Parshas Chayei Sarah 5786 "And the field of Efron was established" - Being a king over the world

00:00 I once heard a story at a farbrengen from the well-known chossid and mashpia, Reb Yoel Kahn. He said he was in touch with one of the Rebbe’s shluchim. The Rebbe sends shluchim out into the world, to Chabad Houses. They go to places far from their hometowns and work there on matters of Yiddishkeit. Everything a shliach does serves one goal: to build Jewish life in that place. Reb Yoel said he was this shliach’s mashpia, and the shliach would come from time to time to speak with him about his affairs and his shlichus. Reb Yoel told him he had to study Chassidus every day. The shliach was very busy with his shlichus; he had work to do and needed to succeed, and he had many things to attend to. But Reb Yoel said that a shliach of the Rebbe must find time to study Chassidus every day, and insisted that he set a regular time for it. So the shliach took it upon himself, and so on. Some time passed, Reb Yoel related, and when the shliach returned, he asked him, “Tell me, what’s happening? How is it going?” Reb Yoel asked him, “Tell me, how is your daily study of Chassidus going?” The shliach answered, “I’ll tell you the truth. I can’t say I study Chassidus every day. But I

01:32 can tell you the difference between a day when I studied Chassidus and a day when I didn’t.” He explained: “As a shliach in this place, I have things I need to arrange. Sometimes I have to go to a Jew and ask him a favor, to help complete a minyan. Other times I have to go to an official here, someone in a government or municipal office, or the like. I have to request all sorts of permits and ask for all sorts of things. If, for example, I want to put up a menorah on the street, in a public place, as the Rebbe wanted, I need a permit to do it. I have to obtain all those permits and approvals. I have to go through all sorts of offices, deal with all sorts of people, and navigate all the bureaucracy.” The shliach said: “On a day when I studied Chassidus—when I got up early in the morning and studied Chassidus, even a little; when I learned about Hakadosh Boruch Hu, learned that the world belongs to Him, learned about the oneness of Hashem, learned Chassidus—on that day, when I go to an office and need to meet someone, an important person, a minister, a judge, a governor, whoever it may be, I have a feeling, a certainty: I

02:55 am in charge here, in this city. He is actually working for me. Rashi says in Chumash, ‘For the sake of the Torah and for the sake of the Jewish people.’ The whole world was created for the Jewish people. The whole world is here for me. I am here as the Rebbe’s man; I am the shliach. I came here to illuminate the world and bring Hashem’s name to this place. So I am in charge here. And this whole undertaking, all this activity, everything happening here—it is all for me, so that I can fulfill my shlichus. Everyone works for me. I am in charge here. When I approach things this way, with this attitude, with this pride, every door opens. I don’t say this to them, but inside I have that pride. And with that pride I can transform the world. On a day when I don’t study Chassidus,” he said, “this does not shine for me; it does not glow within me. I look at the situation as it appears: he is an important man, a minister, an actual government minister, an influential figure. He has the money, and I have to plead with him, bow before him, and persuade him—perhaps he’ll have pity on me. My approach becomes that I need to get through to each person. And then the whole thing looks completely different.” That is the point; that is the feeling that [unclear].

04:17 Chassidus. And we can understand that this is what a shliach is. A shliach—“a person’s agent is like himself”—goes with the power of the one who sent him. By being connected, by studying the Torah and Chassidus of the one who sent him, he has the right approach: when he arrives in a place, he is in charge of that place. In the weekly parsha, we find a verse that relates to this, in Avraham Avinu’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah. Throughout Avraham Avinu’s negotiations over the Cave of Machpelah, the Torah relates that Sarah Imeinu passed away. Avraham Avinu looks for a place to bury Sarah, and he goes to the children of Cheis and asks, “Give me a burial property.” He asks them whether he can find a place there to bury his wife, Sarah. And a whole negotiation begins. In the end, Avraham Avinu pays Ephron the full price. Then the verse says, “And the field of Ephron rose.” What does “the field of Ephron rose” mean? “And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, before Mamre, rose—the field and the cave within it, and every tree in the field.” Rashi comes and says that “the field of Ephron rose” means: “It experienced an elevation, for it passed from the hands of a commoner into the hands of a king.” In other words, “rose” here does not simply mean that ownership of the field passed from one person to another. It says “rose” because this was no ordinary acquisition. It was an elevation, a raising up. The field passed from one category into another; it was brought to an entirely different standing, to...

06:10 a higher world, here in physical reality. It had been in the hands of a commoner and came into the hands of a king. And here Rashi says that the plain meaning is that “rose” is a term for acquisition, and we have already found this kind of term for acquisition in the Torah. It means, quite simply, that Avraham acquired this entire property, the whole thing. What is the point here? What troubles Rashi so much that he wants to interpret “rose” as “it experienced an elevation”? This is what Rashi wants to emphasize. Seemingly, the entire verse is unnecessary. There was no need to write all this at such length. We were already told that Avraham Avinu paid, that they gave him the place, and that it became his. A single word would have sufficed. Yet the Torah gives us a whole verse: “And the field of Ephron rose, the cave and the field and every tree.” What does the Torah want to tell us with this verse? Rashi answers that the Torah wants to tell us what happened here through the acquisition of the Cave of Machpelah. The Cave of Machpelah was Avraham’s first acquisition in Eretz Yisroel. Avraham Avinu wants to bury his wife Sarah. Sarah Imeinu is the root of the Jewish people, the mother of the Jewish people. Avraham also had Yishmael, but Sarah had only Yitzchak. And of Yitzchak it says, “For through Yitzchak shall your descendants be called”—“through Yitzchak,” but not all of Yitzchak; that is, Yaakov. In other words, a new reality begins here. Sarah belongs entirely to the Jewish people. When Avraham Avinu wants to buy Ephron’s field, he wants to acquire it in a way that it will belong entirely to the Jewish people,

07:46 with no connection remaining to what it had been before. That is why Avraham Avinu stands here as a king. In the laws of acquisition, the nature of a king’s acquisition, as explained in the Rambam’s laws, is not the same as an ordinary person’s acquisition. When a king acquires something, he completely removes the previous owner’s ownership. In an ordinary sale there are two people, a seller and a buyer. The acquisition is effected by both of them: the seller’s intent and the buyer’s intent. There are forms of acquisition in which the seller’s intent is more central, and others in which the buyer’s intent is more central; there is no need to delve into that now. What is the nature of each form of acquisition—acquisition through payment, through a document, through taking possession, and all the others? But there is always a combination of the giver’s intent and the seller’s intent, the seller’s intent and the buyer’s intent. That is how the acquisition takes effect. Consequently, even after the seller hands over the item, some connection of his to it still remains. Avraham Avinu wanted this property, which had been in the hands of a non-Jew, to pass from non-Jewish ownership into the possession of Avraham and Sarah in a way that would sever that connection completely, so that it would not have the status of an ordinary private acquisition at all. That is the nature of a king’s acquisition. There is also a particular force to it. Avraham was not a king. He was “a prince of G-d among us,” an important man. But compared with a king, even that is considered a commoner. This is not an ordinary acquisition between seller and buyer. Compared with Avraham, Ephron is a commoner.

09:30 And when Avraham takes possession of the cave, he acquires it in the manner of a king. For that is what characterizes a king: “It rose in status for him.” The property is elevated; it passes into another domain. That’s it—it no longer has any connection to a private individual. The king is the master of the place, its sole master. And that is what Avraham wanted: for the way he acquired Chevron to establish a connection to Eretz Yisroel that left no trace of any previous private ownership. This also explains why Avraham Avinu paid the full price. An ordinary acquisition can be made with a single coin, or something worth a coin, and so on. But Avraham Avinu wanted to pay the full price specifically, so the seller would have no grounds to claim, “I did you a favor; I gave it to you,” [unclear]. That is one aspect of the acquisition. But there is something deeper here: not just an acquisition, not just a buyer’s ownership. This is a king’s acquisition. And a king, [unclear], removes it from the private owner’s domain, because he is the sole master of the place. That is the nature and extent of our ownership of Eretz Yisroel. The Jewish people’s ownership of Eretz Yisroel is like a king’s ownership. It has no connection to anyone else. And what is the point the verse is making? That even before Sarah was buried, it had already “risen.” It “rose” while it was still Ephron’s field. She had not yet been buried; only afterward does the verse say, “And after this.”

11:13 “Avraham buried Sarah his wife.” That is what it says later. The acquisition had already taken place before the “And after this.” The moment Avraham handed over the money for the place, it became a burial property; it had already risen to a new status. It had entered a state in which the private individual no longer had any connection to it whatsoever. And this is an eternal lesson for every Jew, wherever in the world he may be: this is our task in the physical world. The Jew is the king. “All Jews are the children of kings,” as the Gemara says. Rabbi Yishmael, Rabbi Akiva, and others, [unclear]—the Tannaim say, “All Jews are the children of kings.” And Tikkunei Zohar says, “All Jews are kings.” This is not a kingship that already exists [unclear]. The Jew is the king. The Jew is king in this world [unclear]. The Jew is the master here. Hakadosh Boruch Hu entrusted the world to the Jewish people so they would live in it and make the entire world into Eretz Yisroel, as the Tzemach Tzedek said. When a Jew fulfills his mission, when he arrives at a particular place in the world, he is the king of that land, because he is a shliach sent to carry out Hashem’s word. He comes and illuminates the place, sanctifies it, and brings the holiness of Hakadosh Boruch Hu into the world. And in this way, the entire world—with all its people, all its things and all its affairs, everything that happens in it—is given over entirely to that person. He is its sole master, and he makes the world a place that is a dwelling for Hashem, a holy place, Eretz Yisroel, a world for Hakadosh Boruch Hu.

12:51 And that is what the entire parsha tells us. [unclear] This is the mission of Jews in the world: Hakadosh Boruch Hu gives every Jew the mission of making the world a dwelling for Him. Every Jew, the Alter Rebbe says in Likkutei Torah, as [unclear], every Jew is a shliach. And “a person’s agent is like the person himself”—the Jew is, as it were, like Hakadosh Boruch Hu Himself. Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave us souls that are “an actual part of G-d above.” And when a Jew acts in the world, wherever he goes and wherever he stands, he must remember that we are children of kings. When he enters the world, he is the king. What does it mean that he is the king? That he has the ability to change the world and make it a place for Hashem, a dwelling for Him, a holy place—through observing mitzvos, through serving Hashem in all that he does: “Let all your deeds be for the sake of Heaven”; “Know Him in all your ways.” He must make that place a place for Hakadosh Boruch Hu, so that the world becomes a G-dly world, a holy world, a world in which Hakadosh Boruch Hu is present—“the place that Hashem will choose,” and there, “the place where Hashem will dwell.” And that is our purpose in the world. And when we carry out today every aspect of [unclear], we transform the world and make it a G-dly world, a holy world, so that the entire world becomes one great Eretz Yisroel—“Eretz Yisroel is destined to spread throughout all lands”—and the entire world becomes a dwelling for Him: “And Hashem shall be”

14:15 “King over all the earth; on that day Hashem shall be One and His name One.” Amen, may it be His will.