Sarah
and her ability to see things clearly
At the end of her life, Sarah is described as being “as beautiful at 20 as she was at 7” and “as [free of] sin at 100 as she was at 20.”
While the average contemporary Westerner might compose a woman’s praise in the inverse order — “she was as beautiful at 100 as she was at 20, and as free of sin at 20 as she was at 7” — the Torah, it seems, views aesthetics and moral responsibility differently than we do.
In Jewish consciousness, beauty is not merely a description of surface-level appearances, but rather it is the full, transparent expression of one’s innermost self. The word for “beautiful” יפה can be broken apart into the letter י, which represents spiritual essence as a hovering point, and the word פה, which means “here [in front of you].”
True beauty is manifest essence.
There is nothing uglier than hypocrisy, and nothing more beautiful that authenticity.
The beauty of a child is that she does not (yet) try to be someone she is not. A 7-year-old is who she is. She says what she thinks, and does what she wants.
Sarah managed to preserve this connection to her innermost self even through the most disruptive stage of development that is teenage-hood.
As for her ethical integrity — 20 years old is the age of moral responsibility vis a vis God,1 which means that she managed to go through her entire adulthood with a clean slate.
How did she do it?
What was her secret?
The way she saw herself and the world around her.
Sarah was not given this name at birth. At birth, she was called “Iska-יסכה” from the word סוֹכַה, which means “see.”2 Sarah had a natural gift of seeing what others were blind to. As a strikingly beautiful woman, she also seemed to attract people’s sight wherever she went.3 It was Avraham, though, who named her Sarai-שרי, which means “my princess.”4 Avraham admired Iska’s ability to see things with such focus. He understood that this focus was her superpower to make the noble, bold decisions that would allow her to rule as a princess.5
Indeed, Sarah made many bold decisions throughout her life — some of which are not nearly as appreciated as they deserve to be. For starters, she committed her life to outreach and education no less than her husband Avraham. This dedication to others requires maintaining perspective to truly help people, and not pass these opportunities up. Sarah worked with the women as Avraham worked with the men. The two get equal credit for their life-changing impact on the people whose lives they touched.
Having built a massive following in Aram (estimated by Maimonides to be in the 10,000s), Sarah left it all to follow her husband to an unknown land God had told him to go to. As impressive as it was for Avraham to do so, in a sense, for Sarah, the demonstration of loyalty was even greater, as she did not receive the prophetic transmission herself — her husband did. She also managed to maintain her conviction even after arriving in that promised land and finding it ravaged by famine. Sarah’s vision was was not blurred by the bumps on the road of life. Her focus was on her doing what was right. The outcomes that were out of her control were in the background.
The famine forced them to move to Egypt, and almost immediately she got abducted and nearly raped by the king himself. Miraculously, she made it out alive and unharmed, but more notably, she didn’t complain or express any doubts as to God’s or her husband’s plans.
One could suggest that perhaps she’s just a pushover — a typical woman in the ancient world with no vote or voice in her marriage or religion.
Just as this thought might cross your mind, Sarah makes a series of decisions whose boldness dwarfs those of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Although the narrating voice of the Torah introduced Sarah as biologically incapable of getting pregnant, presumably, no OB/GYN had informed her of her condition. As she reached the age 75, however, it dawned on her that it is very possible that she may not be the matriarch of the “great nation” that had been prophesied to her husband Avraham. This may seem shocking from where we are sitting because we know how the story goes. She, however, living through it as it was being written, did not.
On her own initiative, Sarah offered her maidservant Hagar to Avraham as a surrogate, so at least she might be a key stakeholder in their children and the nation that would emerge from them. Also at a loss himself for how their story was meant to play out, Avraham heeded her insistence, and took Hagar as a second wife to perhaps give birth to that child he had been promised.
Consider Sarah’s self-sacrifice to be a part of her husband’s fulfillment of his covenant with God. Consider what she was signing up for when she offered to do so from the sidelines. Consider the number of times a day she would have to swallow her pride with a second wife that she introduced into his life. Consider how she would be forced to simply let the pain inside of her brew.
She saw what she had to do, and did it.
To make such a decision demanded that she “burn the boats.” This is a tactic in war to stop soldiers from looking back, thereby helping them to look only at the battlefield ahead of them.6 Most people, most of the time, try to keep as many options open as possible, thinking that this will provide them with maximal freedom. But this way of seeing is blind to the reality that if you try to do everything, you end up not doing much of anything.
The most difficult decisions are the irreversible ones. It is this resoluteness — this ability to draw lines in the sand — that made Sarah the perfect counterbalance and match for Avraham. Love, kindness, intellectual openness were Avraham’s strengths. But these strengths came with weaknesses. Unbounded love disperses without boundaries. Kindness without regiments becomes cruelty. And openness without shutting doors builds a prison of possibilities.
Hagar became pregnant immediately, and just as quickly she came to see herself as the future matriarch of that great nation, pushing aside the matron who had given her this golden opportunity as an accessory to her rise to greatness. When Sarah noticed Hagar’s contempt and lack of appreciation, she pulled the plug. Sarah wasn’t passive aggressive. She didn’t hedge her bets. She identified the source of the problem as none other than her husband who enabled it, and told him as much: “You could have prayed for me, and you could have defended me, and you didn’t.” To his great credit, Avraham did not get defensive (husbands, take note), and allowed Sarah to do what she wishes with Hagar, which she did, and Hagar left.
Sarah’s bold decision to offer Hagar as a surrogate to Avraham didn’t stop her from making another bold decision to send her away. Very often our ego having made a decision stops us from seeing the path that requires us to go the other way.
It was this same clarity that made Sarah send Hagar and her son away a second time when she noticed what everyone else is was missing — that Ishmael was messing with her son Isaac. Once again, she burned the boats, against her husband’s best instincts. God famously has to tell Avraham: “everything Sarah tells you, listen to her voice.” She could see what Avraham couldn’t.
Sarah’s secret for living a life connected to who she was, and connected to her moral sense was to focus on what is essential. Everything else should be in the background. We have to do what we have to do even if we it doesn’t fit into the picture we had in our heads of how things would go. Sarah was willing to let go of being a matriarch if that is what Hashem wanted from her. The results were in Hashem’s hands. This ability to see to the essence of things is itself the essence of leading a good life, a beautiful life, and a life of leadership.
12 for women, and 13 for men, are the ages of legal responsibility in a court of law, but 20 is the age of being “obligated in the laws of Heaven.”
Yes, “socha” and “sukkah” are almost identical and related conceptually. This kind of seeing, as we will develop in this piece, is about focusing on what is critical, and not letting the technical details blur the image. This is precisely the goal of the holiday of Sukkot that invites us to live in a minimalist way so as to see our lives with the correct perspective.
Whether in Egypt or in the land of the Philistines.
It was Hashem Who changed her name to Sarah to convey that her power and influence should extend over all.
The root “Sar-שר,” which means “minister” or “official” is much more correlated to power and rulership than the sweet and precious but powerless connotation of “princess” in English. One can add here that Avraham in general was able to see people’s inner greatness and in so doing, raise them up to become the distinguished people they were born to be.
Julius Caesar is attributed the line “to take the coast, burn the boats,” but historically, an example of a military leader who forced the point of no return in battle were Tariq bin Ziyad who quite literally ordered his boats to be burned in 711 CE when his army invaded the Iberian Penninsula. Another example was in 1519 CE, when Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, sank his own ship so that his men would have to conquer or die.