Abraham has just buried his wife, Sarah. Linked from their youth, his separation must have felt like a severe loss, and indeed, just after concluding his mourning for her Abraham turns to the task of finding a wife for his son, Isaac, as though the impact of his loss made him realize what was still missing from his son’s life. The Torah let’s us know that his will be the last act of the patriarch, introducing this topic with the words, “Abraham was old, well along in days, and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all (ba-kol) (Gen 24:1).
This is surely a lovely tribute, to receive God’s blessing in every area of your life, but it raises problems for a careful reader. Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed Abraham leaving his father’s house, smuggling his wife (and nearly loosing her and his own life to two different lustful kings), participating in the animosity of his wife Sarah and her servant Hagar, expelling Hagar and his son Ishmael, suffering the feuds between his own servants and the servants of his nephew Lot, waging war with a victorious coalition of kings to save his nephew, arguing with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and being ordered to kill his beloved son, Isaac. That’s an awful lot of struggling, loss, and suffering for a man who is described as ‘blessed in all.”
Our tradition does not lack for insightful responses to the nature of Abraham’s blessings. Rashi notes that the numerical value of the word “ba-kol” is the same as the numerical value of the word “son,” reminding us of what an immense blessing a child brings into one’s life. Connected to that understanding, Rabbi David Kimchi says that at the end of one’s life, “the years when a person thinks about his departure from this earth, [Abraham] lacked nothing, and did not need anything in this life except to see his son well married.” For Radak, the fullness of Abraham’s life impels him to seek that same fullness for Isaac. Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra observes that the blessings that constitute human richness are: riches, possessions, honor, longevity, and children. Abraham was blessed in all of these areas.
A second stream of insight sees the blessing in a more radical turn. According to Rabbi Judah in the ancient Midrash, Bereshit Rabbah, “it means that God gave him a daughter.” What a surprising concept: even though the Torah is silent on this point, Rabbi Judah notes what a special blessing a daughter is, and tells us that this is a reference to the unknown girl who blessed Abraham.
There is a third path, alluded to by some of our sages, and worthy of our reflection now. Ramban tells us that the reference to “ba-kol” is an allusion to “one of the secrets of the Torah, a great matter, namely that the Holy Blessing One has an attribute called “kol/all,” so-called because it is the foundation of everything. Instead of seeing Abraham’s blessings only in the abundance in his life, in the good things he owned, can’t we learn to see blessing in the fullness of his life, the sheer “all-ness” of it.
Life doesn’t come in sweetness and light. It erupts with an irrepressible mixture of joy and sorrow, achievement and defeat, vitality and illness, connection and isolation. To focus only on part of that mix would be to produce a caricature of the fullness of life, and God is not found in caricature. The energy that it takes to edit out the unpleasant aspects of life can only suck out our passion and our ability to live enthusiastically. And such denial requires ever greater amounts of energy to sustain the illusion, yet still results eventually in defeat. Only be embracing the totality of life’s experiences can we truly live. By allowing ourselves to dwell in the suffering and in the ecstasy, to embrace the disappointment and hurt along with the delight, we can experience the fullness of being alive, the holiness of being itself.
Seeing blessing in “all” shifts our focus away from possessions – elusive though they are – and toward our inner response to what life brings. All living beings suffer. But remaining open to see the blessings amid the suffering is the key inner work that allows us to be with God and each other even in our pain. The Midrash Tanhuma notes that “the Holy Blessing One only elevates a person after testing and trying him first.” Echoing that broad view of blessing, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak, the Seer of Lublin, reminds us that God blessed Abraham with the qualities of “with all,” as the Torah states, “…all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might (Dt 6:3).”
Blessed to be able to see blessings in “all,” able to release his inner energy to embrace everything that life brought him, that is indeed the blessing that Abraham was able to reveal. To see blessing ba-kol, in everything, is the task of a lifetime, and the opportunity of every moment.
Shabbat Shalom!