A story of attachment and tradition
Shabbat Shalom to all our readers.
Hebron. One of the most storied places in history. At the heart of the town is a sacred grotto. Within lie four sets of graves: those of Adam and Eve, Avraham and Sarah, Yitzchak and Rivkah, and Ya’akov and Leah. Above looms an ancient Herodian building, turned into a church, and then a mosque, and now a shared space with a synagogue within. It is a site, that perhaps more than any other, breathes the history of the Land of Israel. It is a site which tells the stories of the many groups that have called Israel home throughout the ages. It recalls the history, the long periods of stability, and the many changes which occurred there.
We first learn of Me’arat HaMachpelah in the Torah. After Sarah passes away, Avraham must tend to her burial. However, Avraham does something we do not expect. Instead of just burying her in a plot somewhere, he purchases a cave, with the insistence that the cave will be his family’s inheritance, our inheritance, forever.
Avraham saw the place that he would bury his wife, the place where he would join her in his own time, and the place where his son and grandson would be buried, as not merely a cemetery. It was a signpost to his own family about the things, and the land, that were important to him. The cave represents his honesty (he would only buy the land using legally recognised tender).
The cave represents his feeling of belonging to the land (he needed a monument to his family’s attachment to the Land of Israel). Above all, it represents the way of thinking that made Avraham truly different to those who came before him.
Avraham started a new tradition with the purchase of the cave. He would be part of the land and its community, yet still separate and unique.
His method of burial became the Jewish way for thousands of years after. To this day, we remember and celebrate the seemingly mundane act of (effectively) paying for a funeral, not because it was a happy moment, but because it was a marker of what makes us what we are as a people.
It is this seemingly paradoxical attitude to the world which sits at the heart of the Jewish experience. We are a people which both glorifies the old and makes way for the new. We celebrate, value, and hew to tradition (especially in the context of funerals), and yet we are also open to change and to the new. Avraham himself was both the originator of an original tradition of monotheism which would take over most of the world, and an iconoclast chosen precisely for his ability to (sometimes literally) shatter old norms and idols and chart a new course. The combination of boundless creativity on the one hand, and traditionalism on the other, is what animates our consciousness and our sense of who we are to this day.
In our rapidly changing world, we often find ourselves adrift. Too often we are told either to merely hew to the old, or to embark on a new voyage without regard for what came before. The Torah’s message is more complicated. Let’s keep the content, the form, and the message our traditions have been carrying for thousands of years. And with that solid background, let’s make changes slowly and carefully to make ourselves and our society ever better.
It is at times like these, when change seems to run away from us, that we most need a tradition which, nevertheless, values change.
Alexander Tsykin is rabbi of Brighton Hebrew Congregation.
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