After the binding of Isaac, and throughout the events surrounding the death and burial of Sarah, his mother, Isaac disappears from the narrative. It is not clear if he came home with Abraham, and he is nowhere to be found in Abraham’s process of mourning and burying Sarah. Though we see Abraham sending his servant, Eliezer, back to Haran to find Isaac a wife from his own kin, we do not see any direct action from Isaac himself; Isaac seems to be absent, or at least silent. Read more...

The first verse of the parashah, Gen. 23:1, tells us (following the translation in Etz Hayim): "Sarah's lifetime - the span of Sarah's life - came to one hundred and twenty-seven years." There is a rather strange little midrash that appears in Bereshit Rabbah regarding Sarah's death, and more particularly her advanced age the time of her death: Read more...

Last year I took a group of high school students to New Orleans to do relief work in the Lower Ninth Ward. After five days of hard work - painting and rebuilding homes devastated from Hurricane Katrina - we visited to the French Quarter. A funny thing kept happening to us as we wandered the narrow streets. We continually found money scattered on the sidewalk or sitting in dark stairwells. By the time the night was over, we had found nearly $140 in misplaced cash! Read more...

"And Sarah's life was a hundred and twenty and seven years; the years of Sarah's life" (Genesis 23:1) Read more...

It is a truism of human nature that we often denigrate our own abilities while extolling those of the generations before us. Our grandparents appear to us as giants, perhaps a reflection of our size relative to them when we were infants, but also because we are able to look on the challenges of their age from the perspective of the passage of time. Events in the past look bigger, more romantic, and more heroic than the puny happenings of the present. Read more...