Torah portion: Love and loss — two ways about it

Last week, I had a root canal. It turns out that I had a crown that had never been permanently cemented — I only received temporary cement that eventually washed away, allowing bacteria to move in. 

I could not believe I had not gone back to the dentist to have it permanently cemented, until the dentist looked at his notes and told me he had last worked on it in late 2012. Then it made sense — it was just before my dad died, just before I spent most of January 2013 sitting in a hospital waiting room, just before I entered the fog of grief that took months to begin to lift. I’m sure I forgot to do many things in those months following my father’s death; remembering to make a dentist appointment would not have been high on my list.

Even though grief is universal, we all experience it in different ways. Abraham and Isaac each mourn the death of Sarah differently in this week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah.

And Sarah died in Kiryat Arba, which is Hebron, in the land of Canaan, and Abraham came to eulogize Sarah and to bewail her. And Abraham arose from before his dead, and he spoke to the Hittites, saying, “I am a stranger and an inhabitant with you. Give me burial property with you, so that I may bury my dead from before me” (Bereshit 23:2-4).

After the initial shock of mourning, Abraham gets practical. He devotes his time to securing an appropriate burial site and negotiating for the land so it would be clear that the land and the cave would be his. The Torah records the details of the transaction: Abraham negotiates, he speaks with the local leader, and he makes sure to pay a fair price so ownership will not be questioned. 

This seems like quite a bit of business for a grieving husband. One might think that he was no longer grieving and was back to business as usual, securing the land that was promised by God. And perhaps this is how Abraham is dealing with his grief. Perhaps dealing with the details of a land transaction, details he could control, was a way for him to cope with the uncontrollable nature of grief. He had no control over Sarah’s death, but he could have complete control in securing her a burial plot.

Grief is messy and uncontrollable, and for some, returning to work — returning to a world where you have some power — is a comfort in itself. Perhaps Abraham just needed some normality in his life again. Returning to work or dealing with practical details like paperwork creates structure and reminds us that we are still among the living. Doing normal, everyday things also can allow us to take a break from the deep sadness and despair that can be overwhelming.

Then there is Isaac. The midrash teaches that Isaac spent his evenings wandering in the fields. Perhaps this was how he dealt with that feeling of being lost — by wandering around as if he were. Perhaps it was the quiet of nature or the stark beauty of the desert landscape that allowed him to find some comfort. He needed time to process his loss. We all grieve at some point, but the process is different for each of us and sometimes we need to be alone with our memories to begin to make sense of what we have lost.

As a part of those nightly wanderings, Isaac also grieved through prayer and meditation. He appears to be searching for something — perhaps even searching for God — taking long walks around Be’er Lachai Ro’i, where Hagar had encountered God. Perhaps after the horror of almost being sacrificed by his father, followed by the death of his mother, Isaac needed to look for God in a different place, a place separate from those in which his father, Abraham, had found God.

It’s also possible that Isaac went into a temporary depression — something common after a death. Midrash teaches that when Sarah died, the cloud that was over her tent left with her and did not return until Rebecca married Isaac and moved in. The cloud represents God’s presence and the sense of wholeness and contentment that Isaac is not able to feel while he is grieving. 

It is not uncommon for grieving people to feel that God has abandoned them, much as the cloud departed from Isaac’s tent. The midrash teaches that it is when Isaac is drawn back into the world of the living — when Rebecca brings back the rituals that Sarah once did, when Isaac begins to participate in life again — that his sense of God’s presence returns:

As long as Sarah lived, there was a blessing on her dough, and the lamp used to burn from the evening of the Sabbath until the evening of the following Sabbath; when she died, these ceased, but when Rebecca came, they returned (Bereshit Rabbah 60:16).

We read Torah over and over, trying to see ourselves in the stories. The different ways that Abraham and Isaac grieve over Sarah are just some of the ways that we may grieve for our own loved ones. 

The Torah normalizes a spectrum of grief, from returning to business as usual as soon as possible to wandering aimlessly for a while. It is not one or the other. Sometimes we grieve like Abraham, sometimes like Isaac — and the hope is that all who are grieving will someday find the same comfort that Isaac did — from friends, family or feeling God’s presence. 

Shawna Brynjegard-Bialik is a rabbi at Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge.