Leah’s eyes were rakkot (tender/long/weak). And Rachel was beautiful of appearance and beautiful of form. (Genesis 29:17)
Rakkot—Leah thought she would have to marry Esav and she therefore wept continually (Rashi, citing Genesis Rabbah 70:16).
All happy families are alike. But every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)
Sibling rivalry and co-wife rivalry are recurrent themes in the Torah, particularly in Genesis. The sibling-wife pair of Rachel and Leah brings these two tropes together and is the subject of this week’s Torah reading, Vayetze (Genesis 28:10–32:3).
Nowhere else in the Torah do we find a story of two sisters who share the same husband. The Torah, in fact, explicitly forbids such a relationship (Leviticus 18:18). Even in a historical context in which polygamy is accepted, the Torah considers a marriage involving two sisters a step too far. Genesis hints at the cruelty of such a familial set-up by telling us that Leah was “hated” (29:31). The language of hatred then reappears with a vengeance later on: Leah’s sons “hate” Rachel’s son, Joseph (37:4). Joseph’s descent into Egyptian bondage, leading to the entire enslavement of the Jewish people, can be traced to the fact that Jacob marries two sisters, spurring a cycle of hate and inter-familial conflict. From the beginning, Jacob’s house is “a house divided against itself.”
The rivalrous pairing of Leah and Rachel reminds us of the rivalry between Sarah and Hagar (wife rivalry skips a generation, apparently—Isaac only had one wife, whom he loved, Rebecca). But with Hagar, Abraham, following Sarah’s orders, kicks her out of the house (a metaphor for her exclusion from the genealogy of the Israelite nation). In the story of Rachel and Leah, no such exclusion occurs. Leah is like a Hagar who sticks around, an excluded figure who yet remains integral to the whole. I think of Leah karmically (and pyscho-analytically) as the return of the repressed. Abraham could kick out Hagar, but eventually Hagar comes back in a different form. It’s easier to justify Hagar’s exclusion if she’s considered the mother of a different nation, but what happens when she is “one of us”? It’s only a matter of time before the things which we deem “other” and “not my problem” show up to challenge us at home. If we failed to have compassion for Hagar because she wasn’t part of our tribe, the Torah gives us a second chance with Leah.
Why does the Torah present the Jewish people’s lineage as one that comes from two sisters who share the same husband? Why must the 12 tribes descend from four women (two wives and two handmaidens) and not one? On a historical level, we can venture a simple hypothesis: the multiplicity of origins testifies to a complex national formation (an emergent group rather than a top-down organization). Israel is a hodgepodge of different experiences, temperaments, value systems, histories, not a monolith. On a moral and literary level, though, the Torah is trying to get us to recognize that an “us” vs. “them” mentality is a dangerous game that eventually comes back to spite us.
The Midrashic tradition can go to great lengths to show how horrible (and un-Jewish) Ishmael and Esav are (the Biblical text is laconic on the topic)—but eventually we have to contend with the fact that being in relationship with “difficult personalities” and finding connection with those with whom we disagree on fundamental questions are simply part of what it is to belong to a group. Tribalism won’t make us whole. And if unchecked will eventually leave us with just ourselves as a tribe of one, until we are pulled apart by our own internal conflicts and multiple identities. The Jewish people can aspire to be exceptional—to differentiate itself from the Esavs and Ishmaels of the world—but it will still have to face the Esav and Ishmael within. The Torah tells us to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6), but it also tells us that we are “a nation like any other nation” (1 Samuel 8:20).
Leah is hated. And she is the mother of Yehuda, from which the name Yehudi, Jew, comes. She is the ancestor of the Kingdom of David, and, of the messianic future (along with Lot’s daughters on the matrilineal side). If the messianic future represents a rectification of our current reality, what better way to get there than through the hated wife, the figure who is the reconfigurement of Hagar, the recapitulation of Esav?
The connection between Leah and Esav seems weird and farfetched, at first. But remember, Jacob and Esau are twins. And so there is a world in which Leah and Esav should have been married, a point the Midrash makes. Rashi cites this idea to support the notion that Leah was a melancholic who wept all the time. (Leah was apparently crying because she didn’t want to marry Esav.) If Leah had married Esav, we might have avoided many a tragic saga—perhaps we’d be living in a more perfect world—but we also would be paradoxically deprived of the Jewish people who are descended from the (fraught, broken, disappointing) marriage of Leah and Jacob.
If you wanted to tell a story of Jewish purity, Jewish glory, Jewish yichus, you wouldn’t have the people come from such a broken home, and certainly not from a wife who gained her position, from the start, through deceit. You also wouldn’t have the hated wife (and presumably the less beautiful one) be the mother of the Davidic Kingdom (Rachel is the mother of Benjamin, and Saul, the first King is a Benjaminite). Taken on a macro-historical-view, it is Leah who supersedes Rachel, thus fulfilling the psalmic adage, “the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
The Torah is rather spare in its descriptions. Of Rachel it simply says that she’s beautiful. Of Leah it says that she had eynayim rakkot (weak? eyes). Perhaps the narrator is telling us how they looked to Jacob; perhaps it is a more “objective” view. No matter. The contrasting of Leah’s eyes with Rachel’s beauty is asymmetric. The word used to describe Leah’s eyes is enigmatic. Commentators disagree as to whether the word means something negative or positive. Tender suggests she had beautiful, emotional, mature eyes. Weak or long implies that she lacked a certain outward shine (charisma) possessed by her sister. The two can actually work simultanesouly, suggesting Leah as a hidden beauty rather than Rachel who was a head-turner.
Read more psychologically, though, the narrator is not describing Leah’s eyes as they appeared outwardly, but rather as they appeared inwardly, that is, how Leah herself, and thus the world, through her eyes.
Rachel is deprived of the perspective of someone who is ignored or belittled. Because she is so outwardly beautiful—and recognized for it—her growth is stunted as a result of being objectified through praise. Leah who is cast aside, even hated, is able to refine herself as an observer—because she is spared the burden of the spotlight. The Jewish people come from both mothers, but derive their power and sovereignty from the one who had a rich inner life, whose outward attributes were less noticed and socially lauded. In Biblical Hebrew, the word ivri, Hebrew, was an ethnic slur, a term of bigotry. Yet the Torah reclaims the word as a source of pride. Leah’s eyes function similarly. The very eyes which mean “weak” become the same eyes that see what none else can or want to.
Jacob is a split self, a man with two names, two wives, and a twin brother. Perhaps Leah’s eynayim rakkot suggest two eyes of different colors or different shapes, making her revolting to Jacob precisely because her doubleness reminds him of himself. The overcoming of that self-revulsion, the acceptance of our doubleness, of the foreigner within us, the uncanny that is at the same time familiar, is our work. It is the psycho-spiritual legacy of being children of Israel, of being Yehudim.
Another way to think of the pairing of Rachel and Leah is that Jacob loves Rachel because she looks like and reminds him of his mother (Rebecca is also described in the same exact terms as “beautiful of form and beautiful to look at”), but that Leah represents his father (just as Isaac’s eyes were dim, and some say, blind, so Leah’s eyes were impaired in some way). Of course, Jacob prefers Rachel because Rebecca preferred him. To reconcile himself to Leah, Jacob must heal his relationship to his father (do her eyes remind him of the moment when he deceived his father and pretended to be Esav?)
Jewish history—the Torah contends—is the product of relationships that are deeply human, deeply fraught, often painstaking.
Here are some of my take-aways from a story that continues to challenge and incite:
Good things can come even from difficult, even traumatic situations, and often require them.
To heal the world, heal ourselves, and become the people we are meant to be, we have to rework generations-worth of pain and primal conflict.
When we make small spiritual advances in ourselves, the ripple effects are tremendous, both going backward and forward—we are redeeming the past and the future.
The Torah’s emphasis is not on origins, but on what we make of them. Teshuva—repair, revaluation, integration—is always possible. The beautiful wife is not better than the hated one.
Outward beauty and external accomplishment are great, but remember the power of hidden beauty. When you look at yourself and others and aren’t immediately impressed, consider the eynayim rakkot, the inner eyes you can’t see that hold wisdom and mystery.
In the spirit of thanksgiving, I thank you, reader, for accompanying me on this learning journey. I give thanks to the Source of Life for enabling me to make study, reflection, and teaching my makom kavua, the steadfast river in which I can expect to never step twice.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
About the name: Deuteronomy 20:19 teaches that when one conquers territory, one should not cut down the trees, because trees, unlike people, cannot run way. Read spiritually, the image-concept of the “tree of the field” represents that which we must preserve in the face of great cultural, political, and technological upheaval and transformation. As the world becomes more and more modernized, it becomes even more necessary to secure our connection to the wisdom of the ancient past and to ways of being that give our lives irreducible meaning.
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