Adath Jeshurun

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from Can­tor Lipp

My brother owns a large sound and light­ing equip­ment cat­a­log busi­ness. One of the clips he shows his sales staff in train­ing is from the Monty Python film Life of Brian. Brian, a par­ody of the char­ac­ter of Jesus, in flee­ing from Roman sol­diers is try­ing to buy a dis­guise from a ven­dor in the shuk. He asks the price, is told 20 Shekels and just gives it to the mer­chant. The mer­chant objects.

We’re sup­posed to hag­gle! the mer­chant com­plains.
Okay 19, answers Brian.
No, that’s not hag­gling, sneers the sales­man.
Okay 10, answers Brian, look­ing around, wor­ried about the approach­ing sol­diers.
10! And me with a dying grandmother?

Every time Brian gets too close to the merchant’s most recent offer, the sales­man tells him he’s doing it wrong. Every time he doesn’t raise it enough, the mer­chant hag­gles as required by the dance: It cost me 12! he com­plains when Brian, forced to ask for a bet­ter bar­gain asks for 11.

After the death of Sarah, Avra­ham needs to bury her. He asks the Hit­tites of Hevron to sell/give him a bur­ial site for his wife. The word T’nu in Bib­li­cal Hebrew can mean give or sell. They say he can bury her any­where. He asks for Efron son of Tzochar. Efron reit­er­ates that Avra­ham can bury Sarah in his plot for free. Avra­ham says let me pay the full sil­ver price. (Accord­ing to my brother, NO ONE pays list price). Efron offers it for free again after Avra­ham per­sists say­ing: What’s 400 Shekels between friends? Avra­ham hears the price, weighs it out and acquires the land to bury Sarah in the pres­ence of the entire town’s population.

There is a clas­sic rab­binic assump­tion that Efron has cheated Avra­ham. The prob­lem with this assump­tion how­ever, as well stated by our Humash, is that with­out know­ing how large the plot of land or the rel­a­tive value of the shekel circa 1300 BCE we can’t know that. But here’s a clue to the like­li­hood that Abe paid more for the plot than it was worth. After all, bar­gain­ing was not invented by Monty Python. They are mak­ing fun of what is an age old cus­tom of the Lev­ant. It seems likely that Abra­ham paid LIST PRICE for the land, some­thing no one else would have done but it’s not the same thing as being cheated. If you don’t enter the coupon code when you pur­chase online, you don’t get the dis­count. Abra­ham clearly wanted a title that could never be chal­lenged. Not only did he not pay less than it was worth by skill­fully nego­ti­at­ing, he paid MORE than it was worth by NOT nego­ti­at­ing.

Even more astound­ing, Abra­ham sets up an ambigu­ous expec­ta­tion that he wants it to be given to him but when he is offered the spe­cific land he offers FULL price defy­ing that expec­ta­tion. So what could have been a stan­dard nego­ti­a­tion between the own­ers of a land and a val­ued res­i­dent, became a legal trans­ac­tion that would be remem­bered for its won­der: That Hebrew Abra­ham didn’t even hag­gle with us — he just paid Efron full price! Sim­i­larly we read that when Abra­ham greeted 3 strangers in his tent in last week’s parasha, he promised a morsel but deliv­ered a feast. This was a man who wanted to be known for his mythic mag­na­nim­ity, for his humon­gous hospitality.

Just so you know, if you call Full Com­pass Sys­tems to buy some high end tech­ni­cal equip­ment, I’m not sure you’ll have the same kind of bar­gain­ing expe­ri­ence you would have in the shuk in the Old City of Jerusalem. But my brother’s sales team, trained with Life of Brian, is likely to try and engage you in a con­ver­sa­tion to make sure that you get what you need at a price that makes sense. They will, I’m sure, hope to develop a rela­tion­ship with their cus­tomer to make sure their mod­ern day Abra­ham want to come back for more.

The beauty of shab­bat is that we indulge in deep­en­ing rela­tion­ships with­out the neces­sity of a com­mer­cial trans­ac­tion. If the week that has just passed is a time for nego­ti­a­tion: the price of goods, the value of time spent at work, the value of rela­tion­ships pro­fes­sional & per­sonal; then Shab­bat is a price­less time, a time when we give our­selves over to the beauty of 25 hours of ded­i­cat­ing our­selves to good food, good drink, good con­ver­sa­tion, and sig­nif­i­cant rela­tion­ship build­ing with those we love and with God.

It’s not worth hag­gling over.