by puck glass
In the process of receiving a diagnosis, one of my doctors said i should remain active. Taking this quite seriously, my family and i climbed the largest mountain in the state that weekend. i was not as fast as i once was, but i proudly, and painfully, got to the top and made my way back down. When i returned to that same doctor the following week, she asked how i had been staying active. i was all too excited to tell her about my accomplishment. i had climbed an entire mountain! Surely, she would be impressed by my commitment to following medical advice.
She was not impressed.
Apparently, when she said, "Stay active," she did not mean, "Push your body to its absolute physical limit."
i had heard her instruction as a challenge. my body was changing, my abilities were changing, and i was determined to prove that none of that was going to stop me. If anything, i was going to do more than I had done before.
And that mountain was hardly the last time i pushed myself beyond the point of physical or mental comfort, sometimes even beyond the point of safety.
Internalized ableism is a difficult thing to unlearn. There is a voice that insists that i should be able to do everything i once did, that i should be able to do everything everyone else does, and that needing help somehow means i have failed.
i don't want to be seen as less than, inadequate, or incapable. i don't want to accept help, and i certainly don't want to ask for it.
It seems Abarahm took a similar journey to my own in regards to asking and accepting help. Chayei Sarah opens with Abraham engaging in a negotiation with the Hittites over the plot of land in which to bury Sarah. Abraham refuses the generosity of the Hittites several times. He does not want help or hospitality but to deal with the matter in the way he sees fit and proper.
Yet, in our next scene, it appears Abraham has learned something about asking for help. We are told Abraham has aged, and although we don’t know what “old” means, we can imply by the fact that he does not set out on a journey as he once might have, that his physical needs are changing.
Abraham calls upon the senior servant of his household and asks him to find a wife for Isaac in with very particular oath. This is no small errand. The future of Abraham's family, and with it the future of the covenant, depends upon what happens next.
And Abraham is not the one who makes that future happen.
Instead, the servant sets off with ten camels and an abundance of gifts. He travels to another land, devises a way to identify a suitable wife for Isaac, encounters Rebecca at the well, negotiates with her family, and ultimately brings her back to Isaac.
He is not simply carrying out a list of instructions. He exercises judgment, makes decisions, responds to unexpected circumstances, and takes responsibility for the success of his mission.
Meanwhile, Rebecca undertakes an extraordinary amount of physical labor. She draws water not only for the servant but for all ten of his camels. She offers hospitality, makes hasty life-changing decisions, and ultimately agrees to leave her home and travel to a new one.
And Isaac? Isaac is almost entirely absent from the work of arranging his own marriage. His future is being shaped by the actions and decisions of others.
None of the characters in this scene work alone. Abraham needs this unnamed man. Isaac depends on the arrangement of Abraham, the servant, and Rebecca. Rebecca relies on her family and the arrangement and travels of the servant. The entire story is a network of relationships, responsibilities, and acts of care.
Yet there is something particularly striking about the servant at the center of this narrative.
We never learn his name.
In Genesis 24:2, he is introduced as, עַבְדּוֹ זְקַן בֵּיתוֹ הַמֹּשֵׁל בְּכָל־אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ, "His servant, the elder of his household, who ruled over all that he possessed." And when he introduces himself to Rebecca's family, he says simply, עֶבֶד אַבְרָהָם אָנֹכִי, "I am Abraham's servant." His identity, at least as the Torah presents it, is defined by his relationship to someone else.
Of course, we must recognize that this man is enslaved. His service is not simply an act of voluntary generosity, and his lack of a name reflects a profound imbalance of power. We should not romanticize his position or equate enslavement with caregiving. But his anonymity raises an important question about whose work we recognize and whose work we overlook.
The servant is indispensable to the future of Abraham's family. Without his actions, the story cannot unfold as it does. Yet when he returns, he tells Isaac everything he has done, and then the narrative moves on. Isaac brings Rebecca into Sarah's tent. He loves her. He finds comfort after the death of his mother. And the servant disappears from the story.
The future of the covenant continues because of someone whose own story the Torah does not continue telling. There is something deeply familiar about this. We live in a society that celebrates independence. We praise people for being self-sufficient, for accomplishing things on their own, for never needing assistance. We treat dependence as something to be overcome, something embarrassing, or something that diminishes a person's accomplishments. And disabled people are often made to feel this particularly acutely. We are praised when we accomplish something "despite" our disabilities. We are celebrated for overcoming obstacles, pushing through pain, and refusing to let our bodies stop us. Sometimes we even climb mountains to prove that we can.
But Chayei Sarah challenges the very premise that independence is the measure of a successful life. Even Abraham, the patriarch whose faith and leadership we celebrate, cannot secure the future of his family without the work of others. Isaac, who will carry forward the covenant, does not arrive at that future independently. And the servant, despite his subordinate position, is not without agency. He thinks, acts, chooses, and interprets. His relationship to Abraham does not erase his capacity to shape what happens.
Dependence and agency are not opposites.
Needing assistance does not mean surrendering our dignity, our judgment, or our ability to make decisions about our own lives. And perhaps more importantly, dependence is not a condition unique to disabled people. It is a condition of being human. Some forms of dependence are simply easier to see than others.
The difference is often not whether we need help, but whether our need for help is visible. And this is where the unnamed servant of Chayei Sarah offers us another challenge. It is not enough simply to recognize that we all depend on one another. We must also ask whose labor makes our lives possible, whose contributions we take for granted, and whose names we have failed to learn.
For me, it is recognizing the people who continue to show up. They are the friends who gently remind me that i cannot do everything, and that i do not need to. They are the mentors who guide me into relationships with people i come to trust and depend upon. They are the people i turn to, sometimes begrudgingly but always thankfully, when i finally recognize that i need help.
They are not simply people who make up for something i lack. They are people with whom i share a life.
And i hope that i am also someone upon whom they can depend. Because interdependence is not a one-way relationship between those who have something to offer and those who need something. It is the recognition that each of us, with our different bodies, abilities, experiences, and limitations, has both needs and gifts. It does not mean everyone must contribute in the same way, or that our worth depends upon what we can offer in return. It means that needing care and offering care are both ordinary parts of human life.
When i climbed that mountain, i thought i was proving something about my independence. i thought that if i could push myself hard enough, i could demonstrate that my changing body had not changed who i was. But the lesson i needed was never about how far I could push myself.
It was about learning that i did not have to prove my worth through what i could accomplish alone.
Our task is not to pretend that we need no one but to build communities in which needing help is not a source of shame, offering help does not become a source of power over another, and the people whose labor sustains us are neither invisible nor taken for granted.
So, the question is not whether we can climb the mountain on our own but why we ever thought we had to.
puck glass is a co-founder of Makom Shelanu Congregation in Fort Worth Texas and a full-time rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. they love creating interesting and engaging worship spaces, teaching at all levels, and are passionate about social justice issues. puck's rabbinic interests include modern day midrash, the language and rhetoric of disability in the book of Psalms, and translation as a theological tool. puck has a background in music and loves to play both in worship and in their spare time and also loves drinking tea, reading books, and playing with their cat, qatsi.
