On August 5 of this year, the grandparents of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, were brought from a cemetery in Zemun, Serbia, and reburied on Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery in Jerusalem.
The World Zionist Organization described the ceremony as completing the last unfulfilled clause of Herzl’s will, written in 1903, a year before his death. “I wish to be buried in a metal coffin near my father,” he wrote, “and to lie there until the Jewish people will transfer my body to the Land of Israel.” He also asked for several close relatives to be brought with him. Herzl’s body was moved to Jerusalem in 1949, but it took until the summer of 2026 to complete his request.
It is a surprisingly personal request from a man remembered for his sweeping vision of a Jewish national future. Herzl devoted his life to securing the Jewish people’s future in Israel, not his own family’s. Why, then, did he care so much about where his family would be buried?
Abraham shows the same concern in this week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah. God had promised him the whole land of Canaan, yet when his wife Sarah died, he had not yet acquired any of it. When a man named Ephron the Hittite offered him the field and cave of Machpelah—today known as the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron—as a gift, Abraham insisted on paying four hundred shekels of silver for them, providing a burial place for Sarah and, eventually, himself. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reads the purchase as a lesson in how God’s promises work: they come true only when people act on them.
Abraham’s first act of ownership also tells us something about family. Rabbi Yaakov Medan, a leading rabbi in Israel, explains that Abraham “attaches great significance to being buried with his wife and with the generations of his family to come,” because “the family continues even after death and includes not only the living but also the dead.”
For the same reason, as Jacob is dying in Egypt, he asks his sons to bury him in the cave of Machpelah, naming the family already waiting for him: “there Abraham and his wife Sarah were buried; there Isaac and his wife Rebekah were buried; and there I buried Leah.” God’s promise of the land was made to a family that included the dead. The first piece of land Abraham owned would hold generations of his family.
Herzl’s will echoes Jacob’s request: to be buried beside his father and brought back to the land. Few of us will ever need to move a grave, but there are other ways of keeping a family together after death. At the ceremony, Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, described one: “Dreams are not bequeathed in writing. They pass at the Shabbat table, they pass in the living room, they pass in the story a grandfather tells his grandson.”
When Jacob listed who was buried in the cave, he kept his family together by remembering each of them by name. At the Shabbat table, we remember those who came before us and pass their hopes to those who come after. Telling stories about grandparents who are no longer here keeps them part of the family—because a people that knows where it has come from has a better chance of knowing where it is going.
Rabbi Matt Marks is Executive Head of Tribe UK, the youth arm of the United Synagogue, and a PhD researcher specialising in the thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. He lives in Brighton & Hove with his wife and their four daughters, where he also serves as a Strategic Adviser for Jewish Life and works with the UK Jewish Chaplaincy team.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
