(א) בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּ֒שָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסֹק בְּדִבְרֵי תוֹרָה:
Blessed are You, Hashem our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who sanctified us with commandments and commanded us to be engrossed in the words of Torah.
This is the story of Isaac, son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac. Isaac was forty years old when he took to wife Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac pleaded with Hashem on behalf of his wife, because she was barren; and Hashem responded to his plea, and his wife Rebekah conceived. But the children struggled in her womb, and she said, “If so, why do I exist?” She went to inquire of Hashem, and Hashem answered her,
“Two nations are in your womb,
Two separate peoples shall issue from your body;
One people shall be mightier than the other,
And the older shall serve the younger.” When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first one emerged red, like a hairy mantle all over; so they named him Esau. Then his brother emerged, holding on to the heel of Esau; so they named him Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when they were born. When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob was a mild man who stayed in camp. Isaac favored Esau because he had a taste for game;-e but Rebekah favored Jacob.
When Esau was forty years old, he took to wife Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite; and they were a source of bitterness to Isaac and Rebekah.
When Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim to see, he called his older son Esau and said to him, “My son.” He answered, “Here I am.” And he said, “I am old now, and I do not know how soon I may die. Take your gear, your quiver and bow, and go out into the open and hunt me some game. Then prepare a dish for me such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my innermost blessing before I die.” Rebekah had been listening as Isaac spoke to his son Esau. When Esau had gone out into the open to hunt game to bring home, Rebekah said to her son Jacob, “I overheard your father speaking to your brother Esau, saying, ‘Bring me some game and prepare a dish for me to eat, that I may bless you, with Hashem’s approval, before I die.’ Now, my son, listen carefully as I instruct you. Go to the flock and fetch me two choice kids, and I will make of them a dish for your father, such as he likes. Then take it to your father to eat, in order that he may bless you before he dies.” Jacob answered his mother Rebekah, “But my brother Esau is a hairy man and I am smooth-skinned. If my father touches me, I shall appear to him as a trickster and bring upon myself a curse, not a blessing.” But his mother said to him, “Your curse, my son, be upon me! Just do as I say and go fetch them for me.” He got them and brought them to his mother, and his mother prepared a dish such as his father liked. Rebekah then took the best clothes of her older son Esau, which were there in the house, and had her younger son Jacob put them on; and she covered his hands and the hairless part of his neck with the skins of the kids. Then she put in the hands of her son Jacob the dish and the bread that she had prepared.
WE CARRY within us the Great Duality, the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. Like Rebecca, we are pregnant with dilemma, with paradox. Carrying this contradiction can feel so painful that we forget that it is a pregnancy. We forget that we are in the process of birthing. In agony we cry out, “Im Keyn, Lama Zeh Anochi?” (Genesis 25:22, If life is like this… with so much suffering… Why am I?)
IN THE MIDST OF PAIN AND STRUGGLE, the spiritual challenge is to remember to ask the question, “What am I birthing?”
Pain narrows our awareness, disguises itself as the whole of reality, saps our strength and makes us forgetful of the holy process of birth. Our only path to divinity is through our humanity. When pain presents itself we must remember that it is a doorway. The only way is through.
Each contraction brings us closer to new life. The challenge is to remember the promise of life even as we cry out, even if our cries are filled with despair.
Why did Rebecca not go directly to Isaac earlier? Why did she not set out to him the differences between the brothers and who was appropriate to be the designated successor? We sense that Rebecca achieved more equal status than the other matriarchs. The others lived in a polygamous household; Isaac took no other wife. In itself, polygamy fosters a family culture in which even women who may be well treated are intrinsically on a lower rung. Why did she not negotiate as an equal until they came to an agreed choice? Maybe if she had done that years ago, Esau would have come to accept the needed successor and settled peacefully for a different blessing. Maybe Isaac would not have had to be fooled. Maybe years of exile and fear and torn family bonds could have been averted.
The answer is that Rebecca tried in a thousand private conversations and family moments. Part of her conviction that Isaac would come around grew out of those discourses in which she planted the seeds of Isaac’s acceptance of her judgement. Still, Rebecca functioned in a patriarchal society. In that culture, men made the big decisions, and inherited norms such as primogeniture governed. Isaac heard her out—but he did not quite hear her. So Rebecca, like many of the important women in the Bible, worked through the conventions and powers-that-be. As did Miriam and like Abigail and Bat Sheba in David’s time, they maneuvered and whittled and persisted and bowed and got their way without confronting the establishment. They certainly did not try to overthrow it. They even broke through barriers, but they won by being smart, far-sighted, strategic, but never openly confronting the dominant paradigm. And for them, that included the patriarchy. 4
In truth, this is what I see as the covenantal way. The tradition works toward a final goal of equality of human beings regardless of gender, of open conversation and free negotiation between partners. But it is constrained by the existing system in every culture. . .
. . . I believe that, as in every area of social transformation, until the final level is reached, the covenantal way depends for its success on people like Rebecca, who see the better possibilities and put themselves on the line to bring it home, working inside the covenantal system, toward a changed world that is still partly in the future, rather than abandoning it for its imperfections. As our parashah illustrates, there is often a loss or a price paid for accommodation. However, when it works, the covenantal way is the long-way-that-is-the-short-way, because it does not destroy the inherited: it transforms it, bringing in a better world.