Isaac, Rebecca, and the Legacy of Trauma - Chayyei Sarah 5780: Rabbinic Intern David Chapman
Earlier this week, our young professionals group put on a wine-and-cheese get together for young couples. My job was to meet everyone, make sure they had enough cheese, and offer a little bit of Torah on relationships and Jewish identity. Naturally, I turned to our weekly parasha for inspiration. At first, I thought: Jackpot! Chayyei Sarah is full of rich stories about the marital bond. (Let’s make a note not to have any couples events during Leviticus.) Right at the beginning, we have Abraham honoring his wife Sarah after her death by purchasing a grave for her … OK maybe that’s not the best theme for a young couples night … Let’s keep looking. Oh, great, we have Isaac meeting Rebecca! Our second couple among our patriarchs and matriarchs. I knew that many commentators hold Isaac and Rebecca up to be a model for marriage. First of all, unlike Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah before them, and Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah after them, this couple only has children with one another. In this, Isaac is pretty much unlike every other man in Tanakh. So … monogamy … this is a great start. Second of all, I knew that, towards the end of the parasha, when the verse tells us va’ye’ay’ha’veha -- Isaac loved Rebecca, it is the first declaration of a husband’s love for his wife anywhere in Torah. Even better … we have monogamy and love! Ok, let’s find the verse with Isaac and Rebecca’s meet-cute. Well, this is where things get a little strange. Isaac and Rebecca don’t exactly meet on Bumble. In fact, she is retrieved for him by his father Abraham’s servant. And when she arrives on her camel, the Torah tells us that she sees her future husband Isaac off in the distance, meditating or praying. She sees him … but the text doesn’t tell us that he sees her back … in fact it only says that he saw camels approaching. He does not speak to her, he only speaks with the servant who brought her. And the next thing you know, they’re married. The Torah records no words passing between them. Even the declaration of love I mentioned before happens in narration, not dialogue. The text reads tersely:
Yitzhak brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah. He married Rivkah, and she became his wife, va’ye’ay’ha’veha and he loved her. Yitzhak was then consoled for the loss of his mother.
Even in that scene, it’s not clear that Isaac ever really sees Rivkah. He looks at her and sees his mother Sarah. Insert Jewish joke here about marrying our mothers.
We don’t know why Yitzhak chose to take Rivkah into his mother’s tent, and not his own. We don’t know what words they exchanged – words of love, words of commitment, words of consolation from Rivkah to her new husband. Up until now, we did not even know that Yitzhak was mourning his mother. The Torah tells us that Sarah died right at the beginning of the parsha. Abraham mourns her, and goes about purchasing a grave for her from the residents of Hevron where she died. Abraham turns his feelings into actions – this is consistent with how we see Abraham behave throughout his story. He is a man of action, or as we might say in today’s lingo: He has executive function. But the Torah is silent about Yitzhak’s feelings, until now.
In fact, whenever we talk about Yitzhak, we have to use our imaginations. Hardly any other major figure in Torah is so shrouded in mystery and, yes, silence. The more I read about Isaac in our tradition, the more I realized what a huge role silence plays in his life. Isaac’s silence speaks volumes. He is considered the most passive and least dynamic of the patriarchs and matriarchs. He is surrounded on all sides by more active, more verbose, frankly more fleshed out characters. Unlike his father Avrum who becomes Abraham, his mother Sarai who
becomes Sarah, and his son Yaakov who becomes Yisrael, Isaac’s name is never changed throughout his life. And even though his name means “he will laugh,” we never hear of Isaac laughing. Unlike his parents and his children, he never leaves the land in which he is born. In this parasha alone, Yitzhak loses his mother, gets married, and sees his father remarry and yet does not utter a single word.
In fact, when I started flipping back in the Chumash to find the last time he did speak, suddenly I felt I understood him better than I had before. To find Isaac’s most recent statement, we have to go back to parsha Vayera, to the story of the Akedah (the binding of Yitzhak), when Yitzhak asks his father, “where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” That question is the last time in the Torah any words at all pass between this father and his son. So silent, so absent is Yitzhak’s voice after that event, that some midrashim and some modern scholars believe that the near sacrifice on Mount Moriah was an actual sacrifice – that in at least one version of this story, Abraham really did murder his beloved son Yitzhak at God’s command.
Let’s assume that Yitzhak survives this trauma in a physical sense. In a spiritual sense, it’s less clear. The sages refer to Yitzhak as ba’al yisurin, Master of Suffering, because of his ability to withstand – or at least, appear to withstand – the many trials that befall him, especially this one. Commentaries trace many of Yitzhak’s later challenges back to this terrible moment. When Yitzhak loses his sight at the end of his life, another midrash explains that he was blinded by the tears falling into his eyes when his father Abraham stood over him at the altar, knife pressed to Yitzhak’s neck. This may be a nice story to show Abraham’s deep despair over the act he was commanded to perform, but what does it tell us about the actual victims? Even if the perpetrator feels terrible afterwards, or even during, the victim still suffers. Another tradition holds that Yitzhak is unable to perceive the difference between his sons Jacob and Esau because he is too naïve, another aftereffect from the Akeidah.
I’m not a psychologist or an expert in child development, but I can still imagine that this trauma will leave a mark on Yitzhak through adulthood. So, when we come to the story of Yitzhak meeting Rivkah, and we note Yitzkah’s silence that speaks volumes, we are left to wonder: which is it? Is Yitzhak a model for a committed, loving spouse or the Torah’s first silent and emotionally unavailable husband? Or both? And what role does surviving a trauma play in how Yitzhak turns out?
“Between any two beings, there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.”
This is a quote from Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel, Here I Am, which tracks four generations of a Jewish family as it unravels. The title of the novel, as you might have guessed, is a reference to the Akkeidah - the story of the binding of Isaac that we just discussed. “Here I Am” is Abraham’s thrice-repeated refrain whenever God calls out to him in the story. But the novel Here I Am is about the opposite of declaring one’s presence -- it is about being absent in the lives of our loved ones. At the center of the novel is a couple whose marriage is disintegrating. Jacob and Julia Bloch personify that uncrossable distance. Their lives are intimately interwoven as they raise three kids and care for aging parents and grandparents. And yet, they are worlds apart. They see and speak past each other, focused on their own internal fears, resentments, and agonies. Silence is their primary mode of exchange.
Like the Biblical Isaac, the characters in Here I am are also survivors of various traumas. As a result, they turn inward. They have trouble communicating. Spouses lie to one another, children lie to parents. They trust the wrong people. They can’t make decisions for themselves. Researchers who study the effects of childhood trauma tell us that these are some of the classic symptoms adult survivors exhibit. According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network:
Children whose families and homes do not provide consistent safety, comfort, and protection may develop ways of coping that allow them to survive and function day to day. For instance, they may be overly sensitive to the moods of others, always watching to figure out what the adults around them are feeling and how they will behave. They may withhold their own emotions from others, never letting them see when they are afraid, sad, or angry. These kinds of learned adaptations make sense when physical and/or emotional threats are ever-present. As a child grows up and encounters situations and relationships that are safe, these adaptations are no longer helpful, and may in fact be counterproductive and interfere with the capacity to live, love, and be loved.
Again, I am not a psychologist. But I think it’s important that we read the stories of our tradition keeping in mind what we know about the world today. Torah is an invitation to look at our own lives, our own society, and ask if what we see matches up with the world we believe God intended to create. So imagining how the trauma Yitzhak experienced as a child hindered his ability to live his life fully as an adult has implications for us. If we look around today, do we find children experiencing the kinds of trauma that Yitzhak faced? Sadly, the answer is yes. Right in our own backyard we find plenty of examples of children in our society confronting frightening realities.
An article in the NYTimes this week said that, in New York City alone, 114,000 schoolchildren are homeless. The article followed one of them, Sandy, a 10 year old who commutes from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn to a public school in Manhattan where, according to the principal, about half of the student population is also homeless. Against the odds, Sandy seems to do well in school, especially English class. But her principal still harbors grave concerns about Sandy’s future prospects. “”No one is going to look at Sandy and say, ‘She needs help,’” Ms. Ramos says, adding that Sandy will eventually have to confront her trauma.”
We hope Sandy will get through today and tomorrow, and the next month and the next year. But her situation is the result of a society that sadly systematically neglects its children. A society in which a schoolbus might get showered by bullets. A society in which 92% of schools -- in NYC alone -- reported violent incidents last year. I pray that Sandy, and the thousands of kids in situations like hers, grow up to escape those negative coping mechanisms described in the research -- the same coping mechanisms displayed by Yitzhak in this week’s parsha. But sadly, we know that all too often this is not the case. Frankly, we don’t have to even reach back to the Torah to find that we understand the effects of childhood trauma. We need to only look at our own families’ experiences as Jews in the last century.
Another memorable passage from the Foer’s novel Here I Am takes place at the funeral of Isaac Bloch, the protagonist Jacob’s grandfather – another Isaac. This Isaac is a Holocaust survivor – another terrible legacy of childhood trauma. The rabbi at Isaac’s funeral recalls the trials he had to ensure on his way to America. He speaks about Isaac’s future family, that didn’t exist yet, but that needed him to survive. In Foer’s words, Isaac’s to-be-born descendents needed him to: “turn his back on his grandparents, his parents, and five of his brothers. They needed him to hide in that hole with Shlomo, to walk with rigid legs towards Russia, eat other people’s garbage at night, hide, steal, forage. They needed him to forge documents to board the boat, and tell the right lies to the U.S. immigration officer, and then to work 18-hour days.”
Later the rabbi talks about the effect that journeys like Isaac’s have had on the American Jewish psyche. “We’ve slept with one eye open,” he says, “with packed suitcases in the closet and one-way train-tickets in the breast pocket of our shirts, against our hearts … who could blame us? We are a traumatized people. And nothing else has trauma’s power to deform the mind and heart.”
Trauma, to return to Foer’s image that I described before, creates uncrossable distances between people. Those distances make it impossible for us to see clearly. That’s why Rebekkah could see Yitzhak walking in the field, but when he looked at her from the same distance, he could only perceive the camel she was riding. That’s why when he took her into his mother’s tent, he could no longer see her, but rather he only saw the one parent, Sarah, who treated him with tenderness.
According to Foer, those uncrossable distances can be shaped out of loneliness or shaped out of love. Our tradition calls on us to shape them out of love. Last Sunday, when members of the SPS community came together for our SPS Cares Day, we were shaping the uncrossable distances with love. We didn’t solve every social ill. But we came together, pitched in a few dollars or hours, and lightened the burden of someone else in our community. If we decide to, we can take a more active role in alleviating a problem like homelessness, or school violence, or child abuse. We know that these experiences carry the indelible mark of trauma. And we know from the story of our patriarch Yitzhak that the effects of trauma can last many lifetimes.
The well that Yitzhak and Rivka begin their lives near is called Be’er Lahai Ro-i, the Well of the God that sees Us. God may see us, but it is up to us to see each other. Shabbat shalom.
