This week''s parsha – entitled ''The Life of Sara'' – ironically opens with the news of her death. And yet there is no explicit mention of why she died. The commentators jump to fill in the blank. Rashi himself notes that the proximity of her demise to the binding of Isaac gives a hint as to the cause of her death. Midrashim further elaborate by sharing stories of how Sara splits with her soul (parcha nishmata) in shocked reaction to the happenings on Mount Moriah. The Aish Kodesh, writing so poignantly from the Warsaw Ghetto – takes these Midrashim even further. He, sitting in the fast accumulating ashes of the Holocaust, portrays Sara''s death as a protest. A protest against a God who could call for such a horrific sacrifice. Though Avraham is classically seen as the archetype of one who questions God, Sara here not only questions God but rebukes and defies God through her death, her act of self-sacrifice. The Aish Kodesh''s commentary on Sara''s morbid defiance becomes his own fist-shaking protest to God in the face of the Holocaust. This poem is born from the stirring words of the Aish Kodesh, may his memory be for a blessing, along with all those who have died for the sake of higher righteousness. Sara''s Stand Sara sat by the stream of events which words would later write as history. Which took husband/son some morning on a G-d appointed journey. Left her all alone and buried neath the dunams of her rage. Mumbling with the voice of a silent woman in a wordy book. Who gestured mute and shook the page that sentenced sons away. But how to wail a protest with no mouthpiece and no speech? How to scribe a message with white fire but no ink? This became her solemn study, how to make her silence speak. While the horror of Moriah boiled blindness to her eyes her hands lost grip in helplessness and cripple caught her thighs. Her spirit split and circled in the fire between the lines. And from her lips there bled rebuke to God on high. A higher calling in her triumphed - led her to her mountain''s ledge bound her on an altar of defiance ''neath a dagger''s glaring edge. And no angel held her hand back and no thicket caught a ram the text did not enshrine her with compassionate command. But rather held her tongue and shroud her for her morbid final stand. A fury blatant in complaint, a protest ripe with rage. She''d contest, with all her strength and breath beneath the bloody blade. For written in the empty space between her husband''s deeds Sara screamed in deft defiance of divine decree: “How dare a righteous G-d command Or a father thus comply Or the very son - whom I have mothered - Upon an altar Lie?” Sara stood - a broken spirit stronger a protest pressing bone, “I will not sit to sorrow” stepped to fire and was gone. She would not sit to sorrow stepped to fire and was gone.
(photo credit: The Jerusalem Post)