A Blessing in Anguish

The Family Romance of Isaac and Rebecca

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.” (Genesis 27:2)

It is often said that Isaac is a passive character, to whom things happen. Abraham is the founder, Isaac the maintainer. Abraham is charismatic, Isaac is shy. Isaac repeats his father’s story. He goes to Gerar and tells the same lie that his wife is his sister. He re-digs the very wells that were once dug on behalf of his father. Isaac doesn’t find his own wife. Rebecca journeys to Isaac as a result of his Eliezer’s expedition. Why does Abraham not send Isaac directly on his own journey? Is Isaac so incompetent? Is Abraham’s relationship to Isaac so strained after the Akeidah that it requires a servant as middle-man?

Isaac is sandwiched between Abraham and Jacob. Isaac is a sacrifice—the object of Abraham’s test. In his old age, his eyes dim, Isaac is the object of another sleight. Jacob deceives him into blessing him, at least so it seems. And his wife, Rebecca, instigates the con. Isaac prefers Esav to Jacob and so is in apparent error long before his eyesight wanes. Of course, his reasons for loving Esav might have to do with the very fact that Esav expresses all that Isaac is not: an aggressive man, a hunter, an “alpha.” Isaac’s own sensitivity might bias him against Jacob the tent dweller, Jacob the introvert, Jacob the man of thought. Jacob is second born, just as Isaac lived under the shadow of Ishmael. Jacob and Isaac are figures of interiority, not action. The story of Isaac is “Abraham begot Isaac.” Isaac doesn’t even get to do his own begetting.

And yet Isaac does take a stand—he prays for his wife. Unlike Abraham who takes Hagar, and does not think to pray for Sarah, Isaac prays. Isaac is the only patriarch who is committed to one woman. If Jacob and Abraham suffer from rivalry of wives, Isaac is spared. And though he and Rebecca diverge in their preferential love for their children, the fact that Isaac loves Esav and does not kick him out of the house, as Abraham is compelled to do with Ishmael, suggests a comparatively happy home. Having undergone the Akeida and survived, nothing can break Isaac. When it dawns on him that he has been deceived by Jacob, he doesn’t miss a beat. His own stoic reaction contrasts with that of Esav who cries out in anguish, “Bless me, too, father.”

Isaac’s solidity, however, means that he cannot be a protagonist, since change only comes from the anguished and the dissatisfied. His content or lack of explicit discontent contrasts with Rebecca’s defining moment: “But the children struggled in her womb, and she said, “If so, why do I exist?” (Genesis 25:22) Isaac does not ask why he exists. He also doesn’t carry life within himself, let alone the lives of two beings and two civilizations that will clash in perpetuity. Rebecca’s pain leads her to lidrosh et adonai, to inquire of God. Her pain opens up her prophecy where Isaac’s stoicism keeps him in the dark. Rebecca drives.

The Hebrew word lidrosh, to enquire, rings poetically with the rabbinic meaning “to drash” to offer a Midrash, to darshan a text. Read with this association in mind, Rebecca’s pain provides the basis for her ability to interpret and comment her life situation, to treat it as a text and to unlock its insights. She alchemizes her own situation into a universal discovery by offering it up to God: if this is who I am why am I this way? She experiences what Augustine describes in his Confessions as quaestio mihi factus sum— “a question have I become for myself.” Rebecca moves history through her drash and she finds an answer to her enquiry only because she is literally pregnant with contradiction. If we think of Isaac as a preserver of tradition and a passive character this completes a picture in which he is also one who cannot stomach contradiction. He’s had enough conflict for one life. Rivka’s name associatively conjures ribui, multiplication of meanings and riv, rebellion, as in the waters of me-ri-ba. She holds multitudes. Isaac is stable and still, Rebecca is dynamic and turbulent. It’s a powerful model for a relationship forged on the meta-tension between agreeableness and dissent.

No sooner does Isaac pray for Rebecca, then the pain of infertility is transformed into the pain of too much fertility, the pain of lack to the pain of too much. It’s hard not to hear a kind of subtle debate in the scene: Isaac tells Rebecca I’ll pray for you, but be careful what you pray for. We could have peace together here in the tent, but if your prayer is answered you’ll get more than you bargained for—our lives will become very dramatic. Are you ready for that?

Rebecca seeks an explanation for her pain and is told that it is the result of housing two great nations. While the conflict on its surface is between Jacob and Esau, the lesson generalizes: the more you contain, the more complex you are, the more you become an I, an anokhi, and the harder it is to be a self. Complexity individuates. But who will be able to handle Rebecca’s anguish? Not even Isaac. She takes it straight to God because Isaac will never know what it’s like to be her. The psalmist turns to God as an expression of his inability to turn to his fellows? Only God can hear and hold the prayer “from the depths.”

The complexity of the Isaac-Rebecca family suggests a kind of divinity to the diversity, a recapitulation of the story of Babel where disunity is both punishment and blessing. That complexity comes to a head in the ironic re-use of the Akeida language during Isaac’s deathbed scene:

Just as God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac inadvertently tells Esav, his son, to sacrifice himself. By asking him to go and hunt him some game, he sets Esav up to fail as Jacob swoops in to steal his blessing. The scene is ironic in a few ways. First, the Torah draws a parallel between Isaac and God, as the ones who set the trial—except God is missing in the second story. We don’t hear how God feels about any of this directly. We just have multiple points of view. Rebecca and Isaac each have a take. Second, Esav is the wrong son. Isaac gets it wrong. Much like Abraham is told at the last minute not to sacrifice, in the final moment Esav is disallowed from offering his game as a kind of sacrificial gift. Third, Esav’s response Hineini to his father’s request is tragicomic. Is it really such an ordeal to go out and find the food that he is accustomed to doing regularly? Esav is a hunter? His Hineini response is melodromatic, incommensurate on its face with Isaac’s ask. Fourth, perhaps Isaac ventriloquizes God and Esav’s Hineni reverberates as a re-enactment of his own sacrifice once again on Moriah. Isaac will become a sacrifice a second time, this time as a result of his son’s actions. Fourth, Jacob does not say Hineini! When Rebecca tells him to pretend to be his brother, he protests with a technical rebuttal:

“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.” (Genesis 27:11-12)

Jacob doesn’t protest on deontological grounds, but on practical and consequentialist ones. He doesn’t want to get caught and he doubts the efficacy of his mother’s plan. The clever one is rewarded not for humble submission (“yes, dad”), but dialectic of the kind we’d expect in developed jurisprudence (“how much hair is required to successfully pull off the stunt?”). One lesson to draw from this might simply be that Hineini is only appropriate in response to God’s command, never to a human one. Alternatively, it intensifies the pathos of a story in which Esav appears more morally developed than Jacob in some ways, even if he is less cognitively developed. How much does morality depend upon cognition? We know that being smart doesn’t always mean being good—often smarts can be weaponized to terrible effect. Still, it’s doubtful that you get technological and scientific advances with people who just do what they’re told. Esav’s submissiveness to his father contrasts with Jacob’s mini-debate with his mom. The Torah appears to favor the most complex characters. But more than this, it appears to favor the most complex families.

For most of their lives, Isaac and Rebecca fundamentally disagree about who is the favorite son, even though they start off on the same team, with Isaac praying on Rebecca’s behalf for any children, just children at all. The Torah sides with Rebecca and her choice in Jacob, because it sides with complexity and contradiction, but it also sides with Isaac since the story would not have been initiated without Isaac’s love of his wife—he is the first husband in the Torah to love his wife. (Abraham explicitly loves Isaac—”take your son, your only son, the one whom you love, Isaac”—at least we are told indirectly by God, but not his wife.) Ironically, Isaac is presented as a figure of passivity, but his own love for his wife, and his own prayer for her drives history. Perhaps Isaac wants nothing more than to retire into his tent after the Akeidah, but his own love propels him back into the fray. And this, too, is a kind of moral teaching: the hidden anguish Isaac and the overt anguish of Rebecca are needed to advance the cause of spiritual and civilizational progress. What feels like a curse is in fact a blessing. Rebecca knows this. And so we can now hear her rejoinder to Jacob: Your curse, my son, be upon me! (Genesis 27:13) Rebecca accepts the would-be curse because she knows it is in fact a blessing.

On Thanksgiving we acknowledge the obvious blessings in our lives as well as the ones that arise from the complexity, contradiction, and anguish of containing multitudes.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins Etz Hasadeh