"These are the Generations of Rebekah”: Thoughts for Parashat Toldot - Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie

A voice is heard in Ramah: The mothers’ lament. Their sons’ cries.

Rachel weeping for her children.

Sarah’s wail, Hagar’s plea, Leah’s jealousy.

Rebekah question echoes through the generations:

Her eldest son Esau’s bitter scream echoes back from within her womb, a time machine:

Another cry echoes from within - her grandson Reuben’s wailing, he who abandoned his captive brother:

Beyond time and pain, from deep within her, Rebekah wants a different, just solution to the ceaseless struggle between her sons. She knows another way is possible.

Rebekah seeks a better, new story.

A young woman, with a golden nose ring, who knows how to run fast when she needs to, her eyes bright, far from her parents’ home in a land of deserts and wells, lies on her back in her dead mother-in-law’s tent, now her home.

She awakes, in the early hours of dawn, and feels life stirring and kicking within her. at long last. She is excited but also bewildered, and confused.

they wrote about her, later.

Something isn’t right in there, too much movement. Her hands soft on her risen belly: Why? Who and what am I now, as a family grows within me? Why does it hurt so much? And why do we exist?

Rebekah is the great mother.

She carries the first twins in the family’s lineage, her womb the home of two opposites. In pain, she bore two sons, they will later write about her: two nations, the elder and the younger, heir and outcast, blessing and curse.

But in those early hours she does not yet know any of this. She only feels that something is amiss and seeks a blessing and relief from what feels like a looming curse.

She gazes toward the soft hills in the morning light and wants answers. She goes l'drosh -to make meaning of the struggle of her sons. She will seek a solution and demand a response.

Rebekah is the mother of Midrash, the ancient art of talking back to life’s troubling questions. From distress, in the face of contractions and contradictions, confronting the enigma of human existence, she demands a solution to the struggle stirring in her blood, in the human blood that has been crying out from the ground since the very beginning: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Why do I exist?

“And she went to inquire of God.”

Where did she go?

In 19th-century Lithuania, Rabbi Berlin explained, “She went to a great man she knew could see and understand,” possibly Abraham himself. In 17th century Prague, the Kli Yakar interpreted that Rebecca embarked on a spiritual journey, “to inquire what truly is the essence of God.” In 12th Century Spain, Ibn Ezra proposed that she asked other women if they had experienced such pain, inspired perhaps by the 6th Century Midrash of Bereishit Rabbah, which suggests, “Our mother Rebecca went door to door, asking other women, ‘Did this kind of pain ever happen to you?’” In 11th Century Worms, Rashi cited an ancient tradition: “The children were running and quarreling over their inheritance of two worlds… and she went to the study house of Shem.”

The response given to her, according to the written story, came from the Divine: Her womb contained, for the first time, two lives, both wanderers and settlers, and from her would emerge two nations. The elder shall serve the younger. There will be generations of competition, and of cries, and bloodshed; And she will be the mother of it all.

But Rebekah is unsatisfied with the conventional response, the words that later would be written and quoted to justify her son Jacobo’s inheritance.

She seeks a different answer, a second opinion, and an alternative reality, one that favors face-to-face encounters, and blessings big enough to go beyond borders.

Some say: Rebekah sought the advice of women, the voice of wisdom, not only the expertise of the scholars in the study halls. She went to Deborah, the woman who nursed and raised her, and who came with her to Canaan. Deborah, the wise woman, who sat beneath the tree, the Oak of Weeping. The Priestess Deborah would know.

The Torah chose to describe the human experience and the Hebrew story as an eternal, binary, and absolute struggle: between mothers and their wombs, between sons and their fathers. A default of siblings competing for parental love, blessing, and inheritance: Cain or Abel, Isaac or Ishmael, Jacob or Esau, Israel or Amalek.

Yet Deborah told a different future, one unwritten in the books, passed down from mother to daughter in a whisper, as a new Torah that still awaits.

You will be the mother of thousands,

The two in your womb shall be blessed, both together,

Like the stars of the heavens and the sand on the shores of the sea

Through them, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed,

From deep within the fertile earth and the dew of the heaven’s love above,

For life,

In peace.

From Deborah’s mouth came the prophecy of abundance and generous grace, justice and joy, truth and peace.

Rebekah demands a new story with a different ending, one in which the curse does not stem from her or falls upon her, but instead becomes a blessing.

She demands a new Midrash, a new beginning, where all inherit together—all those who are of the seed of Abraham, all the fruit of the wombs will inherit together the promised land, where there is room for all, just like in her womb.

As Rabbi Elhanan taught in 21st Century Jerusalem: “Now we need a new Torah.”

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