By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California
Leave it to the Torah to give us a classic case of holy ironies. This week’s portion is titled Chayei Sarah—“The Life of Sarah.” So, what is the very first thing that happens in the opening verse? She dies.
Not to be outdone, the Book of Genesis pulls the exact same stunt at the end with Vayechi—“And Jacob Lived”—a parsha dedicated almost entirely to Jacob’s final wills, testament, and burial procession. You can almost imagine an ancient editor looking over the parchment: “Rabbi, the protagonist just passed away on page one. Should we call it The Passing of Sarah?”
“Absolutely not,” the tradition replies. “Title it ‘Her Best Life.’”
The verse itself insists on being redundant: “And the life of Sarah was one hundred and twenty and seven years; these were the years of the life of Sarah.” Why the double billing? Any decent high school English teacher would have taken a red pen to that second clause: “Repetitive. We already know these were the years of her life—you literally just counted them!”
Rashi and the Sages explain that the Torah adds “these were the years” to tell us that all her years were equally good. Now, pause and think about Sarah’s resume for a moment. She endured famine. She was uprooted from her homeland. She spent decades dealing with infertility. She was abducted by two separate foreign despots—Pharaoh and Abimelech—thanks to Abraham’s rather questionable “tell them you’re my sister” travel policy. She had household friction with Hagar, heartbreak with Ishmael, and capped off her twilight years with the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.
If most of us had a century like that, we would not refer to those years as “equally good.” We would call our therapist, our lawyer, and our travel agent.
Yet Sarah viewed her entire journey as fundamentally good. Her faith was not an allergy to reality, nor was it pollyannaish denial. She possessed the radical spiritual resilience to know that purpose isn’t measured only by smooth sailing, but by what you build out of the storm.
Our Sages capture this with a striking aphorism: “The wicked, even while alive, are considered dead; but the righteous, even in death, are called alive.” We’ve all met people who are technically breathing, checking emails, and ordering lattes, but whose souls seem to be on permanent administrative leave. Sarah was the opposite. A life lived with moral conviction doesn’t expire when the heart stops beating; it continues rippling outward through every act of kindness and every generation that carries the torch forward.
Which brings us to a useful reality check on gratitude. It’s easy to look at our daily headaches—traffic jams, delayed flights, wifi outages, or the fact that someone put an empty milk carton back in the fridge—and conclude the universe is conspiring against us.
Consider a broader ledger:
If you have food in the fridge, clothes in the closet, a solid roof overhead, and a bed to collapse into, you are richer than 75% of the human population.
If you have a few dollars in the bank, twenty bucks in your wallet, and a mysterious ceramic dish of loose coins, foreign currency, and paperclips somewhere on your dresser, you are sitting in the top 8% of the world’s wealthy.
If you woke up this morning with more working parts than broken ones, you have received a day denied to over a million people who won’t survive this week.
If you have never dodged shrapnel, sat in a prison cell, faced torture, or wondered where your next meal was coming from, you are ahead of half a billion souls on this planet.
If you can read these words without a translator or an audio cue, you have literacy that over two billion people were never granted.
And if you can walk into a synagogue or sit down with a sefer without glancing nervously over your shoulder for the authorities, you enjoy a liberty our great-grandparents would have traded kingdoms to witness for 20 minutes.
Sarah lived through plenty of chaos, but she refused to let circumstances define the value of her days.
So stand up straight, put a smile on your face—if only to keep everyone guessing—count your blessings, and remember: today is still part of the Chayei, the life we have the privilege to live.
Wishing you a joyful, healthy, and wonderfully productive week!
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California.