The Parasha features a lot of good Torah for Sheva Berachot. Most people think that means the long story about looking for a wife for Yitzchok, which dominates the Parasha.
That would mean they would skip the story about Sara passing away. There does not seem to be much there about getting married. But I have a teacher who taught us that that would be a mistake.
He presented it something like this:
The burial plot that Avaraham is negotiating comes from the tribe of Chet. In this part of the story, that name will appear eight times, which should not surprise us, as the Gematria of Chet is eight. If you look at a Chet, it is in the shape of a Chuppa. Like many Hebrew letters, it combines other letters. It is formed with two Zayins with a rooftop overhead. In Hebrew, Zayin means a weapon. This is also the Chuppa. They are of course a couple, but their interaction is weaponized, if you will, because the two sides see themselves as self-contained. They are Sevens, people who feel they are complete, a world unto themselves. What makes it possible to become a Zug -- a zivug--i.e, to mix? That is what Chet is about, the Chuppa above them, that connecting figure above the Zayanim, points to a reality beyond the two of them. They become complementary in striving for that mutual goal.
Burying Sara is about that Chet, that Chuppa. We call a marriage a Chatuna, from the word Cheetun, which means a binding tie. This word also comes from the word Chet. The final connection between Avraham and Sara is put in place as he arranges for them to be bound forever. He might marry again -- he does marry again, in this Parasha -- but they will be bound forever.
This also points the way toward what Avraham must do in order to move Sara’s legacy forward. He must find someone like Rivka to take her place. At the end of the story, Rivka becomes Sara, as Rashi points out. This is not a weird thing about boys marrying their mothers, or about daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law. It is about Rikva stepping into the ideals and goals that Sara had forged.
Early in Beresisheet, I laid out the Rashbam’s theory about the word Toldot, or offspring. The Rashbam says that the phrase isn’t used to talk about mere children but about grandchildren. That is the trust of Bereisheet. And the story in this Parasha is about creating this type of chain of generations that will successfully pass on the baton.
I have an old friend who is in the school business. He founded a bunch of charter schools in the NY area, mostly in poor neighborhoods, first in Newark and then throughout New Jersey and New York.
He did that for about a decade and then he and some colleagues who do the same thing around the country realized that schools are great, students are great, but the one thing that they run short of is teachers. Good teachers are hard to find. So they got together to make their own graduate school of education to train potential teachers.
They called the graduate school Relay. Why that metaphor? Because one or two teachers are a great boon to any student. But one of the most potent predictors of academic success is a string of successful teachers. A child is a baton, and the more times that baton is passed consecutively from good teacher to good teacher, the greater the chances of success. According to their metrics, they say that four straight good teachers is the gold standard.
We too are in a relay. But instead of children, Jews pass on the tradition. This is the chain we are trying to create. One of the saddest documents in this regard during the 20th century is a letter from Franz Kafka to his father. He uses the baton image as he faults his father for fumbling the tradition. His father, he writes, had so little to give, that it dribbled through his fingers as he tried to pass it.
Avraham and Sara completed the baton relay. It is incumbent on all of us to make sure that there is never so little that it dribbles through our fingers.
