Avraham Avinu's Final Test

21 Marcheshvan 5785
Erev Shabbat Kodesh
Parashat Chayei Sarah

Sarah's Last Moments - A Deadly Trick
by Rabbi Eliyahu Hoffmann

...Rashi points out the proximity of Sarah’s death to the Akeidah. Quoting a Midrash, he explains that Sarah’s death was a result of the Akeidah. According to this Midrash, the Satan (Angel of Death) was exceedingly perturbed that Avraham was willing to go through with the sacrifice of his son, an act which stands as a merit for his decedents to this day. After repeated attempts at discouraging Avraham failed, the Satan took a different tack. If he couldn’t deter Avraham, at least he could scare Sarah – as they say – to death; literally. He appeared to Sarah and showed her how in the distance, her beloved and only son Yitzchak lay bound upon the Altar. The hand of her husband Avraham, clenching a sharp knife, stretched towards his neck to perform the ritual slaughter. In the moment just before the sacrifice (Avraham was halted at the very last moment), Sarah was overwhelmed by the vision of her son’s slaughter, and in a state of intense shock her soul departed.

It seems like the ultimate irony. Avraham returns home having navigated the most profound test of his life, to find his life-long partner has passed away; he has been left alone. Not only that, but her death was a direct result of his having obeyed Hashem’s command to sacrifice Yitzchak.

One of the other nine tests is that after leaving his homeland and arriving in Cana’an at Hashem’s behest, Avraham encounters a famine, and is forced to abandon Cana’an for Egypt, where food was more plentiful (the famine was restricted to Cana’an). The test was not to question Hashem – that even after having done what he had been told, things didn’t work out the way he might have wished or expected.

Compared to what transpires here, that test seems like child’s play. In Cana’an, the famine was “coincidental” to Avraham’s coming; here Sarah’s death is a direct result of the Akeidah. There, Avraham suffers the temporary inconvenience of prolonged exile; here he loses his spouse forever. Putting oneself in Avraham shoes, were it possible, it is almost unimaginable to not feel even the slightest touch of doubt or misgivings. “How could it be? Where have I sinned, in doing what You told me, that I should lose Sarah as a result?” If there were any test that could top the Akeidah, this was it.

What was the truth? Sarah’s time had come. In a Divine irony, Hashem arranged things so that the (aborted) Akeidah take place at the precise moment that Sarah was meant to pass away. Satan knew this, and grabbed a hold of the opportunity. In a ruse second to none, he played things just-so in order that it should seem to the observer that Sarah’s death was an outcome of the Akeidah, when in truth things were occurring according to the Heavenly plan. Each person is given a certain number of years upon the Earth; Sarah’s were up. No force, not even the Angel of Death, could take from her even the smallest moment of life. Rashi says that the reason the verse repeats, “… these were the years of Sarah,” at the beginning of the sidrah is because her years were perfect and complete – there was nothing missing.

The only thing that could nullify and revoke the merit of the Akeidah, even after it had been performed, would be if Avraham would, G-d forbid, regret have done it. This is what the Angel of Death, in bringing about Avraham’s final test, and his own last hurrah, hoped to accomplish.

Avraham, inimitably, took the incident completely in stride. His calmness as he patiently deals with Efron and the B’nei Cheis over Sarah’s burial plot is obvious. “And Avraham came to eulogize Sarah, and to cry over her (23:2).” The letter kaf in “ve-livkosa – and to cry over her,” is diminutive, to note that although he cried, he did not obsess over her death as one might under such circumstances, inconsolably sobbing over the irony of the loss and his possible role in it. He cried as one must, and he went on in complete faith that such was the Heavenly decree. He pointed no fingers and voiced no concerns. He saw the Satan’s ruse for what it was; a distortion of the truth accomplished by “slight-of-hand” and advanced knowledge of what the future holds. (see Nesivos Shalom and others)

~ SHABBAT SHALOM ~