Parashat Toledot (Gen 25:19-28:9)

Like father, like … daughter-in-law

My jumping off point this week is going to be what Rebekah says in Gen 25:22.  She’s having a difficult pregnancy, and she exclaims, לָ֥מָּה זֶּ֖ה אָנֹ֑כִי lama zeh anokhi – a difficult phrase that can literally be translated as “why is this I?”  It seems to mean something like, “What's the point of me living if I must suffer like this?”

Rebekah of course is the woman who was brought back from Aram by Abraham’s servant to become Isaac's wife.  You can read the whole story in Genesis 24.  As she is about to find out, she's pregnant with twins, and they are struggling in her womb.

In the context of the story lama zeh anokhi – what's the point? – is just a complaint about how difficult the pregnancy is for her physically.  But I’m going to come back and answer that question from a completely different direction.  To do so, I'm going to take a roundabout path, starting off from our discussion of last week when I compared Abraham to King David because they are both described as “being old, getting along in years.”

As I told you, I was not the first to make that comparison; Jewish tradition itself makes the comparison, since the haftarah, the prophetic reading that goes with last week’s Torah reading, is from the book of Kings, starting with that very first verse, the one that talks about David aging in the same terms used in Genesis for Abraham.

This week, however, I want to make a different comparison, not Abraham and David, but Abraham and the hero of this week's reading (or perhaps hero is not quite the correct word) – Rebekah.  If not precisely the “hero,” she is certainly one of the main characters of this week's reading.

As you remember from last week's episode, when Abraham's servant shows up and says, “I'd like this woman to be the wife for my master's son Isaac,” her brother Laban says, “Take her and go!” (Gen 24:51).  (Interestingly, this is just how Pharaoh dismissed Abram in Gen 12:19 when he discovered that Sarai was Abram’s wife.)  It’s true that Rebekah’s family subsequently balks at sending her off to the wild, wild west.  But when they ask her about it herself, she too essentially says “Take me and go!  I'm ready!  Let's buckle up and head off to the land of Canaan.”

That is the first comparison between Abraham and Rebekah.  Out of the blue, a stranger shows up and invites her to go west to a new land, just as YHWH did to Abram at the beginning of Genesis 12, and she immediately agrees.  Like Abraham again, she not only leaves for Canaan but she leaves her family and her father’s house behind.

Another comparison with Abraham comes at the end of Genesis 27, after the events that we will be talking about momentarily.  (Don’t worry, I have not forgotten that I’ve left Rebekah pregnant with twins.)  Once the boys grow up, Rebekah says to Isaac, “I'm fed up with my life on account of these Hittite women” that your son Esau has married (see Gen 27:46 for her comment and Gen 26:34 for the wedding announcement).  “I don't want Jacob marrying one of these local Hittite women.”

Abraham. too, did not want his son Isaac to marry a local girl.  That is why he sent his servant back to Aram, to fetch a woman who turned out to be Rebekah.  Now she and Isaac agree to send Jacob back to the old homestead in Aram.  Just as Isaac himself got a wife from back home, so too will Jacob.  We understand that these are the birth pangs of the next generation, because what Rebekah says when she fears (or at least pretends to fear) that Jacob too will marry a Hittite woman is essentially the same thing she said when the twins were struggling in her womb:  ‏לָ֥מָּה לִּ֖י חַיִּֽים lama li ḥayyim ‘why do I have life’?  What’s the point?

The bulk of Genesis 27, the long episode we skipped over when we jumped from Esau’s marrying two Hittite women to Rebekah’s complaint about them, is another comparison with Abraham – Rebekah sacrifices her son.  I'm not talking this time about Jacob, but about Esau, who was Rebekah’s son just as much as Jacob.  Yet she pulls the rug out from under him and makes sure the blessing his father (her husband) Isaac intended for him goes to Jacob instead.  In the big picture, the continuation of the Abraham story will go through Jacob (as we know it does).  In the moment, she leaves her other son Esau high and dry.

Just as Abraham was willing to “sacrifice” his older son Ishmael by making sure that his line would continue through his younger son Isaac, Rebekah “sacrifices” her older son Esau by having him cheated of the birthright.  Just as Abraham will essentially end his relationship with his younger son – he and Isaac never interact once Abraham has raised the knife to slaughter him – so Rebekah will essentially end her relationship with her younger son by sending him back to Mesopotamia.

When he returns, after 20 years or so, he will have not merely one wife but two pairs of wives.  That will enable the story to continue its tale of rivalry between two women and bring it to a new level.  Zilpah and Bilhah do not seem to feel the same antagonism that Leah and Rachel do, but Leah and Rachel are simultaneously rival wives and – like Isaac and Ishmael, like Jacob and Esau – rival siblings. 

That unites the two themes that have powered our story since Genesis 16.  Spoiler alert for those who have not yet read on to the end of the book of Genesis:  Isaac’s failure to recognize Jacob (see Gen 27:23) embodies the literary theme of the rest of the book.  Jacob’s failure to recognize Leah will be the point from which the plot snowballs until the rival sons of Jacob are brought down to Egypt, where their descendants, the Israelites, will eventually be enslaved.

In Genesis 15, as you remember Abraham was promised by God – if you consider this a promise rather than a threat – that his descendants would be enslaved in Egypt.  So the answer to Rebekah's question lama zeh anokhi … lama li ḥayyim … what's the point of my life? is to steer events in such a way that God's promise to Abraham during the covenant between the pieces in Genesis 15 will be fulfilled and the Israelites will end up being enslaved in Egypt.

There’s no evident psychological or emotional motivation for Rebekah to betray her son Esau as she does.  It seems that the writer who is telling the story of this family (capitalize the W if you prefer) has designed an engine to power his plot that will continue the story to its inevitable sequel: first the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt, then the exodus from Egypt, and then the meeting with God at Mount Sinai.

We’ll take another look at that storyline and the engine that drives it next week.