Chayei Sarah: The Need For Holy Conversation
In the Gemara (Talmud) we learn that the three different prayer times throughout our day are thought to reflect the stories and experiences of our patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In this week’s parasha, Chayei Sarah we come across one of these excerpts from our patriarch Isaac who symbolizes the afternoon prayer: Isaac is in the field mourning the death of his mother Sarah. The verb we understand as synonymous to prayer here is “conversation.”
But, before we even get to Isaac in this parasha, we have Abraham who purchased a burial site in Hebron to bury Sarah in. He purchased this for four hundred shekels of silver and there was promise and intention for this site to maintain as a burial site not only for Sarah but for our peoples’ descendants.
Sometimes when I read parshiot the lessons feel present but the tangible reality feels far away, but not this time. This is deeply personal for me as I have spent a powerful amount of time in Hebron. I have had a number of “conversations” with Hebron. Some of this prayer has been extremely painful. Like davening, these “conversations” at surface level might be more or less the same but we know that internally and externally things are constantly adapting. A prayer is never quite the same.
The first conversation I had with Hebron was in 2011. I had just spent a semester living in Jerusalem and my father came to visit. I had been in Palestinian areas and began to get a glimpse about what the daily reality/nightmare of living under occupation looked like but I had not yet visited Hebron. My father wanted to go and so we took a Palestinian bus from East Jerusalem to Hebron. We entered the Palestinian area and spent time walking through their downtown, we got to a market area and we looked up, the wired roof was covered with a layer of trash that Jewish settlers in the area had thrown. We kept walking and we hit the gate that separates the Palestinian area from the Jewish. We crossed the gate and are met by Israeli soldiers. They asked us to take out our passports and they let us pass. As we walked past them we were met by abandoned streets; my father turned to me and said it feels like how he imagined immediate post WWII Europe to have looked. Some of these streets have segregated blocks where no Palestinians are allowed. We got to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, but I didn’t want to go in. I felt so far from holy in this place. My father insisted we go in and I rushed through. I sped past all the tombs and could not wait to leave. My conversation tactic here was to acknowledge and interact as little as possible. It was a conversation of sorts but not one I could emotionally participate in.
The second conversation came five years later. I found myself in Hebron with a group of Diaspora Jews, Israelis and Palestinians attempting to build the first cinema in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood in Hebron. The IDF arrived to our project site, the property of a Palestinian who hid Jews during the 1929 massacre. The IDF declared the area a “closed military zone” and ordered us to leave. As an act of civil disobedience, roughly 30 of us refused. We sang songs of peace in Hebrew and stood by each other. They arrested 6 of my friends, dragged us out one by one and issued a closed military zone throughout the area for several days. This time, my conversation, my prayer was not passive. After years of avoidance, I recognized that avoidance was no longer an option or at least not one I could consider a type of holy prayer. One year later, my third conversation was one where I led other Jews to participate in similar sort of non-violent resistance work; conversations they had also been needing. I believe a prayer where we bring in our wider community allows for a holiness that can be hard, if not impossible, to achieve alone.
But as we bring in people to engage in similar prayer, we cannot be so removed from the conversations that happen away from us.
This weekend in Hebron, thousands of Jews will gather on Shabbat to celebrate Abraham’s purchasing of the Tomb of the Patriarchs. This celebration (largely organized by The Hebron Fund) symbolizes that this land belongs to the Jews alone. Palestinian families will be placed under a 2 day curfew where they are not allowed to leave their homes and many homes are turned into sniper posts by the IDF. I am reminded of the first conversation I had, one where I ran away, one where it was too painful to acknowledge the content in front of my eyes. Although this is a very human reaction, it is often an unhelpful one. These people, the Jewish people, are my people. To let this Shabbat prayer be taken by deep unholiness of injustice is to not truly pray, it is to not truly be in conversation. Let this Shabbat be one where our voice is added to the conversation because how can we expect holy conversation to speak for us if we do not contribute to its holiness?
