The Resilience of Abraham

Sermon Shabbat Chayei Sarah 5785

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This has been quite a hectic couple of weeks in the life of our always busy Beit Simcha congregation, even for us.  Tonight, of course, is Membership Shabbat, when we welcome those members who have recently joined, and invite those who haven’t yet joined to become part of our wonderful community.  It is also, of course, Birthday Shabbat, plus the night we blessed our Torah Cycle riders before we embark on our 102 mile El Tour de Tucson ride tomorrow.  Last week included two weddings and a funeral, which sounds like an old movie but was just reality, along with Community Shabbat at the JCC, schlepping all of our stuff there and back.  The weekend before that included our Shabbat afternoon hike and service at Catalina State Park, as well as the full roster of Shabbat services and classes. 

And on the building front, two weeks ago we found out that the property we have been negotiating to purchase for three months was not actually available, and never had been; that was deeply disappointing, but then a few days later we suddenly discovered another, better property was available and we have been negotiating to buy that for the past ten days, while all the other things were also going on.  It has been a bit of a whirlwind, to be honest.

Now, perhaps the strongest feature of Beit Simcha through our six years of history has always been that we are remarkably resilient.  One of our many landlords said that we are “scrappy”, which is a way of saying that no matter what happened—including being forced to relocate to four different places, surviving the COVID pandemic shut-down, having important leaders move out of town, and so on—we always stayed focused on what really matters to a congregation and community, and we have managed to grow and thrive through it all.

Which brought to mind a talk I heard a few years ago from a speaker named Dr. Robert Brooks, a prominent psychologist, author, and speaker.  It turns out that Bob Brooks grew up in Brooklyn, went to CCNY, and is a very down-to-earth Jewish guy.  He is also an expert on the concept of resilience, the ways in which we are able to bounce back from set-backs in life and are able to surmount challenges and ultimately succeed. 

Trained originally in abnormal psychology, as everyone was in those days, when the focus was on what patients were doing wrong, Dr. Brooks came to believe that discovering the positive elements in individual and group psychology was at least as important as diagnosing their problems and treating them.  He began to study what it was that differentiated those who came from equally challenging circumstances and yet achieved very different results in life, and he sought to find ways to reinforce those positive tendencies and abilities. 

Brooks began in child psychology, and came to realize that there were several crucial factors involved in whether kids overcame early challenges and flourished or did not overcome them and continued to struggle.  The resilience of children depended, it turned out, upon one crucial factor: whether they had an adult who believed in them and conveyed that to them.  That adult didn’t have to be a parent or teacher; in one memorable example he gave, it was the child’s school bus driver who gave her confidence and courage.  But the existence in a child’s life of what one psychologist has called a “Charismatic individual from whom they drew strength” made all the difference in the world.  Two children who both grew up in equally troubled conditions would have extraordinarily different results if one of them had such a charismatic adult who gave them strength, and the other did not.

The second factor, and it was often derived in part from the first, was the mindset of the individual.  Mindset essentially means what we believe is possible.  If our mindset is that something cannot be done, that it’s impossible, that things will never change or that things won’t work out, well, that is often self-fulfilling.  If we instead believe that challenges exist to be overcome, that we can solve problems, and that ultimately, we will succeed, that too is pretty self-fulfilling, provided it is matched with hard work.

Much of this is somewhat obvious.  If you believe you are beaten before you try, you generally won’t try as hard.  And if you think that things can’t change they usually don’t.

But what Dr. Robert Brooks adds to this is the understanding that this is true of both individuals and organizations.  If we believe in ourselves, and in our mission, we will find that we have the capacity to succeed.  If we don’t, we will discover that we lack that capacity.

Of course, everyone experiences challenges in life.  All of us suffer reverses, have incidents of loss, are wounded and damaged at times.  But whether we rise from those events or not testifies to our resiliency.  Resilience is what allows some of us to keep on bouncing back, while others continually stumble.

I thought about these ideas of resilience in reading this week’s Torah portion of Chayei Sarah.  At the beginning of the portion Abraham has just lost his wife, Sarah, his companion through adulthood and his partner in creating the religion that will one day be known as Judaism.  According to the midrash, Abraham and Sarah jointly brought believers in the one God under the wings of the Shechinah, the divine Presence, and so created the first monotheistic community in human history.  Now, suddenly, Sarah, his partner, is gone and Abraham must face old age without his wife.  And as a nomad he even lacks a proper place to bury her.

But there is more tzoris here.  Abraham, under God’s orders, has just brought his beloved son Isaac up Mt. Moriah for the famous encounter called the Akeidat Yitzchak, the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac.  While in the early parts of the story the Torah tells us they walked together, Vayeilchu shneihem yachdav, now they have become estranged, understandably.  Abraham is distanced from his son, the future leader of the people.

Worse, that son has not married and has no children.  If this Judaism thing is going to work, there have to be children born to Isaac.  And Isaac is showing no inclination to act in that direction.  Abraham’s older boy, Ishmael, has married badly, and if he was ever inclined to follow Abraham’s faith he clearly no longer is.  It is up to Isaac, but Isaac does not appear to be up to the task.

Here, Abraham’s mindset comes into play.  Faced with these challenges, will he simply say, “God will provide?”  Will he trust that things will change on their own?  He is himself an old man—the Torah tells us this specifically in Chayei Sarah, v’Avraham zakein, bah bayamim.  “Abraham was old and had reached the completion of his days.”  Shouldn’t he simply sit back and go gentle into that good night?

Abraham’s mindset, however, is not oriented that way.  He is a kind of Jewish model for straightforward action to solve immediate challenges.  Faced with Sarah’s death and Isaac’s bachelorhood, he addresses each problem in order, and expeditiously.  First, he purchases land to bury his dead near Hebron, the Cave of Machpeilah.  Next, he commissions his trusted servant to go back to the Old Country to bring back a suitable wife for Isaac.  Then he instructs the servant carefully on how to determine her character: she, too, will need to be like Abraham, a solver of problems, a person who acts quickly and decisively for the right reasons. 

The servant’s mission succeeds, and he brings back Rebecca, who becomes the most important member of the next generation of Hebrews.  Soon Isaac and Rebecca will have twins, and the future of the people, and of Judaism, is assured.

We are even told that Abraham marries again and lives many more years in contentment.

You know, there are many other examples in earlier Torah portions of Abraham’s resilience in the face of challenges, and his extraordinary ability to take on new problems and overcome them.  In fact, in almost every instance we have read in the last couple of Torah portions, Abraham ends up in a stronger position after the trouble comes than he was before it occurred.  He survives migration, battle, rough encounters with powerful kings, family conflict, and much more, and somehow each time emerges stronger and more secure.  In each case he quickly develops a plan, and then just as quickly acts on it.

We can learn from Abraham’s resilience in the face of adversity, his ability to propose and implement solutions to serious problems rapidly and effectively.  We can learn from our great patriarch that a Jewish mindset is not a defeatist one, but a productive one.  And we can learn as well that we, his Jewish descendants, have a similar opportunity in our own lives.

When we are faced with problems, and sooner or later we always are, our ability to rebound and resolve those challenges is the result of our own positive mindset.  It is our capacity to believe in ourselves, and the desire to seek solutions, that direct our course towards overcoming these setbacks.

That is not to diminish the severity of anyone’s challenges in this world.  But it is very much to say that we, each of us, have the same capacity to solve our problems and, with God’s help, achieve what Abraham did.  And it is to recognize that Abraham’s commitment to act to overcome adversity embodied a famous phrase of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s: anything worth doing is worth doing now.

In surmounting our own challenges, we can demonstrate the resilience, the mindset, and the character that Abraham showed, which have allowed our people to survive and thrive for 3800 years since then.  For us, perhaps the first step will prove to be knowing that we have the ability to solve our problems.  And like those children who were sustained and strengthened by the belief of a charismatic presence, we can be sustained and strengthened as Abraham was, perhaps simply by having faith in a God who believes in us.

In Chayei Sarah Abraham fulfills his mission of assuring the future of the Jewish people.  From Abraham may we learn how to continue to overcome our own challenges, find success in our own lives, and to further his mission on behalf of our people as well.

And who knows?  Perhaps soon our peripatetic congregation of Wandering Jews will reach our own Promised Land.