VaYetze

Bereishit 28:10-32:3

Rahel's Pain, Human Dignity, and the Power of Words
Jenny R. Labendz, 5764

This parashah is chock full of exciting events, characters, and questions. I encourage you to read it through. Sometimes, however, one line or one exchange sticks out and catches us, and it is worth dwelling on a detail.

Read through the first three verses of Bereishit chapter 30. (Re-read the end of chapter 29 for the context of Leah giving birth to several children while Rahel is barren.)

After reading the first verse, pause for a moment. Why is Rahel upset? Is she justified? How is she feeling? What do you think she needs from Yaakov right now? If you were Yaakov, how might you respond to your wife? Now continue to the second verse:

Why does Yaakov respond this way? It is a good response? Is he justified?

I feel bad for Rahel. She wants so deeply to have children. She sees her sister's beautiful children; she sees her husband with them. She has been raised to expect that she will get married and have children, and something has gone wrong. She's not getting pregnant. It's hard perhaps for us who are far from that sort of reality to relate to this pain, but let's just imagine something that you long for terribly deeply being in such close reach but never quite happening. Rahel is heartbroken; she turns to her husband for help. She doesn't know any way of expressing her pain but in a tearful demand, "Give me children. Please. Please. I'll die otherwise! I can't handle this!" Yaakov should have been gentle, given her a hug, put his arm around her and said, "I know it hurts. I'm with you. I want you to have children also. I wish I could do something, but we both know I can't." Maybe he could have assured her of her importance to him in the family despite not having children.

But not so. Yaakov is angry. He more or less says to her, "What do you want from me? It's not my fault!" Even if Rahel's tone was aggressive, would it have been so hard for him to see that she was just sad and didn't know how to handle the situation? What was making him so angry? Why did he think she was so out of line to be sad?

I will veer from my normal habit and first refer to two Medieval commentators, and then return to Haza"l. The Medieval commentators offer different defenses of Yaakov. Ramban says that Yaakov was annoyed and upset with Rahel because she didn't understand what prayer was. She had prayed to God for children and God didn't answer, and suddenly she was up in arms. But since when does asking God for something mean that God must or will necessarily grant that request? From Yaakov's perspective, how could Rahel be so narrow-minded, and on top of it then make HIM responsible for God's silence?! Perhaps what Ramban is getting at is simply that sometimes life is difficult, and jumping right to "I'll die if I can't have X" is simply unproductive, and maybe immature. Sometimes we just don't get what we want. Yaakov has no tolerance for Rahel's inability to accept that fact.

The Akedat Yitzhak also thinks Yaakov is justified in his impatience, but for a different reason. Rahel didn't understand the purpose of a woman. There are two aspects of being a woman, according to him. One is implied in the name Hava (חַוָּה) - from the word for "life" - and that is childbearing. But the main "purpose of a woman" is derived from the name "isha" (אִשָּׁה) - woman. (From Bereishit 2:22-3:19, the first woman is referred to only as "isha"). This purpose is essentially that a woman is the same as a man - "ish" (אִיש). In other words, it is unfortunate if you can't have children, but you are sorely mistaken if you thought that having children was your sole worth in life. You are a human being, with or without children! Yaakov is impatient because his wife is speaking as though she's not a person. This upsets Yaakov because - and here I am adding onto what the Akedat Yitzhak said - he's interested in Rahel because of who she is, not merely because she will have "his" children.

So Ramban and the Akedat Yitzhak offer some fascinating defenses of Yaakov's impatience. But we are left with this question: When people are misguided about something - their identity, God, life, prayer - and this leads them to real pain, should we brush them off rudely and not take their pain seriously, since after all it is rooted in even a stupid mistake? Is that was these great rabbis are telling us?

Obviously not. They are explaining, not excusing. It is important to explain, because understanding the reasons behind our mistakes can help us isolate the problem. What's the problem here? It's not that Yaakov had no reason to "disagree", as it were, with Rahel. The problem is that he was just not loving, compassionate, or sensitive to Rahel's needs, nor thoughtful as to the best way to correct her mistaken ideas about herself and about prayer. Let's now look to Bereishit Rabbah (71:2).

Yaakov was wrong. Plain and simple. This is not the way you speak to people when they are upset. Even if Yaakov was correct in the substance of his claim, he had no right to be so cruel to her. For this one moment of speech, this one instance in which Yaakov was caught off guard and behaved wrongly to his beloved Rachel, the fate of his children was determined. We can look forward in coming weeks to that drama.

Words have tremendous power. Things we say quickly, without thinking, without taking the time to notice the situation of the person to whom we're responding, without considering what that person can or should hear right now - these unthinking comments that we all make now and then can have huge consequences in the world. How careful we need to be!

On the flipside, the Talmud tells us, ".אין העולם מתקיים אלא בשביל הבל תינוקות של בית רבן" -- "The entire world is sustained by the breath of schoolchildren learning Torah" (Shabbat 119b). How much positivity, creation, and love we can bring into the world with the tiniest piece of Torah, with the tiniest loving word or even smile. What happens when children learn Torah? Think back to the summer. Think of the way we all learned to express disagreement with respect, and to support each other in havruta and in shiur. Perhaps if Yaakov had behaved like a havruta with a different perspective, things would have been much different for his children. What future do we shape by our words and by the tone of our voices? Even if we're right, sometimes (always?) it just isn't worth it to speak angrily.