Hayyei Sarah: November 14, 2020/27 Heshvan 5781

This week marks the 18th anniversary of my bar mitzvah. If you're doing the math, that makes me 31, which, when flipped, is 13 (this mathematical quirk has nothing to do with anything, but I felt like including it anyway). Years ago, when I was preparing my d'var Torah for my bar mitzvah, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was also sufficiently lazy that I didn't really want to explore the parashah much beyond the last aliyah, which I read during the service. To that end, I skipped over the huge amount of content that there is to talk about - adding life to our years, the value of caring for others, the progressive nature of Rebecca's consent being sought before agreeing to marry her off, etc. - and went to a sort of half-baked discussion of Isaac and Ishamael coming together to bury their father and a nice bromide about their descendants making peace. And something about one spinach. Incidentally, this year, I find a similar topic appropriate.

At the end of this parashah, Abraham, having acquired a wife for his heir, Isaac, remarries after the death of Sarah. His second wife, named Keturah, is a one-scene wonder, appearing only in this scene, though she is mentioned in Chronicles, where she is identified as a concubine of Abraham. The association with concubinage leads many commentators to identify Keturah with Hagar, seeing the patriarch as having married his sometime concubine. After fathering six sons with his new wife, Abraham finally dies at the age of 175. His sons Isaac and Ishmael are reunited after more than seven decades of estrangement when they come to bury Abraham in the Makhpelah Cave, which Abraham had bought as a burial place for Sarah earlier in the parashah.

This past September, decades of diplomacy and behind the scenes work finally bore fruit with the signing of a set of treaties establishing economic and diplomatic normalization between the State of Israel and two Arab states - the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Bahrain. These treaties, referred to as the Abraham Accords, were followed by a treaty between Israel and the Republic of the Sudan, bringing Isaac's children and those of Ishmael together again. With so much enmity in the world, it is easy to paint everyone who might oppose us with a broad brush and call them enemies who should be shown no mercy and with whom no peace should be sought. In reality, it is much more preferable, if exponentially more difficult, to eliminate an enemy by making them a friend. This is especially true in the case of Israel and the Arab World. 

I recently watched a series from the Israeli broadcast news corporation on the deficient state of Arabic instruction in Jewish Israeli schools. Even graduates of Middle East studies programs, earning five units (the highest level of instruction) of high school Arabic are incapable of communicating with their Arab peers or even buying vegetables in the market. One of the things highlighted in the reporting was that a major part of the marketing of Arabic instruction to high schoolers and their families focuses on the potential for using knowledge of Arabic to secure a spot in the Intelligence Corps during their mandatory military service. Arabic language and culture are being taught as the language and culture of the enemy, rather than the language and culture of the neighbors. While it is important to recognize that Israel's military enemies speak Arabic, so do most of its potential regional allies. By focusing on Arabic as the tool of spies and soldiers, and not as the language of diplomats and civilians, the perception becomes one of us vs. them, helpful for maintaining the violent conflict, but at the risk of altering the understanding of the conflict, making it seem like something to be desired. In the two years I spent living in Israel, I was asked very often by cab drivers, people on the street, shopkeepers, etc. what it was that I was doing in Israel (although I grew up speaking Hebrew, I have an accent which I have been told sounds distinctly French, so my not-sabraness is apparent). When I told them I was studying counterterrorism, I got many responses about how there isn't really anything to study - just kill them all. To my explanation of the importance of de-radicalization and stopping the spread of terrorism, many of these self-appointed experts told me that it would create a different problem; with no terrorists to kill, there would be peace, and we can't have peace with our enemies. That is precisely the wrong attitude, though. While it is true that one cannot conclude a peace with an enemy, one cannot initiate peace with anyone else. It is the process of making peace that transforms them from enemy to friend (or at least, not-enemy).

As someone who studies violent extremism, I see education as the most important tool in the fight against terrorism. While it is often necessary to fight violence with violence, and some people are too far drawn into the terrorist belief system to be rescued, that is not the majority of the terrorist world. If we as a society can help people escape these terrorist ideologies the same way we help victims of other cults, we lower the number of people who need to be met with violently. All the more so, if we can educate and support at-risk populations so that the terrorist lifestyle is less attractive to them, the ranks of the violent extremists will only continue to drop. This is true whether these terrorists are plotting to hijack airplanes, carry out mass shootings, bomb public events or buildings, kidnap and murder politicians, or any other method of using violence to progress their cause. Sometimes it takes a moment of loss to bring peoples together, as in the aftermath of the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the massacre in the Christchurch mosque bringing out the solidarity between Jewish and Muslim communities which know the pain of violence caused by difference, or, as we see in our parashah, Isaac and Ishmael being brought together by their father's death. But we hope that those moments where we are forced together by death and mourning are fewer, and peoples and nations can be united by happier things, and we can, in the words of a prayer written by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, "see the day when war and bloodshed cease, when a great peace will embrace the whole world. Then nation will not threaten nation, and mankind will not again know war."