What Abraham Teaches Us About Fighting Like a Minority
A burial negotiation & the art of survival
Last week I wrote about Zohran Mamdani’s election and what it revealed about where Jews now stand in America. The short version: we need to become a resistance movement that relearns how to fight like a minority.
This week’s Torah portion shows us what that actually looks like.
In Chayei Sarah, Abraham faces the dilemma Jews have carried for thousands of years: how do you protect what matters when you live inside a system built for someone else?
You might have status, wealth, maybe even influence—but none of it guarantees safety. For Jews outside of Israel, that’s not a metaphor. It’s our story across time.
When his beloved wife Sarah dies, Abraham wants to bury her with dignity. The problem is stark: despite God’s promises and despite his own wealth, he owns nothing.
So he turns to the locals, the b’nei Ḥet, to buy a burial plot.
The Torah gives us an entire chapter of negotiation—Abraham asking, the people offering, Abraham insisting, a local man, Ephron finally naming a price.
As a kid, I was taught this was a lesson in menschlechkeit: Ephron speaks generously but acts stingy, so we should be the opposite.
But this year, reading Rabbi Dr. Yoni Grossman’s work on Abraham, I realized the whole story is about something far deeper.
This wasn’t a business transaction. It was a taboo.
The locals keep inviting Abraham to bury Sarah in their family tombs, free of charge. It sounds generous until you realize the subtext: their society didn’t allow selling land to outsiders.
Foreigners could reside there but not belong there. Abraham knows exactly what’s being offered: hospitality without permanence.
He refuses. Abraham wants a deed. He wants recognition. He wants land that cannot be taken back the next day because someone changed their mind.
Ephron finally names an outrageous price—four hundred shekels—and Abraham pays it without flinching.
Because he isn’t trying to get a bargain. He’s trying to break a system that denies him permanence. He is carving out a foothold in a place where outsiders aren’t meant to have one.
Abraham walks away with something radical: the first documented Jewish claim to land in Israel, held not only by divine promise but by legal agreement with his neighbors. It is a minority’s act of self-determination on the world stage.
Look at Abraham’s strategy. He might have been motivated by safety, by an outraged sense of justice (minorities should own land!), by religious obligation (fulfilling God’s promise).
But as a minority, he operated from pure realism. No appeals to goodwill, no expecting them to see things his way. He read the room, played the long game, paid the price.
The lesson: when you’re outside the power structure and shared values don’t exist, only interests matter. Understand them and pursue them strategically.
When I talk about fighting like a minority, some of you might worry that I’ve lost faith in the American promise—the idea that this country could lift us beyond the old patterns of Jewish history, that we could make our case not as a besieged people but as equal citizens appealing to shared moral commitments.
Others might push back in the opposite direction and argue that I’m underestimating the fact that Jews in America still have power, influence, and real allies.
I don’t buy either instinct. I haven’t abandoned the American promise, and we’d be foolish not to acknowledge that American Jews still have reservoirs of goodwill and meaningful leverage.
But we’d also be naïve—dangerously naïve—if we didn’t see how quickly antisemitic forces on both the right and the left are moving from the fringes toward the mainstream. We’d be careless inheritors of Jewish history if we didn’t take that seriously.
Look at what Rod Dreher wrote this week. Dreher is a staunch conservative, a committed Christian, and generally supportive of Israel.
He published a blunt and important post about rising antisemitism among young conservatives.
One line stopped me in its clarity: “Support for Israel has collapsed among the young, and it’s not coming back anytime soon. This is the political reality we have to deal with. We can’t wish it away, or cancel it away.”
He’s right. We might know this intellectually, but too many pro-Israel Jews still aren’t operating with this reality in mind. There’s a deep, understandable nostalgia for the old shared assumptions.
But what if that world is not coming back anytime soon? If the consensus is gone, we can’t keep acting like it still exists. And if it doesn’t exist, then we have to do politics differently—not louder, but smarter.
This doesn’t mean abandoning moral arguments. It means recognizing their limits. Values only move societies when they expose a hypocrisy the majority actually cares about or when they align with interests people already hold.
So what am I actually advocating?
Spend less time performing outrage for our own side and more time building coalitions rooted in shared interests. In New York City, for example, that means building a coalition opposing the virulent ideology of the DSA while taking seriously the affordability concerns that shaped this last election.
Build political environments where antisemitic candidates are far less likely to gain traction at all. Support reforms that reward moderation—like ranked-choice voting in general elections instead of primaries—because when you can’t rely on a broad moral consensus, you change the incentives that allow extremists to win.
None of this requires abandoning our commitment to our values, for ourselves or for society at large. It requires clarity about when we’re operating from strength and when we’re operating from vulnerability.
Above all, it requires a shift in mindset: stop confusing values with strategy. Keep our ideals—but don’t confuse them with a plan. Values explain why we fight. Interests and strategy determine whether we win.
Abraham understood this. He overpaid, swallowed his pride, and navigated a system that wasn’t built for him. He walked away with land, legacy, continuity.
Minorities survive by seeing the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. The era of assuming value alignment is over. What comes next requires wielding our ideals with strategy rather than sentiment.
Survival isn’t awarded for righteousness. It’s a discipline.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
🕯️This past week marked the yahrzeit of two people who shaped me in profound ways: my beloved grandmother, Abuela Nory — Oro Nory bat Esther z”l — and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, Harav Yaakov Zvi ben David Arieh.🕯️
My abuela taught me so much of what I know about being a Jew, what it means to live with ne’emanut — faithfulness to our tradition and our people — and what real love looks like ❤️. I wrote briefly about her influence in this Sources article.
Rabbi Sacks also transformed my life. Having the privilege to learn from him personally during his years downtown was a life-changing gift, and it continues to guide my path.
Here is one reflection I wrote for The Times of Israel in his memory:
May their memories be a blessing.
The Dvar Torah is wonderful
The essay dedicated to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l touched me deeply.
When I discovered his Torah- a new light switched on for me
You Mijal Bitton have the same gift .
We are blessed to have you on our team- as a team leader
שבת שלום ומבורך
I share with your readers another Dvar Torah on this week’s Parasha by a special Jewess I follow on X
@LiquidFaerie
Shabbat Shalom
The strangest thing about this week’s Torah portion is its name. חיי שרה Chayei Sarah “The Life of Sarah” it doesn’t open with birth but with death. The first words we hear are that she has died in Kiryat Arba, (Hebron). The matriarch’s biography begins at her funeral. 2 years after the deadliest day in Israel’s history, that paradox feels less like literary irony & more like lived memory. We, too, are trying to speak of life while still arranging the graves.
Abraham’s first act after Sarah dies is to secure a burial place in the Land of Israel. He will not leave her in foreign soil. Standing before the sons of Heth, he insists on buying the Cave of Machpelah at full price, in broad daylight, with witnesses. The Torah records the transaction in painstaking legal detail, as if to say: this is not conquest, this is not theft; this is ownership etched into history. Every November, when we read these verses, the city of Hebron is still on the front page, still contested, still bleeding, still the place where the Jewish people first said, “Here we stay, and here we bury our dead.”
The deed from 3,800 years ago is read aloud in synagogues while soldiers patrol the very same streets, and the echo is deafening.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been gripped by the same urgency Abraham felt. Recovering bodies, sometimes fragments, from Gaza tunnels has become a sacred national obsession. Hostages’ families wait in a limbo that feels older than scripture. When the IDF announced in January 2025 that it had brought home the remains of Youssef and Hamza Ziadna, Bedouin victims murdered in captivity, the entire country understood Abraham’s tears.
We know what it is to weep, to negotiate, to insist on bringing our dead home for Jewish (or Israeli) burial, no matter the cost.
Yet the parasha does not linger at the grave. Immediately after the funeral arrangements comes the longest single narrative in the entire book of Genesis: the quest to find a wife for Isaac. From burial to bride in a single breath. Abraham, still dusty from the cemetery, turns to the future. “You shall not take my son back to Haran,” he warns the servant. Under no circumstances is the next generation to leave the Land.
After October 7, hundreds of thousands of Israelis with foreign passports received frantic calls from relatives abroad: Come home, come now, it’s safer in London, Toronto, Berlin. The answer, almost without exception, was Abraham’s answer: we do not go back. The future stays here.
And the future is being born. Israel’s wedding halls have never been busier. Young couples who danced at the Nova festival, or who lost friends there, are marrying earlier and having children faster than any demographer predicted.
They speak openly of “hope babies” and even “revenge babies,” as if the parasha itself were unfolding in real time: bury the matriarch, then find Rebecca, then fill the tents with children’s laughter. Death tried to have the last word on October 7; the Jewish people are answering with cribs and kindergartens.
The parasha closes with Ishmael and Isaac, estranged for decades, burying their father Abraham in the cave he purchased. The descendants of Isaac & the descendants of Ishmael share the same small plot of earth in silence and in grief.
After October 7, images of such fraternity appeared: Druze and Bedouin mourning with Jews, Muslims in Rahat flying Israeli flags, shared tears at military cemeteries. Somewhere beneath the rage and the politics, the Torah whispers that the two brothers will stand together again at that tomb.
Chayei Sarah refuses to be a portion about death. It is a portion about what a Jew does when death comes knocking: we secure a grave in our own land, we refuse exile, we marry, we give birth, and we dare to believe that one day the children of Isaac and Ishmael will lower their father into the earth side by side.
That is not escapism. That is the life of Sarah,then, now, and, with G-d’s help, always.