D’var Torah: Parshat Chayei Sarah

My friend Peggy has the following custom license plate: “TILLCXX”

Who can tell us what it means?

It means “Till 120”, or, “May you live until 120”, which is a traditional Jewish way of wishing someone “Happy Birthday”, good health, or recovery from illness. In Yiddish the expression is: “זאלז דו לעבן ביז הונדערט און צוואַנציק“, and even in contemporary modern-day Hebrew, people still say: “עד מאה ועשרים” – “Till 120”.

So, what’s the origin of the saying?

Genesis 6:3 tells us:

ויאמר ה׳: לא-ידון רוחי באדם לעולם, בשגם הוא בשר, והיו ימיו מאה ועשרים שנה

And the Lord said: My breath shall not abide in a human being forever, since human beings too are flesh; let the days allowed them be one hundred and twenty years.

-and Deuteronomy 34:7 tells us:

ומשה בן-מאה ועשרים שנה במתו

And Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eye was not dim, nor his vigor abated.

The expression is even the subject of a number of jokes, e.g. the story of a man who couldn’t stand his noisy neighbor any longer, so one night he goes upstairs and knocks on the door and says to his neighbor: “May you live until 119” and then says to the wife “May you live until 120.”

When asked by the husband “Why should I only live until 119?”, the downstairs neighbor who was being disturbed, answered: “She deserves one good year…”

There are all sorts of theories about why people in the Torah lived so long and what the meaning of their ages were, but I’m not going to go there this morning. Suffice it to say, the Torah tells us that Moses lived until 120, Noah lived to be 950 and Methuselah hit the jackpot at 969.

In this morning’s פרשה – parashah – Torah reading – we are told that Sarah lived until 127, and what is really unique about this is the way in which are told her age, more than her age itself:

ויהיו חיי שרה מאה שנה ועשרים שנה ושבע שנים; שני חיי שרה

]בראשית כ״ג:א׳[

And Sarah was one hundred and twenty-seven years old; these were the years of the life of Sarah.

[Gen. 23:1]

It is taught that not a single word in Torah is superfluous and that no elaboration in biblical narrative is unnecessary. So, in a case where we do see what looks like repetition or excessive verbiage, it becomes fodder for rabbinic interpretation. The wording of this verse is the kind of thing that kept our sages of blessed memory, in business.

And Sarah was one hundred and twenty-seven years old; these were the years of the life of Sarah.

[Gen. 23:1]

The medieval Torah scholar, Rashi, looks at this and explains that the reason for adding “these were the years of the life of Sarah” is to teach us that all of her years were equal in goodness.

Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, in Poland, who was known to his students as the ספת אמת – The S’fat Emet – someone who spoke the Language of Truth, taught:

“It is the way of ordinary people that as you get older your self-awareness increases and you begin to get rid of your bad ways. The older you get, the more you are able to put aside certain bad qualities and stop doing some of the bad things you used to do.” [1]

He explains that the phrase “days of your life” refers only to the very limited period of our life that we live with “real wholeness”, by which he means purity, or free of sin, which of course very few of us – probably none of us – ever get to experience or truthfully claim.

But Sarah,” he said, “all her days were good and unspoiled. Surely she rose higher and higher in her old age, not by having to banish bad qualities from her youth; rather, she grew higher and higher spiritually, totally naturally, by continuing to live just as she always had.

For the rest of us mere mortals, every day of our lives we are faced with opportunities to correct or improve some aspect of ourselves, but in Sarah’s case, according to the ספת אמת, no damage had been done throughout the course of her life. Nothing about her required repentance, and this is the meaning of Rashi’s explanation that all the years of her life were “equal in goodness”.

None of us is like Sarah. This lack of perfection in us can either be a source of great personal despair, or a source of real liberation, a gift, because every day that we work on our imperfections is a day that we work on our spirituality and a day that we cleave more closely to God.

Every day when we wake from our sleep and we recite:

מודה אני לפניך, מלך חי וקים, שהחזרת בי נשמתי – בחמלה רבה אמונתך.

I am thankful before You, living and enduring Sovereign, for you have mercifully restored my soul within me. Great is Your faithfulness.

-every day when we say these words upon waking, we recite them knowing that we’ve been given the gift of another day to continue to make the necessary changes in our lives. The ספת אמת teaches that “each and every day God places a new point of awakening in each of us, to which we may attach ourselves”; more than just a sense of renewal, more than just a sense of rebirth, every new day offers a sense of purpose and a renewed sense of attachment and connection to the Source of All Life.

Our daily work to transform ourselves, to triumph over our weakness and to gain a sense of mastery over our own natures – to spend the years of our lives focused on growth – is how we give time itself a sense of holiness: when we spend our time developing awareness and spirituality, our sages say that time, too, is uplifted.

We know all too well that some specific periods of time, such as Shabbat and festivals, are intrinsically holy, but for the most part, time is only potentially holy. This potential is realized by the way we use time; we have the capacity to make time holy by the way we use it. My own teacher, Rabbi Arthur Green, says: “(Time is made holy) by the way we search ever anew for holiness in the days and years that are given to us, for each day, according to the Kabbalists, we weave the garment that will clothe and protect our soul throughout eternity.

Our ancestors Abraham and Sarah are presented to us by Torah as two perfect individuals. Perfection is not something we are capable of emulating, yet the attributes which made them perfect are definitely something we can aspire to: their spirituality – their connection to the Blessed Holy One – was impeccable, and we are taught that it is because of them that love exists in the world. True love emanates from God; all love comes from a single place and we are taught that the capacity for love is something that humankind only became capable of once it entered into a relationship with the Divine, a relationship which was initiated for us by our ancestors, Abraham and Sarah.

We are the inheritors, the beneficiaries of the gift of God’s love. As we wake this morning, as we return to life today and every day, let us remember this, let us be inspired by our heritage and let us bask and grow, embracing our sacred mission to spread God’s love every day and every year of our lives.

ויהיו חיי שרה מאה שנה ועשרים שנה ושבע שנים; שני חיי שרה

]בראשית כ״ג:א׳[

And Sarah was one hundred and twenty-seven years old; these were the years of the life of Sarah.

[Gen. 23:1]

These are the years of our lives.

מודה אני לפניך, מלך חי וקים, שהחזרת בי נשמתי – בחמלה רבה אמונתך.

I am thankful before You, living and enduring Sovereign, for you have mercifully restored my soul within me and given me the opportunity today to grow, to love and thereby to be closer to You.[2]

These are the days and the years of our lives. Let us live them well.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] The Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of the Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, translated and interpreted by Arthur Green

[2] My own כוונה – intention – in blue