What Death Takes

 Why do we comfort mourners?  In fact, why is comforting mourners such a great mitzvah?  Is it not obvious?

Part of life is cut away when a life is complete.  No more kisses or caresses.  No more conspiratorial meetings or happenstance encounters at the refrigerator.  No more birthdays.  Nor more blessings.    How could the yanking of a life string be anything but painful?

Sarah died.  According to the Midrash Abraham saw the distraught looks on their faces.  He looked at their pain and saw how abandoned people felt.  He watched heir tears and squirmed as they ground their hands helplessly into one another. Isaac dissolved into tears cry out, my mother, my mother! Why have you left me?”  The servants gathered about and ripped their clothes as they fell to the ground weeping.  

So Abraham went to console them.  Abraham?  The bereft was comforting everyone else?  

When we finish reading, studying a holy text, we say Tam v’nishlam…” All is whole and complete now.  The book is not complete until it has been read and finished. Only then is it tam, whole.  We then return the volume to its place on the shelf.  It is finished.  So it is with Sarah, our Mother.  Having lived a full and rich life she returns to the resting place of Adam and Eve, Machpeleah.

Abraham knows that this separation is temporal.  He is old and will soon regain the companionship of his life.