Becoming Sympathetic Listeners (Chayei Sarah) | by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Nov, 2025

Parashat Chayei Sarah opens in the shadow of trauma and loss. The echoes of last week’s Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, still reverberate through the text. Isaac, who barely speaks again. Abraham, whose faith has been tested to its edge. And now, Sarah — whose absence from the Akeidah narrative speaks volumes — dies.

This is a Torah portion about generational transition, about what happens when one chapter ends and another begins, but the page itself is still trembling. There is worry in the air. The stories of our ancestors are never only historical — they are emotional landscapes, revealing how human beings stumble, grieve, and find their way toward blessing again.

The portion begins with Sarah’s death and ends with Abraham’s. Between them, life begins to stir again. Isaac meets Rebecca, and the Torah tells us that she becomes his comfort after his mother’s passing. Love reenters the story. Blessing reawakens.

But the vacuum left by loss is not easily filled. The Torah does not rush the healing process. It shows us that faith and continuity unfold in real time, within the ache of uncertainty. We move forward, not because grief is gone, but because life — divine life — keeps calling us forward.

Abraham, feeling the weight of his years and the fragility of covenant, sends his servant — tradition calls him Eliezer — to find a wife for Isaac. What follows is one of the most intricately told stories in Torah.

Eliezer prays for guidance: “Let the woman who offers water to me and my camels be the one You have chosen.” The moment unfolds as he imagines — Rebecca appears, generous and kind — and yet the Torah tells this story not once, but four times. We hear it from the narrator, we watch it happen at the well, we hear Eliezer retell it to Rebecca’s family, and then again when he returns to Isaac.

Four tellings. One journey.

Why such repetition?

Perhaps because storytelling itself is sacred work. With each retelling, the servant’s understanding deepens. The words become not only testimony, but transformation. Through story, experience becomes meaning. Through meaning, memory becomes healing.

Rabbi Josh Feigelson, in his luminous book Eternal Questions, quotes psychotherapist Estelle Frankel, who writes:

“All verbal therapies are, in fact, narrative therapies — focused on altering the problematic stories people tell themselves.”

When we tell our stories again — especially to a compassionate listener — we begin to see them differently. Not as victims of what happened, but as survivors who have grown.

In Chayei Sarah, Eliezer becomes the Torah’s first narrative therapist. Or perhaps it is his story, and we, readers of our sacred story serve as the listeners to his inner narrative. His repeated telling reframes anxiety into gratitude, mission into revelation. The story doesn’t change — but he does. And so can we.

We chant Torah. We don’t just read it — we sing it. Even the hardest parts of our story are sung into holiness. Maybe that’s the Torah’s deepest instruction about memory: not to deny pain, but to sanctify it through voice and community.

When we sing our story, we say: this happened — and still, I am here.

Perhaps that’s what it means to be a people of Torah. We are not simply readers of an ancient text. We are sympathetic listeners — to our ancestors, to each other, and to the unfinished stories within ourselves.

A story, retold by Elie Wiesel:

Once there was a boy who would one day become known as the Seer of Lublin. Each day he disappeared into the forest, until his mother, worried, followed him and found him praying alone among the trees.

“Why go there?” she asked. “God is everywhere — God is in school, too.”

The boy replied, “You’re right, Mother. God is the same everywhere — but I am not.”

Sometimes we need distance from our routines to find the voice that has grown silent. We step outside the familiar to rediscover who we are — and who we can still become.

This week’s Torah portion invites us to become sympathetic narrators of our own lives. To retell our stories not to revise the past, but to redeem it. To be gentle with the characters we once were, and compassionate toward the ones we are still becoming.

Because the story of faith is not only about God’s promise to Abraham — it’s about our promise to ourselves: to keep listening, to keep telling, to keep singing.

And if we tell our stories with love — if we learn to be kind listeners to our own souls — then perhaps our words, like Eliezer’s, will extand that healing to others, and to the world.