What is Abraham’s legacy? This week’s parashah, named after Sarah but telling both of his and her death, puts this question at the centre.
In the opening chapter of the parashah Abraham faces a question every immigrant asks his/herself: “Where do I want to be buried?”— a very different question from “Where do I want to live?”
The open mouth of the grave asks about the future rather than the past. It asks you where you want your children, those who would visit your grave, to live and is that more important than joining your forefathers and their dreams.
Abraham choses Canaan, but also, as the verse says, “is gathered to his people”, whoever they may be. Abraham is an ambivalent man. Half of him seems to always be somewhere else. An immigrant to Canaan and to monotheism, a man who walked away from his fathers, he seems to be troubled also in relation to his sons.
He prays for sons and loves them, and then sends them to die in the desert or takes them up mountains to bind them or send them to the east never to be his heirs (Genesis 25: 6). Lineage and legacy do not come easy to him even in his death.
But through Ishmael and Isaac we learn what it is. As they show up to bury their father, Ishmael and Isaac stand together, fulfilling a dream greater than Abraham could have dared to dream. They create their own story in which they share not only a father but a land, a future, even mothers.
When Sarah dies, Isaac is said to live in the place the angel was revealed to Hagar. Ishmael agrees to bury his father with Sarah. Isaac and Ishmael refuse to play the roles set for them by their parents. Is this Abraham’s true legacy?
People make plans, and God laughs, we say, and this week we hear Him loud and clear. For the boys of Abraham followed his footsteps and went away from their father’s house. They refused the rivalry and envy set for them, loyalty to painful history. And they both heard “lech lecha” and went on to inhabit together the Promised Land, staying close to the grave of Abraham, and so did their children, just as their father wanted.
