Chaye Sarah
The life of Sarah begins with her death. And from death, new life begins.
Eliezer – Abraham’s servant – was sent to find a wife for a now ageing Yitz. Yitz is alone. He is alone like the silence around him. He is bereft of a father he can trust, and with her death, he is now bereft of his mother. And, increasingly, with his sight diminishing, Yitzhak has a smaller and smaller mah, a perimeter beyond which he does not let himself step. He is alone.
He is lonely in his emptiness. He only leaves his rough flap of a make-shift tent to wander into the fields at even time. He stands in the late drooping light, listening to birds sing their praises of light and of worms, and he feels the meadow grasses brushing against him softly, the only touch he can abide.
He silently yearns for something – someone – perhaps the nameless One? Not yet. He is still burning with betrayal, even as he knows somewhere in his being that his father Abraham was just trying to meet some testy demand of the One. Whenever he drifts towards that last journey with his father, all Yitz can think of are words like appeasement, malicious, betrayal in a rushing thicket of words that hobble his mind. The grasses stroke against him quietly, and then a teasle thorn caught against his miel, his tunic and the loosened miel slipped back from his shoulders. As he first held, then readjusted the tangle of rough wool in his hands, he stopped. He listened. He looked up. Yes, there, in the distance. He hears a caravan approaching, but who is drawing near? He tightens his miel closer against the chilling air, and waits, standing, frozen in his fear of other. The air is quiet now. Still.
All he can feel is the plodding gait of the camels, the g’malim – and he thinks back to that other walk, uphill, the branches for the offering strapped to his back. He feels their weight, their hard dry shove against his backbone, his insistent question, his not-yet-dread beginning to calcify those same bones. His questions deflected, he continued to walk. And now, he stands very still, barely touching the sprouting grasses that surround him. The light is dimmer, the camels approach.
He knows within those same bones – how does his know this? – he knows this approaching caravan will change his life-course. He can feel again a pin-prick of a question defiantly opening what had been battened down. He felt that question that moves us all from the ground we once knew to the ground we know not yet, almost bypassing present time and space. Yitzhak wants to avert his eyes – he wants to look away, he wants to step out of this magnetic field that surrounds him, weaving its web tighter and tighter around his feet, so that he cannot step away or closer. He is held by a grip tighter than the hands of his father. He peers into vagueness.
A figure reaches up against the gloaming sky and adjusts what was light into darkness – all he can see is movement, this figure slipping to the ground, near but far, close but distant. He is cold. He cannot move. The figure approaches. Her eyes search his own and she holds his question, and then they both weep with tears of recognition. They begin to stroll through the grasses, their hands stopping occasionally to caress the golden plump seed heads, and too soon they reach the pounded ground outside her tent, the ohel that held the life of his beloved mother, Sarah. Tired canvas sags against the poles, fraying carpets less a welcome than a warning, the entrance laced tightly against the winds.
Slowly, Yitz worries the knots and then unties the laces. He tugs against the ropes pulling them taut, tightening each knot securely to each tent peg. He opens the tent-flap and invites these eyes to enter. He feels his muscles, his ligaments, his bones begin to dissolve into a light familiar, a light that seems to defy the now-night time darkness. יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חשֶׁךְhis father used to say as they walked that walk. Light and darkness are One, he used to say, as fractals of light fractured windows from the darkness of night.
Yitz turned, and faced her eyes again, and he saw that her veil was now unhooked, her layers of shawls loosened. Ani Rivkah, she whispered. I have come, he’neini. And she took her palms and rested them against his brow. Then slowly, sliding down the planes of his loneliness, her hands came to rest, strongly, against his heart. Ani Yitzhak, he whispered into the retreating silence.
In that moment, as golden light filtered into this tent of his mother, his heart cracked. He almost keeled over. He couldn’t breathe. His knees buckled and then her hands caught his arms and she held him. Her strength held him and all the fear in his bones flowed into and through her hands and he looked up into her face. And through her eyes he saw he was whole, a seam of love glinting along his jagged edges, mending what once was broken. Ani Yitzhak.
And it was evening, and it was morning, the first day.
Last week I noted that there is a Midrashic tradition that Torah existed before Torah (as we know it). In Midrash Bereshit Rabbah we see an elucidation of this idea. Referencing Mashal, or the Book of Proverbs, our Sages discuss how Wisdom existed before Creation. “The Lord made me as the beginning of His way, the first of His works of old” [Prov. 8:22]. Our Rabbis loved back-dating – “the older, the better”, and this pre-history certainly grounds that maxim.
With the opening of Lech Lecha, I realize again how difficult it is to go beyond these two not-so-simple words. Go. Go where? What constitutes a journey, especially in our minds? How do we hear the voice of God: Commanding as in the domain of the Leviathan, or insistent as a mosquito? And how do we understand Lech lecha in the context of understanding the mitzvah of circumcision, brit milah?
Toldot: Deception – or love?
November 4, 2018 by Rabbi Lynn Greenhough • From the Rabbi's Desk Tags: toldot •
But what is even more? And from whose vantage point – that of the father or the son? The Sefat Emet, taught from his grandfather, “Everywhere there is a hidden point of God. We only have to remove the external covering in order to reveal that innermost point, which is called a “well of living waters.” What did the father need to uncover in himself to reach out and love that inner well of his son?
Toldot is a story of such a dilemma. Our text polarizes the natures of two twin brothers. Esau, the elder, is an am ha’aretz, a simple man, a hunter, a ruddy-faced outdoorsman. He is emotional and hearty, but, as commentators note, not a scholar. His brother Ya’akov however, is understood to be a scholar of Torah, one who stayed in tents to learn. We see in Rashi that our Sages say that he went to the Yeshiva of Shem and Ever, where he studied for 14 years. Eventually, one brother wins, one brother loses. Love and deception are at the core of this story.
We will see, to paraphrase Rashi again, that deception begets deception. Ya’akov will find this out when he finally weds and beds his beloved Rachel, only to find the not-so-beguiling Leah lying in his bed. As we learned last week, kinyan (acquisition in marriage) is kinyan by any other name. We can certainly hear by the shock in his voice, that Ya’kov has indeed consummated this marriage. Sex trumps deception; and, as Leah wryly notes, comeuppance was Ya’akov’s due.
But is Toldot really a story of deception, of what will be eventual retribution? Or is Toldot more a story of listening to God, and following through, even as one son will clearly be hurt, enraged and walk away? God spoke to, and provided very clear instructions to Rivka, about who should serve the other. Rivka’s interventions – which were considerable, and made over the somewhat querulous concerns voiced by her son Yaa’kov – were entirely in order with the prophetic instructions she heard from God while she was still pregnant.
Over the years I have given much thought to this sidra, especially to the nature of Yitzhak. In this sidra Yitzhak is now the father. What did he see? What did he know? Was he deceived – or was he a deceiver himself? When does deceit merge with the demands of love? When does love conflict with the demands of God?
As Sefat Emet taught, sometimes what is hidden, holds truth. Yitzhak is at his most enigmatic in this sidra. He reaches into his innermost truth, and while externally he feels the rough, smelly, hides of goat, we know he knows we know. There is cosmic laughter at this point, reflecting the very core of his being. Yitzhak is a man who has held goats in his arms. In touching his son Ya’akov, I think Yitzhak is uncovering his son, finding his own pintele Yid, that inner well of God’s Presence.
Last week I spoke about how Yitzhak found healing through the redemptive quality of his love for Rivka. This week I suggest that love was the primary emotional verb in Yitzhak’s tent – and not deception. Toldot is about tough love.
Toldot is acted out to afford the players a stage to actualize God’s command. The first born must be supplanted, even as he was also beloved. Rivka and Yitzhak needed a strategy to allow them as parents to bank their love in a trust fund, an account that reached to a future beyond that of their sons. Their future was the future of the people Israel – a people barely conceived of at this point – and that future covenant was at stake with the granting of the Blessing.
In this sidra we sit at a crossroads – pagans to the left, Israel to the right. Yitzhak may have had diminished sight but I believe he could see well beyond any immediate physical limitation. Even as Yitzhak became increasingly tent-bound, he understood and loved both of his boys, and he knew what he must do. He also knew from his earliest years he must stay in the Land. Unlike his father, unlike his son, he stayed. Perhaps Yitzhak knew, even then, that possession was 9/10 of the law. And so, he stayed. In that staying he gave us our future. The ohel, the tent, that once filled with love’s light became a light that enabled both Rivka and Yitzhak to see how to make hard decisions – the hardest decision – choosing one son over another. One son only would carry the Blessing, the Covenant forward.
Before my father died, he chose me from his four living children, to be his executrix. After his death, there was some degree of contention that came from one of my siblings, and in support of my decision in the matter, my youngest brother turned to me and said, “You have all the power.” He said that with love.
Blessing, Covenant is power. Let us never underestimate the power of this Blessing. This Blessing is our heritage, our obligation to pass forward. In the words of my beloved father’s favourite song, “I once was lost, but now am found, T’was blind but now I see.”
Rivka heard and Yitzhak saw. They did what needed to be done.