Monthly Archives: November 2020

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

The story of Rivkah’s barrenness, and then fruitfulness, is told by the Torah as if she has no agency whatsoever. Yitzchak prays – no mention of her praying; l’nokhach his wife because she is barren; Hashem is responsive to him; and Rivkah his wife became pregnant.   

This narrational choice has nothing to do with patriarchy. Sarah and Rachel are also akarot, but each acts forcefully in response: Sarah asks Avraham to marry a surrogate, and Rachel demands children and eventually a surrogate of Yaakov. In fact, Rivkah takes the active part as soon as she becomes pregnant. She goes (somewhere) to consult G-d about her experience; and she hears G-d’s oracular response, and we aren’t told whether she shares it with Yitzchak. Yitzchak next appears as the parent who loves Esav over Yaakov on apparently insufficient or self-interested grounds, but maybe because he has not heard that “the elder shall serve the younger,” or maybe because he has.

Midrash Rabbah undoes the narrator by understanding l’nokhach as implying that Rivkah was also praying: Yitzchak prayed “May all the children that You give me be from this righteous woman,” while Rivkah prayed “May all the children that You give me be from this righteous man.” This implies that each believed themselves to be fertile, and their partner infertile. Why would that be? The simplest answer may be that each of them had received a fertility guarantee they deemed sufficient. Yitzchak knew that G-d had told Avraham “for via Yitzchak will be the line of descendants called after you,” and Rivkah was blessed by her family “Our sister, may you become thousands of myriads.” So the only question in their minds was whether they would have children with each other.

However, there’s no way to avoid saying that G-d responded only to Yitzchak. Why, if Rivkah also prayed? Some suggest that the Torah specifically wants to undermine her guarantee; those commentators argue that Rivkah’s family blessed her to become thousands of myriads, but she was barren and would have remained so if not for Yitzchak’s prayer. But their blessing comes true eventually, and G-d’s promise to Avraham also takes quite a few generations to actualize, so I don’t find this reading at all convincing.

Perhaps Rashi didn’t either. He also believes that Rivkah praying, but understands l’nokhach as implying that they were in physically opposite corners rather than praying converse prayers. Presumably they were simply praying for a child. Why does G-d respond only to Yitzchak? “Because the prayer of the righteous born of the wicked is not comparable to the prayer of the righteous born of the righteous.”

Please note that Rashi is not imposing this theological claim on the text. The previous two verses contain peculiarly extended and apparently superfluous accounts of Yitzchak and Rivkah’s families. “These are the descendants of Yitzchak son of Avraham; Avraham sired (holid et) Yitzchak. Yitzchak was forty years old when he took Rivkah, son of Betuel the Aramean, brother of Lavan the Aramean, to himself as wife.”  Rashi understands this as providing context for G-d responding to Yitzchak but not Rivkah.

But – it’s not clear why brothers are relevant in this context. And – as mentioned above, the verse seems davka not to present Yitzchak and Rivkah as responding to her barrenness in the same way. And finally – doesn’t Rabbi Abahu say (Berakhot 34b) that “in the place where baalei teshuvah stand, the perfectly righteous cannot stand?  

One might say that Rashi is following the position of Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba in the name of Rabbi Yochanan, which disagrees with Rabbi Abahu and holds that the perfectly righteous are superior; or follow Maharshal (Chullin 7:17), who thinks the prayers of baalei teshuvah are superior so long as they are davening for other rather than for themselves; or most simply, point out that even the righteous born of the righteous have almost certainly sinned and repented, and did Rabbi Yochanan necessarily mean that those who repent from great sins are superior to those who lived mostly but not entirely blameless lives, and repented of their small failures? 

But even if one finds one of those answers compelling, introducing them into this story is not. A literarily better approach would focus less on why G-d answered Yitzchak over Rivkah and more on why Yitzchak was praying when Rivkah wasn’t.

One way to accomplish this is by saying that only Yitzchak faces a choice. Only he has the halakhic obligation to reproduce, or if you prefer, the mandate to fulfill Hashem’s promise to Avraham of an ongoing line of descendants; and only he has the legal right to marry a second woman. This is surely the approach that Midrash Rabbah was trying to preempt by making their prayers exactly parallel. But Radak leans into the asymmetry: “He multiplied prayers for his wife to give birth because he loved her with an excessive love, as we have explained, and out of his love for her he did not wish to take a wife in addition to her, nor one of her maidservants. Therefore he multiplied his prayers greatly until the Divine shifted for him. “lenokhach his wife” – opposite his wife, meaning for her sake . . . or else the interpretation of “lenokhach his wife” is that during the time of prayer he would stand opposite her so as to direct his heart to be focused on her.”

Radak’s second explanation seems to me the best interpretation of lenokhach, as I can’t find another example in Tanakh in which it refers to logical or conceptual opposition. Even when nokhach is used with regard to G-d, the sense is less “opposed to” than “in plain view of,” as in Eikhah 2:19: “Pour your heart like water nokhach the countenance of Hashem.” Lenokhach appears only two other times. In Bereshit 30:38, Yaakov places his speckled sticks where “the flocks come to drink lenokhach the flocks,” and in MIshlei 4:25 “Your eyes will look lenokhach,” which in context seems to mean that you will exercise proper caution, i.e see what is in front of you.

But – Radak’s overall interpretation depends on halakhicizing a narrative by introducing elements that are not mentioned anywhere in the text.  Also, it seems to me that even if only Yitzchak had a choice, Rivkah should have been praying for him to make the choice she preferred.

So – it seems to me that the most straightforward way to understand the text is to say that Yitzchak was praying for Rivkah to have children, but Rivkah was not praying to have children. This ties in will with her less-than-ecstatic reaction to the pregnancy. The question is why she is so ambivalent. And also – shouldn’t she want children for Yitzchak’s sake, even if not for her own?  The most likely answer to that is that she thought Yitzchak did not want children, and so she did not pray.

Many years ago, I heard Dr. Joshua Berman suggest that Yitzchak spends the years before marriage בא מבא באר לחי ראי, never really able to psychologically leave the place where Yishmael almost died after his father expelled him. Perhaps that’s why he can’t consider responding to Rivkah’s barrenness by taking a second wife, which would risk repeating his father’s Haggar and Yishmael situation. Yitzchak succeeds in leaving B’er Lachai Roi for good once Rivkah enters the picture. But that still left him the trauma of Moriah to deal with.

Listen to Yalkut Shim’oni Toldot 210:

Rabbi Yehudah said: Rivkah was a barren woman for twenty years. After twenty years, (Yitzchak) took Rivkah and went to Mount Moriah, to the place where he had been bound (on the altar), and prayed for her to become fertile, and the Holy Blessed One responded to him.

Maybe this midrash is just about Yitzchak pulling out his ultimate reward card. I think a better reading is that Rivkah was not certain that Yitzchak had overcome the trauma of the Akeidah sufficiently to want children, or sufficiently to handle having children. Could he trust himself as a father, after his own father had been willing to kill him? Could he allow his religion to require anything that made his child unhappy, even momentarily? Perhaps G-d was not (k’b’yakhol) certain, either. But when Yitzchak courageously went back to the place of trauma, Rivkah agreed to go with him, and G-d was convinced.

Deborah Klapper often suggests that Yitzchak wanted only one child, so that he would never have to make the kind of choice that faced Avraham. I argue here that Yitzchak was in fact unable to make that choice, which is why he allowed Rivkah to ‘fool’ him into blessing Yaakov.  But so far as G-d was concerned, it was two or none. Maybe Rivkah knew that twins ran in her family.

Maybe G-d davka wanted Avraham’s successor to be a father who could not make that choice. We need both kinds of role models – people like Avraham who can do the right thing regardless of whom it hurts, and people like Yitzchak who can’t do even the most obviously right thing if it will hurt family or friends. In a healthy society, and marriage, we find ways to let each other lead in the spaces that maximize our strengths, and to step in to cover each other’s weaknesses.

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

“My thoughts are not your thoughts, and My ways are not your ways, says Hashem” (Isaiah 55:8). Maimonides read this verse as a statement of fact – the word “thought” means something utterly different in kind when ascribed to G-d than it does when ascribed to human beings. Acquiring human wisdom requires recognizing and accepting that we cannot truly understand G-d.    

Rashi reads the verse as a critique – human thoughts and ways are not the same as G-d’s, but they should be! We should try our best to bridge the gap by thinking and acting as much like G-d as we can.

Chazal mostly took a third approach. They illustrated the verse with examples of behaviors that make sense for G-dbut not for human beings. (In the modern era, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan adopted this approach in If You Were G-d,  which tries to demonstrate the rationality of G-d’s choice of the Jewish people to bear His message to the world. The Mormon science fiction author Orson Scott Card does something similar in his Homecoming saga.) Here is an example from Midrash Tanchuma (Vayeshev):

This can be compared to a flesh and blood king 

who was sitting in judgement over another human being.

The king says to him:

Say whether you killed or did not kill!

If the defendant replies: “I killed” – the judge kills him; 

But if he does not confess – the judge does not kill him.

But The Holy Blessed One is not like that.

When someone confesses, The Holy Blessed One has mercy on him.

Flesh and blood judges in the pre-forensics era had little choice but to rely on confessions, since the evidence was rarely completely dispositive. Conscience and public opinion also combined to make them leery of executing the possibly innocent (as seems to still be the case in China). Finally, religious scruples might prevent them from executing someone unshriven. 

The first two rationales have no reasonable relevance to G-d, the omniscient judge Who knows all relevant facts and motivations. What about the third? Human courts encourage confession so that the defendant can achieve forgiveness from G-d before dying. But they cannot forgive just because G-d forgave, or every defendant would game the system by confessing. But G-d knows which confessions are sincere and which spurious.

Of course, Halakhah never accepted confessions in criminal cases. The midrash draws its contrast between G-d and royal justice without telling us where a Sanhedrin fits in. I suggest tentatively that this midrash prefigures the Derashot HaRan’s famous contention that Halakhic criminal law is not intended to achieve the practical ends of social order and justice, but rather to bring the Divine overflow into this world, while an adjacent royal law (maybe parallel to dina demalkhuta dina) accomplished the practical ends. Halakhic criminal law models Divine justice as administered by human beings. It serves as both an inspiration and a caution.

To sum up: Human judges and the Divine judge are motivated by the same ethical concerns. However, our inferior access to knowledge properly yields different practical legal standards. Human societies should derive principles from G-d’s judicial behavior but not thoughtlessly ape the specifics.

Chazal’s approach, unlike Rambam’s, allows us to ethically evaluate G-d’s choices. But lehavdil elef alfei havdalot we must be careful to evaluate as if we were k’b’yakhol standing in Hashem’s metaphorical shoes. So, for example, when Avraham challenges: “Shall the judge of all the land not do justice?” he is within his rights and obligations to establish justice as the standard. But the judge of all the land may have freedoms and constraints that give justice a different expression than when administered by local judges.

Let’s see whether this approach can be productively applied to the narrative of Akeidat Yitzchak. Our focus will be on how G-d could ask or command Avraham to sacrifice Yitzchak, whether or not He intended to withdraw the request/command before it could be carried out. 

Prima facie, G-d’s initial request/command seems unethical in at least three ways: it imposes enormous psychological stress on Avraham (and on Sarah if she knows, and Yitzchak at whatever point he begins to suspect); it imposes enormous stress on Abraham’s relationship with Yitzchak (at least); and it runs the risk that Avraham will go ahead with the sacrifice of Yitzchak even if the request/command is withdrawn. (We can perhaps say in response to the last question that from G-d’s perspective there is no risk, since He could miraculously rescue or even resurrect Yitzchak, but that answer raises a host of different theological questions, and also seems evasive.) These costs must be justified if we want to reconcile them with belief in an ethical G-d. 

Halakhically, the standards for justifying interpersonal damage for a greater cause include: The damage caused must be less than the gain, it must be the minimum necessary to achieve the gain, it must be likely to achieve the gain, and it must not be motivated by animus. The question then is what the potential “gain” of the Akeidah is. 

The obvious answer seems to be in 22:12: “He said: Do not send your hand forth against the child; and do no harm at all to him; because now I know that you are a y’rei Elokim, and you have not held back your son, your only one, from Me.”  

However, this approach can be challenged in at least three ways. First, why was it so important for Hashem to learn that Avraham was a y’rei Elokim? Second, why was this the only way for Him to learn this? Third, how do we know that the Akeidah succeeded, in the sense that G-d k’byakhol learned what He wanted to learn? (Please note that this last question is distinct from the question of whether whether Avraham behaved ideally during the Akeidah, and also that many commentators translate ki ata yadati as “because now I have made known.”)

R. David Kimchi (RaDaK, available on AlHaTorah.org) offers a comment on y’rei Elokim that I find frankly terrifying, and I’d love to be shown that my reading of him is incorrect:

,היראה הזאת היא אהבה 

,כי לא היתה יראת גופו אלא יראת נפשו שלא תאבד 

,שהיה מוסר נפש בנו, שהיה אוהב יותר מנפשו

,תחת נפשו, שלא תאבד מהעולם הבא

.שהיא האהבה לא-ל והדבקות בו

The yir’ah/fear referred to here is actually ahavah/love

Because it was not fear for his body, but rather fear for his soul, that it not be lost,

because he was ceding the soul of his son, whom he loved more than he loved his own soul, 

in exchange for his own soul, that it not be lost from the Coming World, 

which is love of the Divinity and cleaving to Him.

As of now, very tentatively, I read RaDaK as saying that Avraham loved Yitzchak more than he loved himself, but not more than he loved loving G-d. He would cheerfully have sacrificed his own life to protect Yitzchak’s. But he was willing to sacrifice Yitzchak rather than lose the eternal experience of loving G-d.

This may be the epitome of what some refer to as “Akeidah Theology.” Truly loving G-d (alternatively: demonstrating that you truly love G-d) requires not self-sacrifice but rather sacrificing those that you love more than you love yourself. (I should note, though, that on this reading the only people one can justify harming for the sake of religious experience are those you love more than you love yourself.)

Radak’s remarkable but hard-to-accept claim that yir’ah means ahavah points to the possibility that the Akeidah was not fully successful. Perhaps the goal was ahavah, but only yir’ah was achieved. 

This possibility is often raised in the context of judging whether Avraham “aced the test,” with the endpoint generally being that Avraham should have realized that sacrificing Yitzchak was not G-d’s will even before he heard the angel calling (alternatively: the angel was calling throughout, and Avraham should have heard it earlier). But what if Avraham did everything right, but the goal was impossible?

We need to reframe our initial ethical questions in terms of relationships. Is it ever ethical to test someone else to prove their love? King Lear suggests to us that merely asking questions is unlikely to generate a reliable answer. But Lear also reminds us how desperate we can be to know that we are loved.

In Sefer Iyov, the stakes of the test are defined by Satan at the outset: Would Iyov fear G-d even if G-d had no way to punish or reward him? Since G-d can give or take away anything, the only way to find out is to reduce Iyov to a point of depression so severe that he cannot imagine either pleasure or worse pain. The ending is enigmatic – Iyov fears G-d as much as any human being can, but is that enough to answer Satan’s question? I understand the position in Chazal that Iyov is a fiction as meaning that the actions attributed to G-d in the book cannot be ethically justified, so it can only be understood as a thought-experiment, which ends up demonstrating that the answer to Satan’s question cannot be known. Because if human beings can think of the possibility that our suffering is a test, we can never give up hope of being rewarded if we pass.

The crucial difference between Iyov and the Akeidah is that G-d never asks Iyov to participate in the destruction of everything he holds dear. That may suggest that it has a different goal, and perhaps that goal is to teach about love rather than fear. But it may fail in the same way, even though Avraham does whatever is humanly possible. Radak’s reading tries valiantly to reach resolution by reclassifying desire for Olam haBa as selfless love rather than reward, but I find this utterly unconvincing in context. I prefer to say that what G-d k’b’yakhol learns is that love is subject to a variation of Heisenberg’s principle; the act of observing it destroys it. Had Avraham killed Yitzchak, his love of G-d would not have survived. (As it is, the simple reading of Bereishit is that he never speaks to G-d again, and G-d’s only speech to Him is a one-way Self-binding oath.) So G-d calls it off at the last moment.

The question I leave open – to which I invite replies – is this. If you were G-d, such that everyone who believed You existed would also believe in Your omnipotence, and therefore expressions of both fear and love are always compromised – could the experiment be ethically justified?