(Delivered November 15, 2025)

You probably remember. For months, I wore a number on my shirt, first with masking tape and sharpie, then with a safety pin and numeral-imprinted beads. Each morning as I was getting dressed, I made a ritual of changing the number. One more day. One more day. One more agonizing day. 

We Jews, of course, have a painful history with having numbers on our clothing or on our bodies—and although the practice I kept over those many months was voluntary—it reflected and refracted that ancient, modern, eternal pain. I am talking, of course, about tracking the days since October 7, 2023 and the embodied symbolism of counting the days of captivity that the hostages of many nations taken that day had to endure. 

On October 13, just over a month ago, the living hostages were released, and I stopped wearing my pin. In the excitement of celebrating the ceasefire and the homecomings, it felt like the right moment to start fresh, with nothing on my lapel. 

This week’s Torah reading from Parshat Chayei Sarah has me reconsidering. As we just read, the parsha opens with Avraham’s transaction with Efron ben Tzochar to acquire the Cave at Machpelah. In a different world with a different Torah, this purchase could easily be one imaginary pasuk, maybe two: 

וְקַנָּה אַבְרָהָם אֶת מַּעֲרָת הַמַּכְפֵּלָה מֵעֶפְרוֹן הַחִתִּי בַּאַרְבַּע מֵאֹת שֶׁקֶל־כָּסֶף
And Abraham bought the Cave of Machpelah from Efron the Hittite
for 400 silver shekels.

End of story.

But in the real world, in our real Torah, the transaction unfolds in lengthy and almost comical detail: there is so much happening in this event, so much more exposition than we might imagine to be necessary. Over almost the entirety of chapter 23, we have Avraham—still grieving the death of his wife Sarah—approach the Hittites and ask for a burial plot. They generously say: you are a person of a higher status than all of us; just take what you want. He replies, essentially, let me speak to someone in charge. Efron emerges from the crowd and offers the land as a gift, Avraham insists on paying, and they go back and forth and back and forth. Finally Efron names his price, Avraham pays it, no questions asked, and the land passes into Avraham’s possession. 

Given that this all could have been a single pasuk, we have to ask why the Torah has elongated and emphasized this exchange. After all, our scripture is often rather sparse on the details of the interactions between people. There tends not to be a lot of dialogue, even in dramatically rich scenes. For example, we famously don’t know what Cain said to Abel in the field, nor how Abel responded. We only know the murderous outcome of their conversation. So often the marrow of a scene is left unspoken. Here, it’s quite the opposite. 

It could be that the Torah is simply reflecting the prevailing social customs for land acquisition, but this seems to me a pale explanation. In general, the Torah is not all that interested in teaching about sociological detail; that gets left more to the Sages of the Rabbinic Period. The Torah’s pedagogy is typically in the realm of theology and morality and ritual innovation.

Obviously I think there’s more going on here, as the Torah study folks and I discussed in detail the other day. Many of our commentators point to the dialogue between Avraham and Efron as being proof positive of the Jewish claim to the land: In Breishit Rabbah 79:7, Rabbi Yudan bar Shimon describes this passage as one of three where אֵין אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם יְכוֹלִין לְהוֹנוֹת אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל לוֹמַר גְּזוּלִים הֵן בְּיֶדְכֶם—the nations of the world cannot disparage Israel and say these places were stolen by your hands. Rather, this dialogue—witnessed by the entire local community of Hittites—demonstrates that Abraham claimed ownership of the Cave of Machpelah fair and square. He paid the asking price. The entire city saw the deal go down.

Perhaps also this scene represents the next step in the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Avraham. Avraham followed God’s commandment to make his way to the Holy Land, in the belief that he and his descendants would become a great nation. He’s been there a while, has already had many adventures and misadventures. Perhaps the text is telling us: now, with Sarah’s death, it’s time for him to put down roots and stay.

This explanation is more compelling to me, as far as it goes. But I think there’s more still. The other day, at the memorial gathering for Jean O’Gorman, Rabbi Geller reminded us of the beautiful oral history curated by our member Sarah Dunlap, with the help of Jean and a few others (including Marilyn’s mother Janet Schlein). In that familiar green book, we learn that in October of 1904, just a few months after the founding of what would become TAA, the chevra, as it was known then, purchased the land that would become Mount Jacob Cemetery. As is customary across the Jewish world, one of the first—if not the first—acts of a group of Jews settling in a place, is the establishment and consecration of a graveyard. One of our core values—precious because it cannot be repaid—is חֶסֶד שֶׁל אֱמֶת, caring for the dead. Once a person’s earthly time is done, they should be buried with dignity, with the community standing alongside loved ones left behind.

We learn this from Avraham. 

When he hears of Sarah’s death, he comes from Beersheva to Hevron to attend to her, he weeps over her, and then he does whatever it takes to make sure that her body will be buried nearby, in a setting that offers her the kavod she deserves, and offers him and Isaac a place to locate their grief and loss. Avraham intuits—and our tradition reinforces—that the honor of the dead cannot be trifled with. Halachic sources are unanimous in their emphasis of this point: from the simple burial shroud devised so that rich and poor will look the same in death, to the practices of mourning that allow us space and time to recall the loved ones who have meant so much to us.

Our tradition knows that relationships do not end with death, and that we must treat the bodies of our loved ones—created בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים in the image of God—with a reverence that befits that status.

It is a savage understatement to say that those who were taken on October 7 have received nothing close to resembling the respect that an image of God merits. That some of them have not yet returned is a heartbreak and a violation of the divinity in each of us.

As of yesterday, there were still three murdered hostages whose remains were being held in Gaza, and as I reflected on this sobering reality in the shadow of Parshat Chayei Sarah, I understood that my embodied practice of acknowledging the days of captivity is not yet complete. Inspired by Abraham’s example, by his piety and devotion even to his estranged wife, let us continue to hold Sudthisak Rinthalak, Dror Or, and Ran Gvili in our hearts and minds. Until the very last hostage comes home. 

Shabbat shalom.