In the first aliya of this week's parsha, Sarah Imeinu passes away and Avraham Avinu (Abraham) has the task of arranging for her burial. He buries her in a cave called Ma'arat Hamachpeila in a place called Kiryat Arba, also known as Hevron. When Avraham buys the field, the passuk (verse) (Breishis 23:13 ) uses the verb kach, to take. In a seemingly unrelated part of Torah, the first mishnah in Tractate Kiddushin (2a) says that there are three ways of enacting a valid marriage in Jewish law. One of those ways is called kesef , money, which refers to the transfer of something of value. Nowadays, this is the main way that marriage is done- the groom gives the bride a ring. The Gemara asks- how do we know that money is an appropriate method to create the bond of marriage? The answer is that we derive the law through a gezera shava, a rabbinic tradition where two similar words in the Torah are connected and the laws associated with one parsha can enlighten us about the laws of the other parsha. So the gemara explains: We know that the phrase used by the Torah when it introduces the laws of marriage is ki yikach ish isha , when a man takes a woman (Devarim 22:13 ). And when Avraham bought the [way over-priced] field from Efron, it says nasati kesef hasadeh kach mimeni, I've given the money for the field- take it from me. Since Avraham bought the field with kesef , so too a marriage transpires through a transfer of kesef . But the comparison between a marriage and Avraham Avinu's purchase is somewhat puzzling. Rabbi Eliezer Breitowitz, Rosh Yeshiva of Darchei Torah in Toronto pointed out that both share the theme of a kinyan , an acquisition. Property is an extension of the legal rights and constraints that make things mine. A spouse somehow falls into this category but in a deeper way- a man doesn't buy a wife with a ring, but rather, the marriage ceremony makes the couple two halves of a whole, ishto kgufo . That acquisition of a spouse is more fundamentally "yours" than just about anything else that you might "own"... except for maybe a burial plot! Why is that? Hashem fashioned Adam from dirt- and the midrash explains that He took dirt from all four corners of the world, so that wherever he would one day be buried, the earth should absorb him. Kabbalistically, this teaches us that there is something unique about the place where a body is buried- this place is that body's destiny. (Now we might understand one reason that people want to be buried in Israel). When Avraham Avinu came to Hevron, he saw the inherent spirituality there [perhaps that Adam and Eve were buried there] and he recognized that both he and Sarah would be buried there, and thus he would pay anything for the field. Therefore, since both marriage and burial plots are things that we acquire on a fundamental and personal level, it is logical that the halakhot of each are derived from the use of similar language. In light of this idea, maybe we can understand this from another angle. Instead of focussing on the connection between marriage and buying a burial plot, perhaps we can sharpen the issue to comparing marriage to the event when Avraham Avinu acquired his first purchase in the land of Israel. Just like a husband's destiny is intertwined with his wife's, so too our national destiny is bound to Israel. The purpose of the kinyan in the marriage ceremony is to cement this bond, so too Avraham created an everlasting connection for his descendants through his acquisition of Me'arat Hamachpela. G idon Schneider is Editor of Divrei Azriel
