A Lily Among Thorns
Rebecca's Choice to Be Great
Come and behold, When the evil inclination was in this world, it was called Lot. In the World to Come, it will be partly canceled and called Laban, for it is not as corrupt as before, but as one who washed the filth off of himself. Why is there need for it? Rabbi Shimon said, It is needed for being fruitful and multiplying. If there is no evil inclination, nothing is fruitful or multiplies. (Zohar 130:b)
And they called Rebekah, and said unto her: ‘Will you go with this man?’ And she said: ‘I will go.’ (Genesis 24:58)
Jewish tradition portrays Rebecca, Isaac’s wife, as a “lily among the thorns.” She is not just a person of rare character; she is a person whose goodness stands out in a rotten world. Rebecca is the daughter of Bethuel and the sister of Laban. Laban will eventually grow up to be a manipulator who holds Jacob hostage for 14 years. Rebecca is related by blood to Isaac, but blood relations alone guarantee little. Given her family of origin, it’s a miracle that she exists.
Abraham is too old to find a wife for his son and so sends his servant, Eliezer, on a mission. Why does Isaac not go himself? Did Abraham’s father, Terach, find Abraham a wife? The entire episode is strange; Isaac, who has just averted being sacrificed, is a passive character. Meanwhile, the protagonists in the story are Eliezer and Rebecca, with Rebecca playing the star role.
The Torah’s language turns Rebecca into a kind of Abrahamic character, so that her journey parallels his; just as Abraham leaves his land to a place that will reveal itself, so, too, does Rebecca undertake a dramatic journey to a foreign land and unknown fate. The strength of her character serves as a further foil for Issac’s passivity, as if it is really Rebecca who continues the characterological lineage initiated by Abraham, not his son. Rebecca is the successor; Isaac merits to enter the succession through marriage. For an ancient text, the reversal of traditional gender roles strikes as remarkably modern.
The literary parallels between Abraham and Rebecca make for some fascinating theological insight. In Abraham’s quest, the commanding voice is God’s. In Rebecca’s, the messenger is Eliezer, a person of low social status. Eliezer announces himself as an “eved” (servant or slave) of Abraham. It is hard to argue with the voice of God. But Rebecca’s decision to go with Eliezer involves an even greater sense of prophetic power and faith—the ability to discern in the mundane a sign of something more.
God’s call to Abraham requires faith in God, but Eliezer’s call to Rebecca requires faith in faith.
The Torah offers us different models of prophecy throughout. Jeremiah is a prophet appointed in the womb; he is a prophet who has no choice but to be one. Isaiah, by contrast, is a prophet who volunteers to become one, and in so doing, proves himself. Some have greatness thrust upon them, while others, as it were, choose to be great. Abraham makes a choice to listen to God’s voice, but the appearance of the voice itself presents him with little option. Abraham is closer to a Jeremiah. Rebecca, by contrast, elects to go on a journey not because she is commanded, but because she intuits the divinity in the adventure. She is closer to an Isaiah.
In the Zoharic imaginary, in which characters are allegories for psycho-spiritual forces, Laban, Rebecca’s brother, represents the evil urge, but the evil urge insofar as it can be defeated. How so? Ultimately, Lavan tries to stop Rebecca from leaving. Lavan using the trick that is to become his leitmotif, the delay tactic. Come and stay, come and enjoy yourself. What’s the rush? Lavan is the voice that says, “Not today, maybe tomorrow.” Rebecca is not fooled by this voice. Hers is the power to overcome procrasination.
And yet Lavan—whose name means “white”—gets associated with an evil inclination that is polished, that is cleaned, that is rendered useful. It’s not that Rebecca is great in spite of her adversity, but in some way—according to the Zohar—her greatness derives from it. The thorns produce the lily, the evil inclination produces the urge to overcome it; the lack produces the longing. Rebecca’s deprivation motivates her to become a pioneer. Whether to follow God or to follow the echo of a divine voice the world cannot be good enough. Rebecca’s agitation enables her to cultivate a thesis through negation. Can this really be it? No. If awe of God is the beginning of wisdom, restlessness with the world is the beginning of awe.
The pairing of Abraham and Rebecca recurs thorughout Jewish history. The first set of tablets are given to us by God, while the second set are composed by Moses. The covenant is said to have begun when God lifted the mountain over the heads of the people and threatened them with death, while it was only ratified later, in the time of Purim, when the people “established and accepted it upon themselves.” Abraham, the first set of tablets, and the mountain over our head, are figures of origination, figures in which consent has not yet entered the picture. Rebecca, the second set of tablets, and Purim, are figures of choice, figures of agency, figures of modernity.
In his Intellectual History of Liberalism, Pierre Manent makes the bold claim that liberalism is not about individual rights, reason, autonomy, or even secularism (all common claims). Rather, liberalism is unique in that it’s an attempt to shape politics in accordance with principled ideas. The ancients philosophized, but they did not seek to philosophize their way to political life; on the contrary, they took political life for granted, and philosophized about and in response to it. By contrast, the American and French Revolutions, the drafting of modern constitutions and declarations of independence, are explicit attempts to apply the teachings of thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, etc.
That is, for the ancient, pre-liberal world, politics was a given; while, for the modern, liberal one, politics is not a given, but something we can and must shape. In Thucydides, Manent notes, no philosophical texts or sources are invoked to justify the actions of the state. Philosophy is “extra.”
To map this onto Torah, the pre-liberal world corresponds to Abraham’s journey, the journey of obligation, the journey of thrownness, the journey of finding oneself called. Meanwhile, the liberal one corresponds to Rebecca’s journey, the journey of reason, the journey of choice. We couldn’t have Rebecca’s journey without Abraham’s; we couldn’t have Purim without Sinai; we can’t have liberalism without an ancient foundation. We can’t have philosophy without realpolitik; we can’t have the Declaration of Independence without tyrants. The lily amongst the thorns is the emergence of choice from a field of obligation. The evil urge—the urge for indepdence—is also the good urge, the urge for creativity and self-expression.
Every phenomenon has two sides. Thus, Aristotle thought that there were six types of political order: good democracy and bad democracy, good oligarchy and bad oligarchy, good monarchy and bad monarchy. Process—how many people rule—is value neutral. What matters, says, Aristotle, is the end or aim of the process.
Neither obligation nor choice are good in and of themselves. Obligation to bad norms is terrible; choosing endeavors that are harmful may be a victory for the abstract principle of choice, but it is a loss for virtue. The problem is that we don’t always choose what is virtuous. And so while liberalism celebrates the choice as an end in itself, anti-liberalism claims that it knows best how to mold people to make the right choices. These challenges being what they are, we should not lose sight of the goal—the choice of virtue, the free excercise of one’s agency in the pursuit of noble ends, ends which sometimes come from without.
In Why Liberalism Failed? Patrick Deneen writes about the deracination that liberalism induces, the “strip-mining” effect, whereby talented people are taken out of their communities of origin and led to the big cities where they lose touch with their roots and where they get absorbed in the morass of elite culture, climbing a social ladder but failing to commit to anything other than a vague sense of optionality. To counteract this tendency, Deneen urges localism, a vision of community in which elites mix with non-elites and share a world together, a world in which elites no longer outsource their responsibilities to impersonal systems, but get their hands dirty. Deneen favorably cites the social critic Christopher Lasch who says that today’s elites have all the vices of yesterday’s elites, but without any of the responsibilities.
I found more than a grain of truth in Deneen’s description, which offers a critique, from a socially conservative point of view, of the American Dream. And yet the ability to leave a bad place, a bad community, a local tyranny, is something that is only possible under a regime of choice. Individualism deracinates, but it also allows Rebecca to walk away. It is true—liberalism is a kind of empire—but the rejection of empire will not necessarily make the world more just; it may simply embolden the lords of local fiefdoms. Deneen is right that the state and the market have failed to facilitate human flourishing, but I’m not persuaded that his alternatives will fare better.
And yet, Rebecca is not leaving her family for the big city; she’s not going to Babel or Canaan or Egypt. She’s going to Isaac, who is her cousin. Abraham’s brother, Nahor, is Rebecca’s grandfather. And so we shouldn’t think of her choice to leave simply as a choice to abandon family for the state or the market. She leaves one part of her family for another. The Torah still maintains family—in the Book of Genesis—as the most important institution for building a better world.
But the Torah is not naive in blanketly defending “family values.” Rather, there are good families and bad families, just as there are good and bad democracies, good and bad monarchies. The goal is not family, rather, family is the process by which the goal of a holy life and good world is to be achieved.
In commissioning Eliezer to undertake the journey to find Isaac a wife, Abraham is adamant that he not look amongst the Canaanites. While the Torah enjoins that it is not good to be alone, it would be better to be alone than to be with someone ill suited to the end of a good and holy life. You might find in the cousin-marrying a vestige of nativism. But the fact that Abraham entrusts the task to his servant, Eliezer, suggests something more complex. In fact, the trustworthiness of Eliezer, who is not related to Abraham by blood, contrasts with that of Lavan and Bethuel. There is no simple formula.
The complexity involved in every succession story, but especially those of founders, suggests that intuition and serendipity are just as important, if not more so, than rules of thumb (which always have exceptions). Taking the long view, we see the power of origination not only in Abraham’s theological quest, but in Rebecca’s earthly one. Perhaps her desire was not to follow God, but simply to get away from evil. And yet, this too, is an incredible feat, an incredible desire, a noble example. For some, the language of God is meaningful; others struggle with theological language, yet resonate with the sheer sense that the world should be ordered by a principle other than “might makes right.”
Sometimes we are obviously called to greatness, and sometimes we must find the call ourselves, hiding, like a lily among the thorns.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
If you appreciate this work and feel moved to support it, you can make a tax deductible donation here.
You may also enjoy my daily question newsletter, What is Called Thinking?