Sally Churgel on Parshat Chayei Sara

November 13, 2020

The Torah's first word, bereishit, is translated as, “in the beginning.” According to Rashi, the great 11th century scholar, it is also an acronym for Bet reishit, "two firsts." The second letter of the alphabet bet is equivalent to the number two. And reishit means first or beginning. To Rashi, the world was created for the sake of two things, both considered a "first," the Torah and the people of the Torah.

Aleph/Bereishit

Bereishit is the beginning when 

God began Creating

Before the beginning 

Aleph

Silence

Before the beginning, before time, 

Before the firmaments

Before the waters and the land

Before the creepy crawlies

Before begetting and betraying

Was a great infinite silence

Aleph is white

It contains all color yet reveals none

Aleph contains all sound 

Yet is steeped in silence

One time I found a black widow spider 

On the welcome mat outside my front door

Not desiring to ask her forgiveness later, 

Instead of killing her, I contrived to capture and release her

I put her inside a glass jar with a screen for a lid

Intending to let her out where no human and hopefully

No animal would come close enough for harm

But well… I forgot…for a day …or so

I saw that the steep sides of the glass jar were

Crisscrossed with filaments of spider webbing

Somehow the strands of her intention

Clung to the sides of the slippery glass

With no food, water or escape

She had gone about her business of living

I wept for her clarity of purpose

Her focus and mostly for her aliveness

I released her off Hwy 116 at the root of a 

Giant eucalyptus, far from houses

Asking for forgiveness for forgetting

And grateful for the great lesson she taught

The act of forgiveness

Is simply the act of continuing to live

Without malice or regret

Just spin your filaments of desires

Allow them to attach where they can

Go about the business of your life 

When you let down the gates in your heart 

You reveal aleph

The silence from before time and space

The chambers of your heart are paired

Two connected Bereishit

Your inner light and darkness

Your love and indifference

Your yearning and fulfillment

Filament and glass

Two, two

You and I

You and God

God and I

God and creation

Forgive and forgiveness

This is a time in our country where reconciliation, through acceptance and forgiveness, is going to be needed. How do we as a people come to reconciliation when our very values are in jeopardy? How does a country come back together when the leader holds division as normal and optimal, and worse, to his advantage? How do we come to unity when major values are so opposed?

A dear friend was telling me this week that she doesn’t think that she can remain friends with a woman she’d been close to for many years. Before the era of Trump, they talked about the things they had in common, their passion for creating art. They hadn’t discussed some of their deeper political values. Recently, this woman told my friend that she thought that children should be kept in cages since they didn’t belong here in the first place.

My friend was deeply shaken. She has delved into her heart and is still not sure how she wants to handle this divide. Does she end the friendship? Talk to this friend at risk of making it worse? Pretend that this gulf in their values doesn’t matter?

This snapshot is just a small peephole into the divisiveness of our current times.

Today’s Torah portion is Chayei Sara, the life of Sarah. The parsha begins with her death but it was during the Life of Sarah when the whole lineage of divisiveness between the descendants of Ishmael and those of Isaac began. Sarah’s torn relationship with her handmaid, Hagar, and the son they shared through Abraham ripples outward for thousands of years. Why? Because the original wound between the two women was never addressed or healed. 

Sarah’s life was full of contradictions, making decisions you might wonder if she would do again given the chance. In other words, the life of Sarah was like our lives, complicated.

So, who was Sarah and how did she go from Sarai to Sarah? 

When she was 90 and Avram was 99, God came to them and said they were to birth a great nation. God would create a covenant between him and them. In order to seal the deal God changed their names. 

The difference between their names is only one letter. Hei.  What is the significance of one letter? 

In our tradition, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is endowed with spiritual qualities. The 22 letters represent 22 different forms of life-giving energy of the divine that enlivens all of creation.  Each word uses different combinations of this Godly energy that actually creates, and continues, the very existence of any object or person.

Hei represents teshuva, often translated as repentance, it actually means returning. The implication is that if you make a mistake that you might need to repent for, you would first need to return to your Self, to your core, to the place where you can make change, repent and forgive. 

We need to return because the part of us that acted out is not who we really are. It is not the essence of ourself. When we blame others or judge ourselves, we create a barrier to being able to return as though creating our own cage.

That’s why the letter Hei has an opening at the top.   It offers a window through which we can move outward beyond our limiting thoughts and beliefs. Built into the spiritual aspect of the letter is an out clause. Not for escape but through our intentionality.

Sarai and Avram were both given a Hei to become Sarah and Abraham. Sarai meant “my princess,” which was personal and private. “Sarah,” which means “the princess,” signified her transition to being a princess or rather, the queen, of the whole nation. Avram meant Father of Aram (the place of his birth) but Abraham means father of the nations. By adding one letter to their names it reflected a broader leadership. God had instilled in them Divine energy commensurate to their new, more global life-mission. It also suggests that God had imbued their names with the capacity to return and repent.

In the Kabbalah, the sound of Hei is God’s effortless breath. This seems to suggest that returning, repenting can be effortless. It isn’t for most of us, but not because that is our design but because we believe our beliefs. And we listen to our own thoughts as if they are reality.

During the guided visualization, I had you sound out the Haaaaaaaa sound which comes from Qigong medicine. That is the actual healing sound for the heart. I hear it as divinity coming through us to our heart. Ha, Hei. Just a different accent from two parts of the world.

The letter hei is also the first letter of the word hei. One of the meanings of the word hei is “here is,” as in the verse, “Here is seed for you” (hei lachem zera). The letter hei in a woman’s name means there is seed or ability to give birth. Sarai could not give birth. After the hei was added to her name she could give birth, at 90.

So perhaps the letter hei is designed to remind us to pause. Each breath is rebirth. In every moment, when you breathe, there is the potentiality of teshuvah.

So, as you go about spinning your filaments of desires and allow them to attach where they will, you can go about the business of your life like a spider in a jar.  Remember to occasionally let down the gates in your heart to reveal the aleph of silence and the beit of new beginnings.

May you breathe in peace tonight. May you breathe out teshuvah and healing. May the unity so needed in our country begin this moment with your breath.