Finding Faith: Toldot

Finding Faith

D’var Torah for Parashat Toldot

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Toldot (“accounts” or “genealogy”—Genesis 25:19-28:9) tells the story of the household that Isaac and Rebekah established.  First let it be stated outright that the portrait the Torah paints is of a less-than-functional family. 

Isaac, by most rabbinic thinking, came home psychologically (and possibly theologically) injured from the encounter where he was almost sacrificed to Abraham’s God.   It’s no wonder that he takes to spending his days wandering in the desert, far from the tent he used to call home. 

And even though he loved Rebekah, I’m not sure how he felt about knowing that the marriage was arranged without consideration for any thoughts or opinions he might have had on the subject (even Rebekah was asked; Isaac never was).  Abraham, the father who was willing to sacrifice Isaac on an altar, had simply sent a servant out to get Isaac a wife, a woman Isaac never laid eyes on before, from a place he may have had heard about but that he never even visited.  Isaac could be forgiven for feeling some resentment at being set up this way.

In fact, being set up seemed to follow him as a personal characteristic, some flaw that people must have sensed about him.  For even Rebekah, his beloved wife, would set Isaac up to achieve her goal—Jacob must receive the blessing of the firstborn, even though technically speaking Esau, Jacob’s twin, was born first.

This passivity on Isaac’s part, this willingness to go with the flow, to repress his own feelings and just accept things the way they were presented to him was a flaw Isaac learned to live with.

Yet in Toldot Isaac proves himself more than an instrument in the hands of God and men. Digging deep (allegorically presented in the portion as digging up wells), Isaac finds within himself rich troves of faith and strength.   Inspired and truly moved by God’s spirit, Isaac rises to the occasion several times, in each case proving his mettle and conviction.

The first time is when Rebekah finds it difficult to conceive a child—a condition ascribed in ancient times to divine powers.  Perhaps at her insistence, perhaps unbidden, simply in recognition of her sadness, Isaac prays to God.  God responds to Isaac’s pleas and Rebekah becomes pregnant—with twins no less!

A second time that Isaac gives voice to his inner sense of fairness and justice is when he confronts the king of the Philistines, Abimelech.  Due to a famine, Isaac moves his dwelling to the land of the Philistines, along the southeast coast of the Mediterranean Sea.  He grows wealthy there, arousing jealousy among the local shepherds.  Wells of water originally dug up by Abraham are stopped up, and any new well Isaac tries to dig is immediately filled up by the Philistines.  At first Isaac does not protest; he simply relocates.  Later, however, he stands up to Abimelech and demands reparation of the wrongs done to him.  The king issues the proper orders, and the harassment ends.

Yet again Isaac is called upon to tap his inner core of faith when Jacob passes himself off as his twin, Esau, in order to trick Isaac into granting him the blessing of the firstborn.

Isaac isn’t easily fooled.  He feels his son’s arms (Jacob’s skin is smooth; Esau is hairy).  But Rebekah had dressed Jacob in goatskins so as to trick the blind Isaac.  Pulling the boy close to him, supposedly for a kiss, Isaac smells the boy before him.  Once again, Jacob and Rebekah had succeeded in fooling Isaac:  Jacob exudes the smell of the outdoors, where Esau is usually found.  But when Isaac asks Jacob to identify himself by voice, no further deception is possible.  “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau,” Isaac exclaims.

Yet, overcoming his personal misgivings, Isaac goes ahead and blesses Jacob, passing on to him the blessings first given by God to Abraham and then to Isaac. 

Was he fooled?  Possibly.  And yet at that sublime moment of truth, it’s more than possible that Isaac recognized the validity of what he had to do, despite his own personal preference for Esau.  He saw the hand of Rebekah behind the masquerade, but he knew the rightness of what she expected him to do. 

The final time that Isaac rises to the higher calling is when Esau, understandably caught up in a state of frustration and anger, swears to kill Jacob.  Rebekah, fearful of losing both her children (presumably she realizes that if Esau kills Jacob retribution will not be late in coming), tells Jacob to flee for his life.  She tells him to set out at once for her brother Laban’s house, where he would find shelter until Esau’s anger subsides.

Isaac, however, will not have Jacob—now the bearer of God’s blessing—flee in fear.  Focusing his attention on the boy he knows with certainty to be his son Jacob, Isaac reiterates the blessing he had given him earlier, going even farther to strengthen it with clear intent and purpose:  “May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, so that you may be an assembly of peoples; and may God grant you the blessing of Abraham, to you and your descendants with you, that you may inherit the land in which you are a stranger, the land which God gave to Abraham” (Gen. 23:3-4).

With compassion and understanding, Isaac passes on to Jacob the sorrow along with the joy.  It isn’t going to be easy, he seems to say.  Jacob will be a stranger; he will feel and know first-hand the alienation people sometimes feel even in their own homelands.  Yet Jacob’s future, Isaac assures his son, will be filled with gladness.  Filling Jacob with hope for days yet-to-come, Isaac sends Jacob off to the same household where Rebekah grew up, to the same homeland where Abraham had once lived.  Jacob may be leaving with little more than the clothes on his back, but accompanying him will be God’s blessing, a promise so rich that it will sustain Jacob during the darkest periods of his life, from that moment on and to the end of all time.

It is only now that Isaac allows himself to sink into the darkness that was enveloping him.  He has fulfilled his mission.  He doesn’t know whether he will ever see Jacob again, but he is filled with confidence and faith, and for the time being these will have to suffice him.

© 2013 by Boaz D. Heilman