"Anyone Who Works on the Sabbath Shall Be Put to Death"

The beginning of this week’s Torah reading is another example of a text that would seem very harsh if understood literally. Exodus 35:2 says “On six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy sabbath of complete rest before the LORD; anyone who does any work on it shall be put to death.”

Those who were present this past Shabbat may recall we discussed, among other things, two different phrases used for the death penalty in the Torah. One is “that soul shall be cut off from its people” and the other is “shall be put to death.” The first type, known as karet, “cutting off,” is understood by the sages as a death penalty to be carried out by God, not by humans. But the second is understood as to be carried out by human courts.

By the time of the late Second Temple Period, the sages had almost entirely eliminated capital punishment through a series of procedural and evidentiary requirements so stringent as to be virtually impossible to meet. We don’t know to what extent the death penalty for Sabbath violations was actually carried out in biblical times, though Numbers 15:32 - 26 tells the story of a man who was stoned to death for gathering sticks on Shabbat.

I’m quite confident that no one reading my brief weekly commentary would think it was a good idea to put people to death for working on Shabbat. So what are we to do with this commandment?

Our Etz Hayyim commentary gives us one helpful thought, quoting Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz (1690 - 1764) to the extent that a Jew who does not observe Shabbat “becomes dead to the spiritual dimension of life.” Jewish lore holds that we are given a neshama yeteira, an additional soul, on Shabbat -- “a person who makes no distinction between Shabbat and the weekday forfeits that gift.”

I think there is some truth to this. If we are “too busy” to observe Shabbat, we are probably busier than God wants us to be.

Gebrochts and the Limits of Jewish Pluralism

Over the last few years, you may have noticed that more and more of the Passover products you buy carry the notation that they are non-gebrochts. Do you know what this means?

    The word “gebrocht” is actually Yiddish for broken. A product is considered “gebrochts” if it contains “broken” matzah, meaning matzah meal or matzah flour. Many of the foods we associate with Passover are gebrochts, such as matzah balls (kneidlach), matzah kugel, matzah brei, and so on.

    It may surprise you to learn that Chasidim and some other fervently Orthodox Jews do not eat such products on Passover. Why? Because there is a fear that a clump of flour in the matzah may not have been thoroughly mixed with water in the matzah-making process. If this happened, when that unbaked flour mixes with any liquid during Passover, it would create chametz. So therefore Chasidim avoid soaking any matzah in liquid during Passover to avoid that theoretical possibility. No matzah balls, no matzah brei, no matzah kugel, no crumbling up some matzah to put in your chicken soup. While this is originally a Chasidic custom, as the Orthodox community in general moves to a more rigorous observance, the custom has spread. Therefore many manufacturers, seeking as large a customer base as possible, have begun to produce non-gebrochts products and to label them as such.

    A fascinating aspect of this custom is that those who refrain from gebrochts for Passover only do so for the first seven days and indeed, go out of their way to serve and eat gebrochts on the eighth day. Why?

    For one, there is a technical halachic reason for this. The original custom of not eating gebrochts is due to a safeik, a doubt. The likelihood of some unmixed flour becoming chametz is doubtful, albeit theoretically possible. Similar, the observance of the eighth day of Passover is due to doubt, since in ancient days our ancestors were not one hundred percent sure of the dates of the holidays. When there is a doubt about a biblical commandment, we rule stringently. But the question of gebrochts on the eighth day is now a s’feik sfeika, a “double doubt.” The worry about the flour is a doubt and the worry about the status of the day is a doubt, and the rule is that in cases of a “double doubt” we act leniently.

    But there is a larger philosophical reason for eating gebrochts on the eighth day as well. Those who observe this know that it is a custom and a stringency. It is not baseline halacha, Jewish law. Someone who eats gebrochts is not violating any Jewish law; eating a matzah ball is not the same thing as eating bread or pizza. In order to demonstrate that they recognize it is only a custom, and that they are not casting aspersions on other Jews who don’t observe it, they go out of their way to eat gebrochts on the eighth day.

    That effort at demonstrating respect for Jews who observe differently is laudable, and it is something that each of us should replicate in our own way. We do that in this community through our participation with synagogues of other denominations in joint services and educational programs, my leadership role in the interdenominational Board of Rabbis, and in many other ways. When a rabbi of another denomination needs me to sit on a Bet Din (rabbinic court) for a conversion, I am happy to do so if the candidate is able to demonstrate a sincere commitment to living a Jewish life, even if their practices are not totally in accordance with ours.

    But are there limits to pluralism? The non-gebrochts people who eat gebrochts on the eighth day of Passover do so because they recognize their own practice as custom rather than law. If they believed that gebrochts was actually chametz, they would not do so.

    Our commitment to Jewish pluralism and our commitment to halachic standards of personal status at times create situations which are not easy to deal with. Jewish movements to our left accept patrilineal descent and some of their rabbis perform conversions without mikvah, and hatafat dam brit or circumcision for males. If a Conservative rabbi accepts such a person as a Jew he or she violates halacha as well as a “Standard of Rabbinic Practice” which means that he or she could be expelled from the Rabbinical Assembly. But telling someone in this situation that they aren’t Jewish risks alienating them from Judaism and Jewish life. Former Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen recounted on more than one occasion that he attended Hebrew school as a young boy but his family became Unitarians when they were told he couldn’t have a Bar Mitzvah unless he was formally converted (his mother was Catholic).

    These issues go to the heart of someone’s identity and are a little bit more consequential than eating matzah brie or kneidlach on Passover. The Conservative movement is starting to grapple with these issues but a solution won’t be easy or universally accepted. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

Two-Minute Torah: Ten Commandments and Polarities

Have you ever noticed that almost all of our prayers are in the plural? We address God in the Amidah as "our God and God of our ancestors." During the Days of Awe we refer to God as "Avinu Malkenu," "our Father, our King." On Yom Kippur we ask God for forgiveness "for the sin which we have sinned against You." And so on and so forth.

Which makes it all the more interesting to note that the Ten Commandments are all in the singular. You may not notice this when reading an English translation since "you" in standard English is both singular and plural. (There are of course dialects which do distinguish between second person singular "you" and second person plural such as the Southern "y'all" or the New Jersey/Philadelphia "youse.") But when God says "I am Adonai your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt" or says "you shall not kill" or "you shall not steal," the Hebrew is in the singular. It is not a collectivity being addressed, it is an individual.

Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor Emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, says that Judaism in general, and Conservative Judaism in particular, is about "balancing the polarities." Is Judaism concerned with the needs of the Jews or the needs of all people? The answer is both. Is Judaism concerned with the spiritual or the material? The answer is both. Is Judaism concerned with perfecting the individual or creating the beloved community? The answer is both.

We stray from the right path when we focus too much on one pole and lose sight of the other. If we are not concerned about the needs of Jews, we will not survive as a people. But if we are only concerned about the needs of Jews, we have no real reason to survive as a people. If we are not concerned with spirituality, our souls will starve. But if we are only concerned about spirituality, our bodies will starve.

Our liturgy is in the plural to remind us that we are a community, a collective, that we are responsible for each other. Perhaps the Ten Commandments are in the singular to remind us that each of us, individually, has our own relationship with God; and that each of us has a responsibility to fulfill the covenant, and not depend on others to do so on our behalf.

How Open Should Our Tent Be?

If you follow the Jewish news as avidly as I do, you may be aware of a controversy involving Swarthmore College Hillel and Hillel International. The Swarthmore affiliate recently declared that it would not be bound by Hillel International’s policy forbidding any Hillel chapter to host or sponsor activities with organizations that “delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel.” In response to this declaration, Hillel International President Eric Fingerhut, a former Ohio Congressman, warned Swarthmore Hillel that he expects all campus Hillels to follow these guidelines or lose the right to call itself “Hillel.”

It’s interesting that Swarthmore Hillel has not as yet actually violated these guidelines; it has merely asserted that it won’t be bound by them.

What precipitated this declaration? According to the Swarthmore Hillel student board, it was a recent incident where former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, an outspoken dove, was not permitted to give a speech at Harvard Hillel.

How on earth is it possible that a former speaker of Israel’s parliament -- who before that was chairman of the Jewish Agency -- could be prevented from speaking at a Hillel? The reality is a bit complicated, but it seems that the Palestine Solidarity Committee had agreed to co-sponsor the Burg speech along with Harvard Progressive Jewish Alliance, a Hillel affiliate, and even Harvard Students for Israel.  Harvard Hillel felt that allowing an event co-sponsored by the Palestine Solidarity Committee to take place in the Hillel building would violate the guidelines, but they also wanted to show hospitality to the former Knesset Speaker. So in a compromise that frankly reminds me of some of the mental gymnastics Conservative synagogues sometimes go through, an invitation-only dinner for Burg was held at Harvard Hillel. After dinner, everyone walked across the street to a university-owned building for the public lecture.

The Harvard/Burg debacle led to the creation of a group called “Open Hillel,” of which Swarthmore soon became the first (and so far only) institutional member.

I began my career as a Hillel director, well before these guidelines came into effect. As a Hillel director I tried to have as diverse a program as possible. When the “Palestine Solidarity Committee” and “Students for Israel” want to co-sponsor a speech by a former Knesset Speaker, and Hillel International’s guidelines prevent it, something is wrong. The ethos of the campus is to promote dialogue and  free inquiry; students learn from hearing a broad spectrum of opinions and having their pre-conceived notions challenged.

I would add that we at Kehilat Shalom have had a broad variety of speakers as well. Last year our Men’s Club sponsored talks by Eric Rozenman of CAMERA, which can fairly be characterized as a right-wing pro-Israeli group, as well as a Muslim leader. In previous years I am told that we have hosted diplomats from Arab countries. Hosting a talk by a particular individual does not imply endorsement of his or her perspectives or activities.

I think Hillel needs to cast its net as wide as possible. As we learned in our “Engaging Israel” course, being pro-Israel does not mean supporting every decision a particular Israeli government makes. Lots of American Jews are critical of certain Israeli policies -- be they on religious pluralism, women’s rights, or the Arab-Israeli conflict. The recent Pew Study showed that only 38 percent of American Jews believe that the current Israeli government is making a sincere effort to achieve peace, while 48 percent believe it is not sincere. (It should be added that 75 percent of American Jews -- me included -- believe that the Palestinian leadership is not making a sincere effort at peace either.) Younger Jews tend to be more dovish than the rest of the Jewish community, and the exclusion of dissenting voices from the Jewish campus umbrella will undoubtedly cause further alienation of young Jews from the organized community as they get older.

And yet -- advocates of the Hillel International policy point out that on the typical college campus there are any number of opportunities on a daily basis to hear from critics of Israel. Indeed, on many campuses pro-Israel students feel that they are constantly under siege. Is it wrong for Hillel to be the one place on campus where Jewish students can enjoy a respite from having to defend Israel? There is a certain merit to this perspective.

The same question can be asked about our synagogue, or indeed any synagogue. How broad do we want our tent to be? I recently attended a “Think Tank on Intermarriage” for Conservative rabbis, and it became clear to me that in the non-Orthodox Jewish community intermarriage is the “new normal.” Roughly half of young adults raised in the Conservative movement are going to marry someone of a different religious background -- and if we are going to retain them and their offspring, we are going to have to make some adjustments. At the same time, Conservative Judaism defines itself as a movement which adheres to halachic restrictions on Jewish status, on marriage and divorce, and the role of non-Jews in the synagogue. How much can we change and still be Conservative? How do we make our synagogue more comfortable for intermarried Jews and their families without at the same time making it less comfortable for our current members, especially those whose inclinations are more traditionalist?

To the credit of both Swarthmore Hillel and Hillel International, Eric Fingerhut will soon sit down with the Swarthmore Hillel student board to begin a dialogue. Within Conservative Judaism, the United Synagogue’s recent Centennial Convention was dubbed “The Conversation of the Century” and kicked off an honest and introspective discussion of the state of our own Movement and its future direction. We need to do the same at Kehilat Shalom. How big do we want our tent to be? What can we do to be more welcoming to those who are not currently a part of us, without alienating those who are already inside the tent?

Conservative Judaism and Mark Twain

Recently I wrote about the recent Pew report on American Jews and what it means for the Jewish community overall. Now I would like to focus on what it means for Conservative Judaism in particular.

Recently there has been a spate of articles reacting to the statistic that only 18% of American Jews currently identify as Conservative, and only 11% of those under 30 do so. This is in sharp contrast to most of the 20th century, when the plurality of American Jews identified with Conservative Judaism. The first study which did not show Conservative Judaism as the largest denomination was in 1990, when 38% called themselves Reform vs. 35% Conservative. So in the 23 years since then, our “market share” has gone down by half.

One of the more interesting articles was by Micah Gottlieb, a professor of Jewish studies at NYU, raised in the Conservative movement but today Modern Orthodox. For Prof. Gottlieb, writing in the Forward, the key failing of Conservative Judaism is its lack of halachic seriousness:

I was told that Conservative Jews were as serious in their commitment to Halacha as Orthodox Jews were, but they differed in that they recognized halachic change. But as I knew no Conservative Jews who cared about Halacha, my teenage sensitivity to inconsistency led me to see Conservative Judaism as inauthentic. . .

I felt that Conservative Judaism was distracted by what I saw as political rather than religious issues. The burning issue of the day in the Conservative movement was egalitarianism and the ordination of women. My synagogue was not egalitarian, although women could be called to the Torah on special occasions. The argument was made that egalitarianism was crucial to keeping Jews affiliated.

I did not buy that. It seemed to me that focusing on egalitarianism was a distraction from the real problem: that Conservative Jews were not committed to Halacha and Jewish learning and that no serious effort was being made to engage them in these matters. Worse still, as egalitarianism swept Conservative Judaism in the United States, Canadian Conservative Jews who were not egalitarian were made to feel unwelcome. . .

Many people are thinking about how to revitalize Conservative Judaism. This is important, as the world needs a vibrant Jewish religious center. From my experience, I would recommend one thing above all else: Support and nurture the most committed Conservative Jews at local synagogues. Give them outlets for their religious curiosity and passion. These Jews may not write big checks. They may sometimes make the less committed members of the synagogue feel uneasy. But they are the future.

There is some truth in what Prof. Gottlieb writes, and in one of my Yom Kippur sermons I recounted the story of one of my friends who left the Conservative movement so that he could raise his children in a Shabbat-observant community. But these kinds of people are not the norm; the Pew report says that 4% of those raised Conservative are now Orthodox while 30% are now Reform and fully another 20% say they are of no denomination or are culturally Jewish but have no religion. I suggest that our survival as a movement depends more on retaining those who have left for Reform or secularism than those who have left to become Orthodox.

Moreover, those of us who are committed to gender egalitarianism don’t see it as a “political” issue but rather a religious, spiritual mandate.

Rabbi Daniel Gordis, an ordained Conservative rabbi and well-known author who lives in Israel (and with whom I shared an office suite at the University of Judaism almost 20 years ago), wrote an article in the Jewish Review of Books called “Requiem for a Movement.” At least, as one of my colleagues wrote on Facebook, he had the decency to sound sorry that we died.

According to Rabbi Gordis, Conservative Judaism died because

Conservative Judaism ignored the deep existential human questions that religion is meant to address. . .As Conservative writers and rabbis addressed questions such as “are we halakhic,” “how are we halakhic,” and “should we be halakhic,” most of the women and men in the pews responded with an uninterested shrug. They were not in shul, for the most part, out of a sense of legally binding obligation. Had that been what they were seeking, they would have been in Orthodox synagogues. They had come to worship because they wanted a connection to their people, to transcendence, to a collective Jewish memory that would give them cause for rejoicing and reason for weeping, and they wanted help in transmitting that to their children. While these laypeople were busy seeking a way to explain to their children why marrying another Jew matters, how a home rooted in Jewish ritual was enriching, and why Jewish literacy still mattered in a world in which there were no barriers to Jews’ participating in the broader culture, their religious leadership was speaking about whether or not the movement was halakhic or how one could speak of revelation in an era of biblical criticism.

Gordis’ article is somewhat schizophrenic in that while he pillories the supposed excessive focus on halacha, and our failure to acknowledge that most of our members are simply not interested in living a fully halachic life, he also criticizes our concessions:

They (the rabbis) expected less of their congregations, reduced educational demands, and offered sanitized worship reconfigured to meet the declining knowledge levels of their flocks. In many cases, they welcomed non-Jews into the Jewish community in a way that virtually eradicated any disincentive for Jews to marry people with whom they could pass on meaningful Jewish identity.

I would posit that numbers, market share if you will, is not the main criterion for the “success” of a spiritual community. Rabbi Irwin Kula of CLAL wrote, in an e-mail which he has given me permission to include in this article:

Enough of this despair: Conservative Judaism won! Everyone today trumpets being for tradition and change and so now we simply need to move up the evolutionary spiral and widen the range of what we mean by both tradition and change and expand our boundaries of who we speak to given a post modern context, a globalized world and an America in which Jews are the most respected group (see American Grace by Putnam)  in the country. Yes our national institutions are going to weaken. But all national legacy institutions are weakening in every domain and business from the government to the NYTimes etc. Yes we have challenges but don't confuse business model changes that challenge our particular institutions and yes jobs with good Torah that is both needed or wanted.

Mark Twain was reported to have once said “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” A little more than a year ago, people were ready to write the “requiem” for Kehilat Shalom, but we are still here, with a brand-new successful religious school, a significant number of new members, and a much firmer financial footing. Yes, we have our challenges ahead of us, and the Kehilat Shalom which emerges at the end of the next few years may look different than the Kehilat Shalom of yesterday.

I agree with Rabbi Kula that the challenge we face is more to our “business model” than to our core ideas. For much of our history Conservative Judaism was sort of the “default” mode. People with memories of immigrant parents or grandparents wanted a Judaism that was basically traditional but adapted to American realities. As those memories fade, tradition becomes less compelling for some.

Beyond that, all sociological research, well before the Pew study, showed that Gen Xers and Millenials are not joiners the way their parents and grandparents were. The challenge to the dues-based model is significant, just like newspapers and music companies are trying to figure out how to respond to the advent of digital media. But we will figure this out. Like Mark Twain, the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

Demography and Destiny: Thoughts on the Pew Study of Jewish Americans

“In 1975, when Elvis Presley died, there were 170 Elvis impersonators around the world. By 2000, there were over 85,000. If present trends continue, by the year 2019, one out of every three people in the world will be an Elvis impersonator.”

    The statistics I quoted above were taken from a reputable academic publication, and they are absolutely correct. But nevertheless they are absurd, because we know that in this case, “present trends” won’t continue. It’s absurd to imagine a world in which 1/3 of the population consists of Elvis impersonators.

    I was reminded of this statistic while reading some of the analyses of the recent Pew Forum report “A Portrait of Jewish Americans.” While to be fair the coverage of the report has been diverse, quite a bit of it has been “the sky is falling,” especially for Conservative Judaism.

    One of the problems of doing Jewish demography is obtaining accurate, consistent data and comparing it over time. The Census Bureau is not permitted to ask questions about religion, and therefore any data is obtained by privately-funded research. Each research team designs its own survey questions and devises its own methodology. It’s therefore important to make sure that when you are comparing figures over time, that you’re not in fact comparing apples and oranges.

    Much media coverage has painted a picture of a community in decline. For example, 22% of Jews surveyed in 2013 report that while they consider themselves Jewish, they have no religion. This compares to only 7% who answered that way in the 2000 National Jewish Population Study (NJPS). The percentage of Jews of no religion has more than tripled in little more than a decade!

    But as JJ Goldberg points out in The Forward, and as those of us who follow Jewish demography know, the 2000 NJPS was notoriously unreliable -- so much so that its release was delayed by two years and the Jewish Federation movement, which funded the survey and its 1990 predecessor, got out of the business of doing demographic studies altogether. That’s why the Pew Study was done by Pew, a general, not Jewish, non-profit think tank.

    In order to understand survey data you need to know the methodology involved. For example, the 1990 NJPS terrified the organized Jewish community with its finding of a 52% intermarriage rate. But this figure was later revised significantly downward, because in calculating the intermarriage rate they counted as a Jew anyone with one Jewish parent, whether or not they were raised as a Jew, whether or not they were halachically Jewish, whether or not they considered themselves Jewish. I have two nieces who are Unitarians with a born-Jewish father and a lapsed-Catholic mother. My nieces would have been counted as Jews by the 1990 NJPS, and should they marry non-Jews would be counted as part of the intermarriage rate.

So to counteract that fairly dubious methodology, the 2000 NJPS set aside those with “weak Jewish connections” and didn’t ask followup questions about Jewish identity. So if you exclude Jews with “weak Jewish connections” it’s not hard to come up with the figure of 7% of Jews who have no religion, and come up with a tripling of that category in a decade. But if you look back to the 1990 NJPS, you had a figure of 20% Jews with no religion -- statistically identical to the current 22% figure when you account for the margin of error.

Far from a community in decline, the American Jewish community is shown to be larger than previously thought. The Pew survey shows about 6.5 million Jews, not the 5.2 to 5.5 million previous surveys thought there were. In addition there are more than a million non-Jews who have some affinity for Judaism, and many attend synagogues or practice Jewish rituals without formally converting.

It would be interesting to explore what the 22% of Jews who claim that they have “no religion” actually mean, because many of them observe practices that most of us would claim are religious in nature. 46% say they believe in God, 24% attend services at least a few times a year. Forty-two percent attended a Passover seder last year, 22% fast on Yom Kippur, 11% have a kosher home. So clearly, being a Jew without religion is a complicated phenomenon.

The survey has been seen as particularly challenging for Conservative Judaism. Whereas once the plurality of American Jews were Conservative, today only 18% are; and only 11 of Jews 30-and-under.

But too little attention, in my opinion, has been paid to one significant figure. Ninety-four percent of Jews report that they are proud of being Jewish. This is quite remarkable. For much of American Jewish history, large numbers of Jews did whatever they could to escape being Jewish. They changed their names, they had “nose jobs,” they converted to other religions or denied their Jewishness. The phenomenon of the “self-hating Jew,” so well-known from American Jewish literature, is clearly no more.

There are lots of other surprising data -- for example, the 1990 NJPS reported that only 28% of children of intermarriage were being raised as Jews, yet the Pew survey shows that over 50% of young men and women who are the products of intermarriages consider themselves to be Jewish. So there is a lot of good news here. Our community will never be able to make any inroads with people who don’t even consider themselves to be Jewish, or who do consider themselves Jewish but wish they weren’t.

Goldberg writes “if we know anything about the future, it’s that we can’t know the future.” Or as Yogi Berra reportedly once said, “making predictions is very difficult, especially about the future.” In the 1890s everyone “knew” that Reform Judaism was American Judaism, and in the 1950s Orthodox rabbis in droves took Conservative pulpits because everyone “knew” that Orthodoxy in America had no future.

Goldberg’s article is worth quoting at some length:

Take away the errors, and you get a very different narrative. It would go something like this: Despite decades of warnings that American Jewry is dissolving in the face of assimilation and intermarriage, a major new survey by one of America’s most respected social research organizations depicts a Jewish community that is growing more robustly than even the optimists expected.

Over the past quarter-century (it continues), the data show a community that has grown in number. Intermarriage leveled off in the late 1990s after rising steadily through much of the 20th century, and has remained stable for the past 15 years.

By some measures, Jews appear to be increasing overall levels of Jewish practice and engagement. Most surprising, significant numbers of children of intermarriage have grown up to become Jewish adults, far exceeding even their own parents’ intentions. . .

The lead technical advisor on the 1990 survey, the distinguished Brown University sociologist Sidney Goldstein, wrote in the 1992 American Jewish Year Book that with low birthrate, aging, high intermarriage and few intermarried couples raising Jewish children, “there seems little prospect that the total core Jewish population of the United States will rise above 5.5 million.”

In fact, he wrote, it’s “more likely that the core population will decline toward 5.0 million and possibly even below it in the early decades of the 21st century.”

Like I said: Whoops.

How Old Was Isaac?

This week's Torah reading is called "Chayyei Sarah," "The Life of Sarah" but
in fact, it begins with her death. Interestingly, the Torah tells us nothing
of how she died nor anything of the cause of her death.

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, instead of a sermon we discussed Rashi's
commentary and various midrashic understandings of the Akedah, the Binding
of Isaac. One of the questions we discussed is how old Isaac was at the time
his father almost sacrificed him. The biblical text seems to indicate a
young lad, certainly someone not yet in his teens. But many commentaries
suggest he was 37 years old.

Where does this idea come from? It comes from this week's parasha, at least
indirectly. You might not pick up on this because of the way the weekly
portions are split up, but at the very end of last week's parasha Abraham
and Isaac return home from their sacrificial journey. The very next thing
that happens, at the beginning of this week's parasha, is Sarah's death.
Again there is something of a gap in the text, because we are not
specifically told that the death of Sarah is connected with the Akedah. But
that is what many midrashim suggest. One possibility is that Abraham and
Isaac were not travelling in close proximity, and Abraham arrived first,
alone. Sarah may have had an inkling of what Abraham proposed to do, and
when he came home alone she thought he had in fact sacrificed Isaac and
either killed herself or died of a broken heart. Another midrash suggests
that it was simply hearing of what had transpired that caused her death.

Now, we know from Genesis that Sarah was 90 when Isaac was born and that she
was 127 when she died. If we assume that her death happened immediately
after the Akedah, this makes Isaac 37 years old at the time of the Akedah.