Based on the Thursday shiur of Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, shlit’a, delivered in the holy Yeshiva of Shuva Israel — Parashat Chayei Sarah.
There is a verse in this week’s parashah that the commentators refuse to leave alone: “And Sarah died in Kiryat Arba, which is Hebron” (Genesis 23:2).
Read it quickly and it sounds like a geography note. Read it the way Rashi reads it, and it becomes the doorway into one of the deepest questions in the Torah — why did the mother of the Jewish people die at the exact moment she heard a piece of news? And why does the Gemara call that news good?
Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, shlit’a, opens the shiur with that question and does not let it go until it has been answered from the Gemara, the Rishonim and the Vilna Gaon. What follows is the full argument, laid out in order.
First: the Ramban’s promise about the Book of Genesis
Before touching the verse, Rabbi Pinto sets the frame. The Ramban writes in his introduction to Genesis that if a person wants to know what his life will look like — how it will go, how it will be conducted — he should study the Book of Genesis. Everything that happened to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was written to teach us the shape of the life of the world.
That is a remarkable claim. It means Genesis is not a family history with lessons attached. It is a map. Every crisis the patriarchs faced is a template for a crisis you will face.
And the rabbi adds the part nobody wants to hear: there is no person whose life is all satisfaction and joy and everything going as it should. Every person faces challenges. Every person faces crises. Every person faces things that are not simple.
The heart monitor
He illustrates it with a memory. Years ago, sitting alone at night in a hospital, watching a heart monitor trace its line across the screen, he noticed the obvious thing we all ignore: it goes up, and down, and up, and down.
“As long as it goes up and down and up and down, it means you’re alive. If it goes flat, you’re dead.”
So, he says, it is better that sometimes it goes up and sometimes it goes down — sometimes way up, sometimes way down — because that is what a living person looks like. A flat line is not peace. A flat line is death.
“When you’re up, be happy. And when you’re down, be happy too. Because if it’s flat, you’re passive, you’re dead, you have no life.”
This is where the shiur grounds itself in a verse of David: “The L-rd has chastened me sorely, but He has not given me over to death” (Psalms 118:18). Whatever suffering, whatever problem, whatever hard thing the Holy One gives a person — He has not handed him over to death. The trial itself is evidence that you are still alive, still in the account, still being built.
Rabbi Pinto’s conclusion is the sentence that carries the whole shiur: everything we go through and struggle with builds us up and raises us to high places.
The question the Shach could not leave standing
Now the verse.
Rashi explains that Kiryat Arba is named for four giants who lived there — Ahiman, Sheshai, Talmai, and their father. Four tall, great men. Sarah died in a place that carried their name, and so the Torah writes it that way.
But the Shach, one of the great commentators, asks the obvious question: so what? If four giants lived in Hebron, why does that require the Torah to rename the city in the middle of describing the death of the mother of Israel? Just say “And Sarah died in Hebron.”
And this is not a small objection, because the Torah does not waste words. Rabbi Pinto puts it sharply: there is not a letter, a word, or anything in the holy Torah that is redundant, missing or extra. Rabbi Akiva would derive heaps and heaps of laws from every crown on the letters. So what is the Torah innovating here? What is it telling us that we could not have been told by the plain name of the city?
The answer, the rabbi says, is that those four giants are not scenery. They are witnesses. And once you know what they saw, the whole verse reorganises itself.
What Sarah knew that Abraham did not tell her
The sages teach that Sarah our mother did not know where Abraham our father was.
Abraham had told her he was taking Isaac to teach him Torah. He took Eliezer his servant, he took Ishmael his son, he took the donkey — and he set out. But Sarah felt that something was not happening as it should. The Holy One gives people senses, and people feel what is happening. She felt that something abnormal was underway.
So she did something that sounds strange until you understand who she was. She went to the four giants and asked them to look at the horizon — to see whether they could see an old man with two people and a donkey walking on the road.
They looked. And what they saw was Abraham binding Isaac.
“And she heard the news, and her soul departed”
Rashi’s phrase is precise: the moment she heard the news that Isaac was bound, at that moment her soul left her.
And here Rabbi Pinto raises the question that unlocks everything:
What does it mean, “she heard the news”?
Because the Gemara in Sanhedrin establishes a rule about news. One who hears good tidings blesses “He Who is good and does good.” One who hears bad tidings says “Blessed is the true Judge.” That is the entire vocabulary of the word news in the language of the sages — news means good news. A rumor is the other thing.
And the rabbi pauses here to draw a line that is worth carrying out of the shiur into your week: a person who hears rumors should not listen to them. They come saying “I heard, I heard, I heard.” Whoever tells you “I heard” — tell him to go away. You want to distress me; I do not want to hear rumors. Whoever comes to tell you bad rumors, the blessing over him is “Blessed is the true Judge” — a judgment that should not be heard at all.
So we are back to the problem. Those four men told Sarah that they saw Abraham binding his son, tying him, laying him on the altar. That is not good news. That is the worst news a mother can receive.
So why does the Torah call it news? And what good thing could possibly have taken her soul?
The law of prophecy — and why it matters here
To answer, Rabbi Pinto states a principle he calls immense in the service of G-d.
The Torah tells us that a prophet must speak his prophecy. A prophet who suppresses his prophecy is punished. The Gemara records a dispute about the punishment: one authority says death from Heaven — a prophet who has a prophecy and does not prophesy is liable to death from Heaven. A second authority says lashes.
The case in the Torah is Jonah son of Amittai, the Haftarah of Yom Kippur. The Holy One told him: arise, go to Nineveh, the great city. And Jonah fled — and became liable. They threw him into the water, the fish swallowed him, and he was saved by a miracle.
The Gemara’s hard question
But the Gemara itself presses: if a prophet suppresses his message, who knows he received a prophecy? And who would administer the lashes? If the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke with the prophet — how does anyone else know that G-d spoke with him?
The rabbi actually walks through the argument the way the Gemara does, question after question. How will they lash him? How will they warn him? Even a Torah scholar who needs no warning — how would you lash him? I understand death by the hand of Heaven. But lashes? That Amora who says he must be lashed — where would you even administer them? Since nobody knows about it.
And the Gemara’s answer is the hinge of the entire shiur:
Every prophecy that the Holy One, blessed be He, gives to a prophet — all the prophets know that same prophecy.
If G-d gives a prophecy to a certain righteous person, the other prophets know that this person received a prophecy. And because everyone knows he received it, everyone knows he should have spoken and did not. So they can warn him, and they can administer the lashes.
Which raises a further question, and this one the rabbi calls very strong. When the Holy One and the angels came to Abraham to prophesy that Sarah would have a son by this time next year — why did Sarah laugh within herself? That was a prophecy. She knew it was a prophecy. If you also heard the prophecy, you cannot laugh. And we find other places where a prophet prophesied and another prophet did not know: our father Jacob did not know the prophecy given to Isaac that Joseph was alive.
So the sages refine the principle, and here is the distinction that resolves it:
- When the Holy One sends a prophecy through a third party, not everyone must know it.
- When the Holy One Himself gives the prophecy, everyone must know it.
- And others say: a prophecy that concerns the whole of Israel — everyone knows. A prophecy that concerns an individual — not everyone must know.
A prophecy for the collective is public. A prophecy for one person is particular, and need not be disclosed to all.
Why Sarah was greater than Abraham in prophecy
Now the shiur can finally explain our mother Sarah.
Sarah was a very righteous woman. The sages say she was also called Iscah — because they would gaze; she was greater than everyone in the Holy Spirit. And the Holy One says to Abraham: “Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her voice” (Genesis 21:12). Our father Abraham was secondary to Sarah in prophecy. For all of Abraham’s greatness, Sarah gazed further.
This is the fact Sarah herself reasons from.
She cannot find Abraham. He usually tells her where he is going, and suddenly he has gone in an evasive way. She worries; she has very strong feelings in her heart. And she sees into the distance — through the Holy Spirit and through the wisdom she had — the same way she once saw Ishmael, son of the handmaid, playing, and said: “The son of the handmaid shall not inherit with my son; drive out the son of the handmaid.” Sarah had very sharp senses.
So she sends the four giants to the horizon. They look. They see Abraham binding Isaac, putting him on the altar, taking the knife.
Sarah’s argument
And Sarah reasons — and this is the heart of the shiur:
If this were a prophecy from G-d, I am a prophetess too. I should know. Every prophecy G-d gives, all the prophets know. If it were a prophecy to Abraham, I should know it. And if it were a general prophecy — because “through Isaac your seed shall be called” — then I certainly should know, because I am part of it.
There is no way Abraham received a prophecy and I do not know what that prophecy is.
Therefore — and this is the terrible conclusion she reaches — it must not be a prophecy at all. Satan confused him. The evil inclination took hold of him. He is going to slaughter his son the way the nations of that generation used to sacrifice children.
The rabbi pauses on how alien that world was. Today, if you told a person to sacrifice his son, he would say: what? A person would kill the one who told him to slaughter his son. But in that generation people ran with joy to slaughter children. It was idolatry — the worship of Molech and Baal. And Abraham our father fought against it his entire life.
So picture Sarah. Her only son, born after decades of barrenness. Her husband, the man who spent his life destroying child sacrifice, now — as far as she can tell — doing it himself. And no prophecy came to her to say otherwise. Her soul could not accept it.
The good news
Then Abraham binds his son, and the Holy One says: do not lay your hand on the lad, do nothing to him. And now I know that you fear G-d, and you have not withheld your son, your only one.
And Sarah suddenly hears a prophecy.
She hears the rest of it: for in blessing I will bless you, and greatly multiply your seed.
Now she knows two things at once. First: it was a prophecy — G-d spoke, and she heard, exactly as she had insisted she must. Second: Isaac is alive. The words “and greatly multiply your seed” can only be spoken about a living son.
And that is the news.
That was the good news Sarah heard. And upon that news her soul departed — in good tidings. Because for her, it was good news.
For good news, one blesses “He Who is good and does good.” And in the same instant, the blessing of “Blessed is the true Judge” was fulfilled, because her soul left her. The rabbi holds both at once: her death was a judgment, and it arrived on the wings of good tidings. She did not die of despair. She died of relief — of the discovery that everything she feared was never true.
And this is why the four giants had to be named. Those tall and great men who looked at the horizon and brought her that word merited that the city be called Kiryat Arba — the city of the four. Not because they were strong. Because they were the ones who told her.
A teaching on the weight of words
Before moving on, Rabbi Pinto draws one more thing out of this. Everything in the holy Torah uplifts the soul. And there is a further principle: every new insight in Torah gives a person a blessing in something else.
He gives it a practical edge. A person wants to buy a house — if he holds the root of that place in the Torah, he buys it easily. If he has the root, he holds onto it. And when a person does not have this root in the Torah, it is hard for him in everything he does.
Set that beside what happened to Sarah. One sentence from four men at a horizon took her life, and G-d had to send her a prophecy to give it back. Words are not small. The report you carry to someone can kill or revive them.
Isaac, and the level of the soul
The shiur closes by opening the next section of the parashah — and, in the rabbi’s words, in honour of the beloved groom and bride.
Abraham sends Eliezer his servant to bring a bride for Isaac. And to understand why that mission is so heavy, you have to see who Isaac is.
Throughout the Torah we find “Abraham, Abraham” and “Jacob, Jacob.” But never “Isaac, Isaac.” The Vilna Gaon explains the doubling: “Abraham, Abraham” is a power from above and below — heaven and earth calling to each other. “Jacob, Jacob” the same. But Isaac is never doubled, because Isaac is the power of the soul alone. Isaac was on the level of the soul.
He was the highest, the most sacred thing. And Abraham our father goes out to bring a match for him.
What you can take from this shiur
Four things, and they hold together.
1. A flat line is not peace. The Ramban promised that Genesis teaches you the shape of your own life, and the shape is a monitor trace, not a straight edge. If you are going up and down, you are alive and you are being built. If you are not being tested, ask what stopped.
2. The trial is not the verdict. “The L-rd has chastened me sorely, but He has not given me over to death.” Whatever the Holy One sends, He has not handed you over. Within the struggle are great things, and the struggle raises a person to high places.
3. Silence is not proof of abandonment. Sarah’s entire collapse came from one inference: no prophecy reached me, therefore it must be Satan. She was the greatest prophetess of her generation and she still read the absence wrong. The prophecy was already on its way; it simply had not arrived yet.
4. Guard what you carry to other people. Four men stood at a horizon and reported what they saw. That report killed the mother of Israel, and G-d had to speak from heaven to undo it.
Watch the full shiur
The complete Thursday shiur, in English, runs about twenty minutes. Watch it here:
Direct link: https://youtu.be/tjnQnieOsT4
📖 About Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, shlit’a: world-renowned Sephardic rabbi and rosh yeshiva of Shuva Israel, teaching emuna, bitachon and hashgacha pratit.
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🔗 Website: shouvaisrael.com
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