There is a moment in the Abraham story where everything gets real. Not when God plucks him from obscurity and asks him to go to a faraway place in a faraway land. Not when he must beg for the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, only to watch their cities go up in flame. Not even in the birth of his sons, or in the banishment of one and the binding of the other. None of these things manages to wake him from the stupor of his wanderings. Only the death of his wife Sarah at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion forces to look beyond the confines of the present into the distant future.
Now at the end of his life, Abraham quickly realizes are two primary duties he must fulfill before he leaves this world. These are duties not to God or to humanity, but for himself as a husband and father. First, he must find a burial ground for his wife, which he does by securing the Cave of Machpelah. And, second, he must attain a wife for his son. To accomplish this, he sends his trusted servant back to his ancestral lands to bring back Rebecca to Isaac. These two tasks pave the road for generations of Jews to follow, providing a deed to the Holy Land and a genetic path forward.
No matter how far we may have wandered from our roots, we all have things we owe ourselves and the world. Sometimes, like with Abraham, these two things are not mutually exclusive. The first step is recognizing what our priorities are. The second is trying to fulfill them. Abraham was lucky to have lived to 175. None of us will have anywhere near that amount of time. As the recent passing of the 18-year-old grandson of a community member reminds us, the time to get started is now.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex