This week, thousands of Jews will spend Shabbat at the burial place of Sarah Imenu and Avraham Avinu as we read the parsha that narrates their deaths and foreshadows the legacy they leave. This custom is unique, as far as drawing large numbers of people to a biblical burial place at a certain time, year after year. It illustrates how Avraham and Sarah are still embraced as our national parents. This concept is spiritually powerful, and also contains important lessons about family, especially the way that leaders balance their communal roles with the roles and responsibilities they have in their own families.
This balance, a perennial challenge faced by community leaders throughout the ages, is what we today may call “work-life balance.” The many pressing needs of the community often compete with the needs of the leader’s own family – a spouse and children, who look to their partner or parent for love, care, and attention. It is true that a life of leadership can offer wonderful opportunities for one’s family not available to others. In such families, children often witness firsthand a rich and multifaceted Jewish experience, as they live within a home engaged in community needs, that takes stands on important issues, and is involved in education and chesed.
Yet this very life of purpose can sometimes come at a cost. The demands of public service can strain devotion to one’s own family – a tension faced by three of the most important figures in Jewish history: Avraham Avinu (our patriarch), Moshe Rabbeinu (our teacher), and David Hamelekh (the king). Each of them responded to the challenge in a different way, allowing us to study and learn the consequences of their different strategies.
Let us begin with who is often seen as the prime example of total devotion to the Jewish people, even at the expense of family: Moshe Rabbeinu. The Midrash (Sifrei Bemidbar 99) informs us that to remain constantly in a state of readiness for prophecy, Moshe separated himself completely from his wife Tzippora. Although we are told the names of Moshe’s two sons, the Torah records not a single interaction between him and them after the exodus. In the Jewish tradition, the consequences are clear: According to one midrash (Bemidbar Rabbah 21:14), Moshe’s sons distanced themselves from Torah study, and another (Mekhilta Derabbi Yishmael, Massekhta De’amalek 1) suggests that one even turned to idolatry. Apart from an ignominious part that they played in the story of Micha’s idol (see Judges 18:30 and Rashi ad loc.), their descendants would recede into obscurity, not playing any major role in subsequent books of Tanakh.
Significantly, after Moshe dies at the close of the Torah, we are told: “No one knows his burial place” (34:6). This is because a person’s gravesite is primarily meant to be a place for his or her own descendants to honor their ancestor’s memory. But since Moshe’s connection with his children was severed, the place of his burial was never preserved. Perhaps it was Moshe’s great responsibilities and dedication to the Jewish people that caused this chasm. However, as students of Moshe Rabbeinu, we need to learn from all sides of his personality: from his amazing virtues, such as his leadership, his dedication, and extreme selflessness, but also from the important things he sacrificed along the way that we might want to work to preserve ourselves.
In contrast to Moshe, our parsha presents the Jewish people’s first patriarch, Avraham Avinu, as a model of balance. Avraham was famously renowned for his hospitality and devoted considerable resources to outreach and moral leadership. But in our parsha, he shows no less zealous attention to those closest to him, mourning and tending to Sarah’s burial, making sure that Yitzchak finds a proper wife, and proactively providing for his other children (Genesis 25:6). It therefore comes as no surprise that Avraham’s burial place – Maarat Hamachpela – is extremely well known and visited constantly by thousands of people of numerous faiths, most of whom count themselves among his descendants.
In our haftara, we are given a third model: King David. A visionary and passionate monarch, David wrote and compiled the book of Psalms, founded Israel’s first ruling dynasty, and paved the way for the building of the Temple. Yet when it came to his family, David often found himself caught off-guard. A rebellion initiated by his charismatic son Avshalom temporarily succeeded in toppling his reign (II Samuel 15). And in our haftara, an aging David is initially unaware while his son Adoniya attempts a similar coup.
David, while not fully withdrawn like Moshe, tends to his family’s needs in a reactive, rather than a proactive, way. He does not devote independent energy to engaging with his children and ensuring their futures like Avraham has done. Fittingly then, David’s burial spot lies somewhere between the two extremes. While a modest site, known as “David’s Tomb,” exists outside the Old City of Jerusalem, it serves as a site of pilgrimage and visitation to only a few, and its authenticity is disputed by many, including important Jewish religious authorities.
A comparison of the three figures of Moshe, Avraham, and David thus teaches a valuable lesson. The endurance of the legacy we leave – symbolized in this case by our burial sites – is proportional to the time and energy we devote not only to our communities, but to our families. We must make space for the continuity of the values most precious to us through the people most precious to us – our spouses, children, and grandchildren – because it is through them that those values live on. Our prioritizing family is not, heaven forbid, an act of selfishness. On the contrary, by demonstrating the importance of this most basic building block of Jewish continuity, we can exemplify to the community at large what God desires from each and every one of us. In doing so, we will guarantee not only our own personal future, but that of our nation as a whole.