Alexander the Great asked the sages of Israel: “What should a person do so that they should die?” They responded, “let him live for no one has ever made it out of this world alive.” “And what should one do in order to live?” They responded: “Let him die in the fulfillment of a value greater than himself. Oddly, our parsha deals with death of Sarah yet is named Chayei Sarah, the Life of Sarah. Why?
Rabbi Noach Weinberg would regular ask his students, what are you living for? Think of what you’d die for and then live for it! The sages say that Sarah passed away when she heard that her son had almost been slaughtered. While Abraham was content with a spirituality which require negating the world as long as it fulfills God’s will (like slaughtering Isaac), Sarah’s focus was to serve God within this world. This came to fruition in the parsha, named ‘The Life of Sarah’ with the marriage of Isaac to Rivka and the purchase of the first plot of Land in Israel. Both these events manifested the need to bring holiness into this world. In the spirit of Sarah, we can ask ourselves, how can we each bring a bit more holiness into our lives and thus bring the world to a more complete state.