Dear Friends,
This past week was the fifth yahrzeit of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, and I’ve been trying to honor his memory by reading a number of his commentaries on this week’s parsha, Chayei Sara. The one that’s really sticking with me is the one he wrote the same year he died, 2020, in which he explores Avraham Avinu and Sara Imeinu as characters who have been through horrors and whose stories are still told as though they’re happy ones. Why do the ancient rabbis say things like “All of Sarah’s years were equally good” and “God had blessed Abraham with everything” when, between the two of them, they’d experienced decades of infertility, two separate kidnappings into royal harems, the horrifying choice to throw Hagar and baby Ishmael into the desert, and the near-murder of their own child (at one of their own hands, which I imagine makes it even more traumatic)?
Rabbi Sacks answers his question by lifting up the story of Edith Eger, a survivor of the Holocaust and author of The Choice, which she published at the age of ninety in 2017. In 1944, Edith was taken to Auschwitz with her mother, father, and sister around the age of seventeen. Their first day there, her parents would be murdered. But on their way, Edith’s mother said to her, “We don’t know where we are going, we don’t know what is going to happen, but nobody can take away from you what you put in your own mind.” Rabbi Sacks shared that” that sentence became Edith’s survival mechanism.” After a long, grueling time, Edith got through Auschwitz and the March, and she eventually became a psychotherapist, a wife, and a mother. This fall, she celebrated her 98th birthday. Her life’s work has been dedicated to helping others make their way through trauma and crisis.
Eger wrote, “We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from the outside… In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside… We develop a victim’s mind – a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries.” For her, that distinction was lifesaving. Eger has also said, “I’ve learned not to look for happiness, because that is external. You were born with love and you were born with joy. That’s inside. It’s always there.”
I love the idea that no matter what horrors surround us, and no matter how other people treat us, love and joy always exist within us. Happiness may not always be possible, but we are born with a capacity for love and joy that are always there. There’s plenty of persecution, pain, and fear to go around these days. My blessing for us this Shabbat is that we remember the wisdom of Rabbi Sacks and from Edith Eger: That no matter what goes on around us, our inner selves are filled with love and joy. May we rediscover them again and again, and may we allow them to radiate to one another through it all.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Hannah