Getting Up After Loss
When Sarah Imeinu dies, the Torah describes Avraham’s response in a very moving sequence:
“וַיִּסְפֹּד לְשָׂרָה וְלִבְכֹּתָהּ”
“He eulogized Sarah and cried for her.” (Bereishit 23:2)
Avraham mourns. He gives voice to his grief. He cries.
And then the Torah tells us: “וַיָּקָם אַבְרָהָם מֵעַל פְּנֵי מֵתוֹ”
“Avraham rose from before his dead.” (Bereishit 23:3)
That word, vayakam, he arose, teaches us a profoundly important lesson.
Avraham does not get up because his grief is over. Our grief and love is not something we get over. Avraham gets up because life continues to make demands, even in the midst of his profound loss. He must secure a burial place for Sarah. And later, he must think about the future of his family and find a wife for Isaac.
He attends to the needs of the present while also making room for the future. In addition, he also remarries and has 6 children with his wife Ketura.
This is something to pay attention to. Avraham is both deeply human and at the same time deeply Torah-oriented. We are not asked to bypass our pain. Avraham mourns first. He cries. His grief is real. But grief does not erase the possibility of continuing to live.
We experience a similar rhythm in our own Jewish calendar on Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av. On this day, marking the day that the holy Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed, we mourn the loss of the relationship we had with G-d when the Temples stood. We sit on the floor, we recite Lamentations, and we give ourselves over to the pain of what was lost. We do not rush past the devastation, even as we remember something that we lost thousands of years ago.
And then, at midday we rise from the floor and sit on regular chairs. The mourning continues, but something shifts. We begin, in a small way, to reenter the world.
We are not finished grieving. The Beit Hamikdash has not been rebuilt. But we are no longer sitting on the floor. We get up and move forward.
Perhaps this is a Jewish understanding of resilience: we do not erase our grief; we learn how to carry it as we rise and live and build.
We have witnessed unimaginable loss, including the widows and families whose lives were shattered on October 7. For those who, in time, choose to remarry, to build a home again, or to welcome new life into their families, this is not a denial of the person they lost. It is not a forgetting. It is a vayakam.
Getting up does not mean that we stop loving the person who is gone. It means that love and loss can coexist with the possibility of a future.
Avraham teaches us that there is a time to mourn, a time to cry, and when we are ready a time and an imperative to rise.
We may not know what the future will look like. We may not be able to imagine it while we are standing among the ruins of our own lives. But perhaps the Torah is reminding us that even after profound loss, there can still be a next chapter. The challenge is not to get up as though nothing happened. It is to get up carrying the memory, the love, and the sacredness of what was while allowing ourselves to build what can yet be.
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