Seth is an 8th grader at the Institute for Collaborative Education, where his favorite subject is Humanities.  His second home during the summer months is in the Adirondacks at Camp Baco.  During the school year, he plays soccer for the Riverdale Juniors, a travel team of the Westchester Youth Soccer League.   He also enjoys playing and watching baseball (Lets Go Mets!!) is an avid reader and loves listening to music.   He has also performed for the Pied Piper Theater Company in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and for the Muscota New School’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

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In today’s Torah portion, Abraham goes to the Hittites to buy Sarah a grave. He asks for a particular cave, and the Hittites insist on Abraham taking it for free, but Abraham refuses, and pays the full price. Then Abraham sends his trusted servant to find Isaac a wife. His servant waits at a well, and then Rebekah comes out and offers the servant and his camels a drink. She invites the servant inside, and the servant tells her that if she and her parents allow it, she will be Isaac’s wife. She agrees, and the servant takes her back to Isaac, where Isaac and Rebekah immediately fall in love.  

Both in my Torah portion and as you also just heard in my haftorah regarding King David and Batsheva, we can easily see what families were like in the Biblical times. The standard of family in the Torah is very different than it is today.  Brothers, for instance, are very different in the Torah than today. When important Biblical figures had children, they usually had many more than one. The first born usually got the all-important birthright (neither Solomon nor Isaac were firstborn), and was almost always thought of as better or more powerful than his or her brothers and sisters. In the haftorah, King David had said that his favorite son, Solomon was to be heir to the throne. Another of King David’s son’s named Ajonadah didn’t like this, so Ajonadah proclaimed himself heir to the throne. Eventually, this problem was resolved, and Solomon was declared the rightful heir to the throne. This kind of sibling rivalry over who got to be king is kind of out of the norm for us, but was normal in the Bible.  Other sibling rivalries, such Cain and Abel, and what happened between Joseph and his brothers also shows that boys will be boys. That was sibling rivalry in the Torah. Nowadays, sibling rivalry is mostly just fighting over who gets control of the TV remote, or who gets to lie down on the comfy couch, some of which I can relate to.

Another aspect of the Torah that is very different today is what the average family looks like. What I mean by that, is how many children and wives men had, how old they were when they got married, and so on.  Polygamy was outlawed in the U.S. in 1862. Nowadays, polygamists are thought of as disgusting. In biblical times however, it was a sign of wealth and prosperity to have more than one wife. The thinking behind that was that you must be rich to support so many wives and children. In my Torah and haftorah portions, there is a lot of polygamy. Abraham had 2 wives, so did King David, and Solomon would grow up to have hundreds of wives. Also, in the Torah it was normal to have 9 or 10 kids (just think of how many Solomon had!) Today, the average American family usually has 2 kids.

In my Torah portion, Abraham tells his servant to go find Isaac a wife. His servant obliges, and comes back with Rebekah. When Isaac sees her, he falls in love with her. I think that although love might have crossed their minds, I do not believe that they experienced love at first sight.  It seems difficult to understand that someone can see a person that they have never met, and say "this is the woman I want to marry".

When hearing all of these stories I began to think: Is this all  true? Did Solomon actually have hundreds of wives? Did Abraham really live to be 175 years old? Did Rebekah and Isaac really fall in love that quickly? It all seems unrealistic and fairytale-ish. Maybe the torah isn’t accurate or maybe it exaggerates. Maybe it is really true that all of that stuff did happen. In the torah, there are many mysteries waiting to be solved.

What is certain to me is that love is very much existent in the torah. Sibling rivalry is very much related to brotherly love, the different relationships and marriages are related to love, and even the death of loved ones is related to love. 

From this week’s torah and haftorah portions we can learn that no matter how complex the family may be, love will still go on through death. In fact, sometimes a loved one’s death can strengthen our love for others and ourselves. When Sarah passes away, and Abraham and Isaac are very sad, Abraham’s servant sets out and finds a wife for Isaac.  At the end of my Torah portion, Isaac brings his bride, Rebekka into his mother’s tent, and finds comfort with her. This shows us that life and love go on and will always exist, even with the loss of a loved one. When Sarah dies, Isaac and Abraham mourn Sarah. They still love her. She is a piece of their hearts.

In an E.E. Cummings poem, Cummings states how love (life) and death compare and contrast.

Death (Having lost) put on his universe

And yawned: it looks like rain

(They’ve played for timelessness

with the chips of when)

that’s yours; I guess

you’ll have to loan me pain

to take the hearse,

see you again.

Love (having found) wound up such pretty toys

As themselves could not know:

The earth tinily whirls;

While daisies grow

(and boys and girls

have whispered thus and so)

and girls and boys

to bed will go, 

-E.E. Cummings

You couldn’t see the punctuation in the poem at the end of each stanza.  If you could, you would have noticed that at the end of the stanza about death, he puts a period to symbolize that death is final. The end. He also puts a comma at the end of the stanza about love to symbolize that love always lives on, there is no end.

Abraham is feeling pain and grief over Sarah’s death, and he misses her a lot, but in his heart, she is still there. He will see her again. Death can strengthen our love for others. It is the loss of Sarah that makes Abraham realize that Isaac needs love in his life to overcome the loss of Sarah.   

Family plays a very important role in the torah. In fact, the torah is mostly centered around a whole big family. The Jewish people were a big family that had all of the aspects of what a family should be like. It even had the most important aspect of family, the thing that all families should be held together by: love.  

I would like to thank my parents for supporting me through this whole affair, my brother Ethan for providing a distraction from my work, Nina Nesher for tutoring and supporting me and Rabbi Weiner for helping me with my speech.