שרה אמנו

Sarah our mother is the first woman of the nation, and the first to teach that faith is not the man's alone. She left Ur of the Chaldees and her father's house with Abraham, went to an unknown land, and descended with him to Egypt and to Gerar, and on every journey she paid the price of one who carries a message the world is not yet ready for.

Tradition holds that Sarah was greater than Abraham in prophecy: 'in all that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice' (Genesis 21:12), God said to Abraham himself. She was the one who understood that Ishmael could not grow up beside Isaac, and the ruling was with her. Her greatness was not in her husband's shadow but at his side, and at times ahead of him.

For ninety years she waited for a son. The laughter her name is bound to, Yitzchak, was born of years of a hope that seemed lost. And when at last he came, he was nearly taken from her at the binding. The Midrash ties her death to the news of the binding, as if her heart, which had borne so much, could not bear even the thought of losing the boy.

What do we learn from her? That carrying a vision is no lighter than giving birth to it, and at times heavier. Sarah teaches that the mother's faith, her judgment and her pain, are a founding pillar of the nation, not an appendix to it. 'The life of Sarah,' say the Sages, was wholly for the good, for a complete life is not one without pain but one that pain did not break.