the divine plan which

began with creation: righteousness and justice, the prohibition against taking

lightly the killing of humans created in God's image as if they were mere

beasts, and even the prohibition against sacrificing human beings who were created

in God's image – any human beings – in the name of some alleged divine command.

Leah Shakdiel

is an educator and social activist. She lives in Yeruham.

 I am a resident alien among you

(Bereishit 23:4) – The point of his

Zekhiyah U'Matanah 3:11] wrote: "One may

give free gifts to a resident alien… because you are commanded to sustain

him, for it is written, a resident alien, let him live by your side (Vayikra 25:35)."

You should know that our

entire holy Torah is rational, particularly in connection with earthly

behavior. Rationality requires the land's inhabitants to establish amongst

themselves the practice of sustaining people who are resident aliens in their

midst, giving them free gifts, just as we treat the resident aliens who dwell

among us. That is Abraham's claim – I am a resident alien among you –

give me. He was careful to say resident and not merely alien

in order to emphasize that while he was an alien and not one of them, he was,

nonetheless, a resident. Another reason why he said alien is because he

was concerned about calling himself a resident of this world, which is opposite

to the way of the righteous, so he first called himself an alien.

(Or Ha-Hayyim Bereishit 23:4)

Why Did Abraham Object So Strongly to the

Canaanite Women?

From the Daughters of the Canaanites –

Lest they say I entered the land through inheritance and bequest, but I only

want to gain it by God's hands, that He gives it to me

as a possession.

(Hizkuni 24; 3)

We must recall that when Abraham rejected the

Canaanite women, the people of Aram were also idolaters. It follows that Canaan's

moral corruption, rather than its strange gods, motivated his decision.

Paganism is in essence an intellectual error that can be corrected. However,

moral corruption takes hold of the whole of a person's being, to the depths of

the soul and the emotions. Here (in Canaan), Abraham could not hope to find his

son a modest and morally pure wife, a wife who would bring to his home the

pearl of nobility and the purity of morals.

(R.

Samson Raphael Hirsch, Bereishit 24: 4)

Anyone can do teshuvah (repent) and teshuvah atones for

all.

And Isaac and Ishmael buried him: From here we know that Ishmael

repented, and allowed Isaac to walk before him, and that is the good old age

spoken of in connection with Abraham.

(Rashi 25:9)

Hayey Sarah ["the times of Sarah's life"]:

Rashi explains, "they were all equally for the best." And although regarding

Ishmael it is written, and these are the years of the life of Ishmael,

one should still say that he repented, in accordance with Rashi's comment on

the verse, And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him, for a convert

who has just converted is comparable to a new-born child, and all of his

preceding years, all of the evil he wrought, is accounted as nothing, and he

is as one who repented each day of his life.

(Da'at Zekeinim MiBaalei

HaTosafot; 23:1)

Kiryat Arba – Four Cubits

One should meditate upon this parasha, which

hints that even if a person's rank is magnified, and he comes to possess the

entire world and all that is in it, (in the end) he owns nothing but the four

cubits of his grave. Abraham was given the entire Land as a gift, and first he

purchased there the Ma'arat HaMachpeilah, in Kiryat Arba, which is

Hebron.

(Rabbeinu BeHayey, Bereishit 23: 20).

…and this is the portion of each person in

his world, that he is buried in the space of his four cubits (kiryat arba

amotav), a hint to those four cubits left to Abraham after the entire land

was given to him as a gift, in reality, that is all that is left to any human

being from all his greatness and property that he acquires in his lifetime.

(Y. Leibowitz: Sheva Shanim shel Sihot al

Parashat HaShavua, p. 94).

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