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The Sefas Emes, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger, accepts Rashi’s explanation, but takes it one step farther. Certainly, he points out, there are differences and changes during the years of a person’s life. Every stage of life has its special qualities. But, Rabbi Leib continues, a truly righteous person finds fulfilment in all the stages of their life. This pervasive contentment, Leib concludes, must be a gift from God. By extension, we can conclude, by emulating the righteous Sarah, we too can enjoy satisfaction in all the stages of our lives.
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This one is classic Rashi, and virtually every other commentator that followed refers back to it. So, this is a good place for us to begin. Rashi believes strongly that the Torah is very economic in its use of language. Each word must have a precise meaning, and there can be no words in the Torah that are superfluous. If there are words that appear to be repetitive or redundant, they must each have their own distinct meaning that adds to the overall meaning of the passage.
Applying this idea, Rashi focuses in immediately on the text’s irregular way of presenting the matriarch Sarah’s age at the time of her death: Sarah was an hundred years and seven years and twenty years. Why does the text not simply say: "Sarah was 127 years old"? What is the text trying to tell us?
Rashi borrows a midrash (Genesis Rabbah 58) to explain. Looking at the larger context of the passage, we see that it says, "The life of Sarah was..." Therefore we understand that the text is not simply talking about Sarah’s age at the time of her death. Rather, it is telling us about her life. She was an extraordinary woman in so many ways, a greatly loved woman and certainly an appropriate companion to her husband Abraham. The Torah’s division of Sarah’s life into three different distinct ages tells us something about what made her extraordinary. At the age of 100 - a long, full life by most standards - she was still as sinless as a woman at the age of 20. The age of twenty is the age at which, biblically, a woman becomes liable for herself (the age of 12, the traditional time of Bat Mitzvah, is the age when a young woman becomes responsible to observe the mitzvot). Before that point, she would be considered "sinless". If Sarah is as sinless at the age of 100 as she was at the age of 20, then she certainly led an exemplary life.
Sarah was also renown for her beauty, which often caught the attention of kings. The text continues by commenting on that quality. At the age of 20, Rashi tells us, she still maintained the same pure youthful beauty as when she was seven years old. Beauty and righteousness, these are the qualities, the text seems to be telling us, that define Sarah’s life. But, Rashi concludes, while the text divides Sarah’s life into these different stages to highlight her special qualities, each of these different stages of her life were all equally good.
Lessons for Today
We can all identify many different stages in our own lives. In fact, in today’s world, most of us will probably go through more transitions and different periods over the course of our lives then our ancestors did even just one or two generations ago. The whole notion of the developmental stage of adolescence is a modern concept, and having an independent life after we have moved out of our parents home, but before we marry and establish a family of our own, is really only a phenomenon of less than the last century. While our parents usually looked to establish a career that would see them through their workings lives, social commentators and career counsellors today advise that we should be prepared for at least three different careers or major changes in our career path throughout the length of our working days. The days of our lives will have to be broken down into a lot more than Sarah’s....
But that simply makes Rashi’s point, supported and enhanced by the Sefas Emes, even more poignant for us today. With the benefit of hindsight, at the end of her life, Rashi describes all of Sarah’s days as “good.” But we know enough about the life of Sarah to know that her life was not always easy, and, in fact, was quite painful and difficult at times. Sarah endured many long physical (and spiritual) journeys of hardship, leaving her home at an early age. She had to cope with barrenness for most of her life, witness her husband conceive a son by another woman, and then endured a pregnancy and birth at an advanced age. She was taken into the harems of two different kings, and survived famines, drought and war. And then, at the end of her life, our tradition teaches us, she died prematurely from the shock of the information that her husband had tried to sacrifice their only son. So how can this be described as a life that was “good”?
What was good was not necessarily Sarah’s life, but rather, how Sarah lived her life. It is always easy to shine and be righteous when life is easy. What truly defines a righteous person is how they act when things are difficult. Sarah went through a number of different stages in her life, and a number of very difficult periods, but, Rashi tells us, she maintained her goodness and righteousness equally throughout all the experiences of her life. Chayyei Sarah is not a retelling of Sarah’s life. Rather, it is an accounting, at the end of her days, of how well she lived the life that she was given.
We will all go through many stages in our lives. Some will be periods of great growth, joy and productivity, others may be periods that are dark, difficult, and even depressing. What counts is not the quality of our days, but how well we live those days. If you can get through those difficult days and see that you maintained yourself as a mentsch (a descent person) throughout, then your behaviour will still define those days as “good,” even if the days themselves were not. As they say, you can make the best of a bad situation, or you can make a bad situation worse. We can learn and grow from all of our experiences, even, or perhaps most particularly, from the most difficult. It is all a matter of how you look at it. Our tradition looked at Sarah’s days, the good and the bad, the pleasant and the difficult, and saw that, in the larger context, all were good, one way or another. At the end of your days, will you, or others, be able to look back and say that all the days of your life were “good”?
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