Parashat Chayei Sarah: The Strength to Commit to Build a Better Future

This week’s parashah begins with a death.

And yet, it is called Chayei Sarah — The Life of Sarah.

Sarah has died. Abraham mourns. He searches for a place to bury his life partner and negotiates the purchase of the Cave of Machpelah. There is something deeply meaningful in this gesture: in a land that does not yet belong to him, Abraham acquires his first piece of ground. Not to live on it. Not to build a home. But to bury his dead.

Abraham’s first act of putting down roots in the land is to create a place for memory.

Perhaps this is not a coincidence. There are forms of belonging that grow out of love, promise, and commitment. And there are others that are born out of loss. Because we also need a place to put what we can no longer recover.

But the parashah does not end at the grave.

After burying Sarah, Abraham turns his attention to the future. He sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac. And then Rebecca appears.

Rebecca is standing by the well when a stranger asks her for water. She does not wait to be told what to do. She steps forward, offers him water, and then offers to water his camels as well. Her generosity is not passive. It is initiative. It is movement. It is a way of opening oneself to another person.

Meanwhile, Isaac is going through his own mourning. Before meeting Rebecca, the Torah tells us that he was coming from Beer-lahai-roi, a place associated with Hagar, the woman who had been sent into the wilderness with her son Ishmael.

Rashi offers a remarkable interpretation: Isaac had gone there to bring Hagar back, so that Abraham might take her again as his wife.

We do not know whether this is actually what happened. But the Torah could have left the name of that place unmentioned, and yet it chose to preserve it.

Perhaps it is inviting us to ask what we do with the stories of separation that we inherit. Do we preserve them as wounds that must remain open? Or can we try to do something different with them?

Isaac has just lost his mother. His family story is marked by absence and rupture. And yet, in the midst of that vulnerability, something new begins.

The Torah concludes this part of the story with one of its most moving verses:

וַיִּקַּח אֶת־רִבְקָה וַתְּהִי־לוֹ לְאִשָּׁה וַיֶּאֱהָבֶהָ וַיִּנָּחֵם יִצְחָק אַחֲרֵי אִמּוֹ

“Isaac took Rebecca as his wife. He loved her, and Isaac found comfort after his mother’s death.” (Genesis 24:67)

Isaac does not forget Sarah. His love for Rebecca does not erase his pain. But love allows him to begin living again.

This might be one of the deepest lessons of Chayei Sarah: life does not mean denying death or escaping memory. It means transforming memory into a force capable of making room for what has yet to be born.

When we think today about the word strength, we tend to associate it with power. We think of armies, weapons, borders, forceful speeches, and the ability to impose our will.

But the parashah offers us another kind of strength:

Abraham is strong because he is able to move through grief and continue building. Isaac is strong because he is able to open himself to love again. Rebecca is strong because she dares to move toward a future she cannot yet see.

There is a kind of strength that destroys, and a kind of strength that builds.

The first can impose itself quickly. The second requires time, patience, trust, and commitment.

A society can be powerful and yet incapable of building trust. It can win an argument and lose the relationship. It can defeat an adversary and still have no idea how to live with that person afterward.

That is why love — understood not merely as an intimate feeling, but as an ethical choice — can also be a form of strength.

To love is to recognize that another person’s existence does not diminish our own. It is to create the conditions in which people who are different from one another can continue to share the same space.

And this is where the parashah resonates so deeply with the moment in which we are living.

Thirty-one years ago, on November 4, 1995, a right-wing Jewish extremist assassinated Israel’s Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, at the conclusion of a massive peace rally.

Rabin had been a military leader, a statesman, and eventually a leader who was willing to take a political risk for the sake of peace. His assassination was not simply the death of a man or the interruption of a government. It was a deep fracture in Israeli society, a wound that remains with us to this day.

In my view, and in the view of many others, Rabin’s assassination also shattered a possibility for peace in the State of Israel. Not because peace was guaranteed, nor because the path toward it was simple, but because a leader willing to take the risk of pursuing it was suddenly gone.

But his assassination left us with a question that remains profoundly relevant:

What happens when a society stops recognizing its adversary as someone with whom it can coexist, and begins to see that person as an enemy who must be eliminated?

After October 7, after so many lives shattered, so many absences, and so much pain, that question has become even more urgent.

How do we speak about the future without making it seem as though we have forgotten those who are no longer here? How do we hold on to memory without becoming prisoners of it? How do we defend our existence and our security without allowing fear to determine completely who we are?

The recent elections in Israel also compel us to think about these questions. A parliamentary majority may express a desire for change, but a numerical majority does not, by itself, constitute a shared vision.

Democracy does not end when the votes are counted. It also requires us to accept the results, respect democratic institutions, and recognize that those who think differently still have a legitimate place in society.

That is why we must be especially careful whenever there are attempts to delegitimize elections through unsubstantiated accusations or to question the right of certain citizens to participate fully in democratic life.

Democracy does not require us to think alike. It requires us to remain a society even when we disagree.

And perhaps this is one of the great challenges before us: not only deciding who will govern, but asking ourselves what kind of society we want to build and what values we want to place at the center of our collective life — not only in Israel, but here in the United States as well.

Chayei Sarah speaks to us again.

Abraham buries Sarah and, at the same time, begins to take responsibility for Isaac’s future. Two gestures that seem opposed, and yet are deeply connected.

Memory and future. Grief and building. Loss and hope.

Abraham understands that it is not enough to mourn the past. But neither does he try to build the future by erasing what came before.

This is one of the greatest challenges for those of us who inherit a history: to make memory not a boundary that confines us, but a root from which we can grow.

Because inheriting does not mean repeating.

And change does not mean destroying everything that came before. It means taking what we have received — its achievements, its mistakes, its wounds, its unfinished dreams — and asking ourselves what we can do with it.

We, too, are living through uncertain times — in Israel, in the United States, in our communities, and throughout the Jewish world. There is much to defend, much to repair, and much to rebuild.

We must be strong as a people. We must be strong as Jews. But perhaps the real question is: What kind of strength do we need?

Not only the strength to defend ourselves, but the strength to remain the people we want to be.

The strength to hold on to our identity without turning it into a barrier.

The strength to defend our existence without losing our humanity.

The strength to listen to another person without feeling that listening means surrender.

The strength to build relationships where it might seem easier to build walls.

Chayei Sara teaches us that true strength does not consist in destroying whatever stands in our way. It consists in transforming our losses into roots, our differences into dialogue, and our memories into responsibility.

We remember Sarah.

We remember Rabin.

We remember those who are no longer with us.

But we also have a responsibility toward those who are still to come, toward the generations who will inherit the world we build. Because life does not mean denying death, and memory does not mean giving up on the future.

Chayei Sarah asks us: How do we build a future when we are still learning how to live with our losses?

We build the future when we find the strength to create, to trust, to sustain one another, to listen, and to love.

May we find that strength.

May we transform our memories into roots rather than walls.

May we be strong as a people, strong as Jews, and strong as human beings.

And may we build a society in which, even in the midst of our differences, we continue to recognize one another as part of the same story and as responsible for a shared future.

Am Yisrael Chai.

God bless America.

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Gustavo Geier