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There are two intriguing commentaries, each relating to a different posuk of Parsha Chaye Sarah, regarding the dialogue leading up to Avraham Aveinu’s acquisition of the Ma’arat HaMachpela for 400 shekels of silver from Efron the Hittite.
The first of the two posukim is spoken by Avraham and says, in part, “I will have given the money for the field; take it of me …” (Breish’it, Perek 23, posuk 13)
“…That a man may marry a woman by using money to effect the marriage is deduced in the Talmud (Kiddushin 2) by drawing a parallel from this verse. But the parallel goes beyond merely the acquisition of the land of the Efronite and the acquisition of a wife. Just as in a marriage the act of acquisition is only the beginning and not the end, because that is when all one’s obligations begin — food, clothing, etc. — the same is true in our dealings with the Efronites. Nothing ends with written contracts and agreements. We pay, pay and pay again, and yet they keep demanding more from us.” (Torah Gems on Chaye Sarah, page 182 quoting Rabbi A.M. Amiel)
Somehow these last sentences, “Nothing ends with written contracts and agreements. We pay, pay and pay again, and yet they keep demanding more from us” seem to ring true in our ongoing struggle to maintain our Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael against the avowed goal of the Arabs, the Moslems, to destroy and eradicate the Jews, to cast us from our land into the sea.
And even worse, a so-called Jewish government, a Jewish Prime Minister is straight-facedly complicit with the enemy in betrayal of his Jewish brothers, the nation he leds, as Sharon was and Olmert is now, by endeavoring to attempt evasion of prosecution for alledged corruption and attempting to personally profit from the betrayals on the backs of the Jews and scheming the separation, divorce and eradication of any and all things Jewish from the mindset, intellect and consciousness of Israelis.
As we know, the comatose Sharon was followed by Ehud Olmert, who despite the lack of a positive mandate from the people for his avowed plans for continued expulsions; convergence, consolidation, realignment, or whatever the newest euphemism is, acted and continues acting out of seeming hatred for anything Jewish, and surely not with a Jewish heart.
Then, three posukim below our first posuk, “And Avraham heard Efron … and … weighed for Efron the silver which he [Efron] spoke about in the ears of the B’nai Chais, four hundred shekels of silver that merchants used.” (Breish’it, Perek 23, posuk 16)
On the words, “And Avraham heard”, the Rashbam commented;
“A hint is sufficient for a wise man.” Efron spoke as if he were a man of generosity. He spoke to Avraham with great respect and ostensibly offered him the burial site free of charge. However, Efron mentioned in passing, “The four hundred shekels … is nothing between friends. Your friendship is more precious than money. Bury your dead.” (Breish’it, Perek 23, posuk 15)(Rashi and Rashbam on posuk 15)
But Avraham was perceptive, with his finely-honed intuition, and understood Efron’s real intentions; he didn’t really want to give the land away for nothing. Avraham responded to Efron’s real inner wishes, not to the outer, simple meaning of his [Efron’s] words. (Growth Through Torah, Rabbi Zelig Pliskin, on Parsha Chaye Sarah, pages 57 – 58).
Rabbi Pliskin speaks of understanding the true meaning of what others say in a context of correcting and refining one’s midos. He writes that “this ability to differentiate between what someone says and what he means is an attribute that we must develop. For many areas of spiritual growth it is essential.” (Growth Through Torah, Rabbi Zelig Pliskin, on Parsha Chaye Sarah, page 58)
However Rabbi Pliskin’s discussion of refining ones perceptiveness and intuition extend beyond the striving for perfection of midos in Everyman. Avraham Aveinu who, in his time, was a prominent leader of mankind as well as builder and proponent of a then revolutionary concept; belief in an infinite being who controls every aspect of the world’s existence, correctly read the reality of his relationship with the other peoples. He read the reality of his relationship with Efron and, with an eye to both Hashem’s promise to create a people from him [Avraham] and to all of future history, he acted accordingly in paying Efron the four hundred shekels of silver.
In our contemporary times, is it the leaders, the politicians of Israel who utterly lack the perception and intuition of an Avraham Aveinu toward the suggestions, nuances and intuitive expressions of the enemy, failing and lacking even strength of character to digest the reality of the straight-out, direct statements made by the enemy, i.e., “Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa are settlements?” Or is it we, the people who fail at perceptiveness by virtue of our not acting to facilitate an end to the rule of these morally corrupt and deranged little men?
And so, the posuk which begins; “And Avraham heard”, is inextricably tied to the posuk 3 above it which reads, “I will have given the money for the field; take it of me …” And so we learn in our days that “Nothing ends with written contracts and agreements. We pay, pay and pay again, and yet they keep demanding more from us.” We paid with Oslo, Oslo 2, the expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif, the continuing propping up of Abbas and Fatah (who seek our destruction and eradication no less that Hamas) by continuing to give them the weapons, training, technology and capability to kill us in numbers, with the “Jewish government” persecuting and expelling their fellow Jews from Jewish land, under the bogus guise of pre-empting UN, EU, World or American pressure. The reality for those perceptive enough, as Avraham Aveinu was in dealing with Efron, to read deeper into revelations made by various investigative journalists or into the pronouncements of Olmert’s trial-balloon man Haim Ramon regarding Jerusalem, Har HaBayit and Yehuda and the Shomron, is that of successive socialist prime ministers soo corrupt and soo blinded by their hate of anything Jewish that they hide behind their enemy’s obvious duplicity and the bogus guise of American pressure even at the expense of national security.
May we be zocha in this coming year that our brethren — the refugee families from Gush Katif be permanently settled and be made totally whole, that our dear brother Jonathan Pollard and the 3 captive Chayalim and the other MIAs be liberated and returned to us and that we fulfill Hashem’s blueprint of B’nai Yisrael as a Unique people — an Am Segula, not to be reckoned with as with “the nations” and may we be zocha the Moshiach, the Ge’ula Shlaima, as Dov Shurin sings; “Yom Hashem V’Kol HaGoyim”, the Ultimate Redemption, bim hay v’yameinu — speedily, in our time”, — Achshav, Chik Chuk, Miyad, Etmol!!!
Good Shabbos!
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Moshe Burt, an Oleh, is a commentator on news and events in Israel and Founder and Director of the Sefer Torah Recycling Network. He lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh.
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