Chaya Sarah 5769

Our conception of romantic love leading to marriage has its roots in the modern era. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, people throughout the western world sought to free themselves from the ties of family, religion and institutions of society that they believed stifled individuality and freedom of choice. People were innately good, taught Jean Jacques Rousseau, and if left alone would make the right choices. We are now reaching the last stage of this era, and it is quite apparent that human relationships are far more complicated than the thinkers of the enlightenment and their followers imagined. Left to their own devices, people in a very materialistic society enter into relationships for the most superficial reasons based on deeply flawed judgment. The couplings and de-couplings of Hollywood personalities and people in public life have now penetrated every level of our society. Marriage in our time has been compared to someone approaching a ticket agent for an overseas flight. As the individual receives the tickets he or she inquires: "Are the flights safe?" To which the agent replies: "Every now and then a plane arrives safely at its destination."

Jewish tradition, going back to our Torah portion, considered lineage and heritage critical in determining marriage relationships. Seeking a wife for Isaac, Abraham instructs his servant Eliezer to go back to Abraham's kinfolk in "the land of my birth." Eliezer, profoundly aware of Abraham's spiritual values based on hesed, loving-kindness, prays to God for a sign of this value in the girls who have come to draw water from the well where he has stopped. Rebecca, who comes from a family related to Abraham's clan, fulfills the servant's criteria of a woman who has heart. It is not that beauty in a woman is discounted. Rebecca, we are told, "was very beautiful." But her beauty was internal as well as external.

The circumstances under which Isaac and Rebecca meet are also instructive. Isaac went out to walk in the field toward evening. As Rashi points out, this was a walking meditation and prayer. Two people, with the proper lineage and heritage, with heart and a spiritual outlook on life, meet. The union had all the ingredients of blessing, and it was blessed. The Torah tells us: "Isaac brought her (Rebecca) into his mother Sarah's tent." Rashi, questioning every superfluous word of Scripture, notes that it would have been enough to say "mother's tent," why "mother Sarah's tent?" Because, says Rashi quoting the Midrash, Rebecca became like Isaac's mother Sarah. Psychologists point out that men unconsciously often choose wives who in one way or another resemble their mother. While Sarah was living, a light burned in the tent from one Sabbath to the next; there was always a blessing in the dough (i.e., the bread and the meals were delicious) and a cloud, representing the divine spirit, was always hanging over the tent. When Sarah died all these disappeared, but when Rebecca came they reappeared.

Rabbi Joseph Schultz