Toldot
Genesis 25:19–28:9
I Samuel 20:18-42
Research indicates that 6 percent of women suffer from clinically significant anxiety while pregnant, and it seems that we can confidently count our matriarch Rivkah among them. Pregnant with twins but under the mistaken impression that she only had a single child in her womb, she was a wreck.
Our Torah portion cryptically offers that “The children ran inside her, and when this occurred she asked ‘Why is this me?’ She went to seek a message from HaShem” (25:22).
Bizarre. What does it mean that the children “ran” inside of her? And why is this so deeply worrisome to their mother?
By way of explanation, Rashi quotes the Midrash that when Rivkah would pass a place of Torah study, her baby kicked as if running to emerge and join the study. Yet when she passed an idolatrous temple, her baby kicked as well. Thus, explains the Midrash, Rivkah was confused and deeply worried that her child was drawn to such conflicting values. So she goes to seek the guidance of Shem and Ever, and is comforted to be told that in fact she has two babies in her womb. They are simply two different people, each drawn consistently in a different direction.
Yet when Rivkah needs insight and guidance, why does she go seek spiritual guidance outside of her home? After all, she is married to Yitzchak. Couldn’t her husband have offered her spiritual counsel? And what does Rivkah possibly mean when she asks “Why is this me?”
My teacher, Rabbi Berzon, noted that Rivkah’s anxiety may have stemmed from her own mixed background. Her father and brother were idolaters. Her earliest childhood memories, the religious sights and sounds of her formative years, were all of that worship so repugnant to her husband and her new life. She met Yitzchak and rejected all of that. She thought that it was all in her past, that the paganism of her youth was forever left behind her.
And then her child kicks at passing houses of study as well as those of idolatry. She worries: Is her unborn child doomed to share her internal conflict? Will he be born with conflicting inclinations? Has her own internal conflict made its way into the heart of her progeny? She feels that she cannot go to consult Yitzchak, as he’ll never understand. He has always been Jewish. He has no way of understanding her experience. So she goes to Shem and Ever, who also live in and are exposed to the checkered world around them. And she wonders: “Why is this me?” What am I? Why am I? Am I doomed to eternal conflict? Will I ever escape my past?
This is the nightmare of Rivkah’s life. She is terrified that her child will take after her brother and her father. She is frightened of that which she thought she had expelled from her very existence, and then discovers that it kicks within her as she passes the idolatrous temples of her day. She dreads the possibility that her child will bear the same internal conflicts that his mother does.
Her reaction? First she settles for herself that in fact it is not a conflicted child that will be born, but rather two different boys. Next, she goes to war against Esav. She fights against what she sees of her family’s past in him, determined to drive it out once and for all. A course that heads straight for family disaster.
One is left to wonder how Esav’s upbringing might have differed if Rivkah had learned to come to terms with her own background. It is a part of her that she will never leave 100 percent behind. What if she accepted it and made herself into the person that she wanted to be in spite of it?
We never escape our pasts. They are in truth a part of us, and they inform our present. We are, however, capable and empowered to choose how we live and to learn from the varied experiences that came our way in earlier times. Let us not deny them. Rather, let us rather learn from them.
Rabbi Judah Dardik is the spiritual leader at Orthodox Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland. He can be reached at [email protected].