Overwhelming God: Parashat Toldot

pregnancy

Torah Sparks
Genesis 25:19 – 28:9
This parashah opens by telling us that Isaac was concerned with having children, but that, after twenty years of marriage with Rebecca, no children had been born. Isaac prays to God on behalf of Rebecca to end her barrenness. And God acquiesces to Isaac’s prayers. (Gen. 25:21) The word the Torah uses for “pray” is not any of the usual ones, such as “va-yitpalel” or “va-yiqra.” Nor is the word used for God’s response a common word such as “va-yishma.” Rather, one unusual word is used for both Isaac’s act of praying and for God’s acceding to his prayer. The word for Isaac’s praying is “va-ye`tar” This word has been explained to mean that Isaac prayed more and more, never letting up. He was overwhelming in his praying. And, indeed, eventually, God was overwhelmed – “va-ye`ater,” and granted his outpouring of petitions.


Our Torah portion introduces Isaac in a way that places him in his father Abraham’s shadow. Isaac’s prayer can be considered in that context as well. If we look into those shadows we can see that he is both unlike and very much like his father as he implores God to give his beloved and barren wife a child. We have a habit of seeing Isaac as a passive character, based on certain stories we read in the Torah. But, as I have pointed out before (- see Torah Sparks for 2010), there is also Biblical warrant to see Isaac as an active agent in crafting his own life. This episode, lasting exactly one verse, is another example of his activism.

Abraham’s shadow stretches over Isaac’s very decision to pray for Rebecca to have a child, but Isaac’s prayer also casts a shadow backwards, over his father. It makes us notice that Abraham is not recorded as having prayed on behalf of Sarah. Did Abraham pray, but his prayers went unrecorded? We can certainly imagine that Sarah and Rebecca must have prayed for a child. Yet their prayers are not mentioned, either. Why was only Isaac’s prayer mentioned? Some explain that this is because only Isaac’s prayer was answered by God. But that answer raises many more questions. Since we know that God eventually gave Sarah a child, in what sense was such a gift not in response to her (and Abraham’s) prayers. The answer is that they must have prayed for children when they had a natural hope to bear a child. But, by the time Isaac was born, they had already stopped praying for children because Sarah was too old. On the other hand, Rebecca was not yet too old to conceive.

This raises another question, then. The word used to describe God’s positive response to Isaac is one that conveys a sense that God, being overwhelmed, has been forced to agree despite God’s own contrary preference. Indeed, we must imagine that all of Rebecca’s twenty years of prayers have gone unanswered. Here we reach a comparison with Abraham that can make Isaac seem a true heir to his father. Abraham had famously forced God to acquiesce to his arguments on behalf of the inhabitants of Sodom. Isaac does not use his powers of persuasion for such a public purpose. His is a wrestling with God on distinctly intimate, personal terms. But, just as in the case of his father’s confrontation with God, Isaac is presented as praying on behalf of someone else. The other person is not the alien populace of Sodom, but his own much loved wife. And. Like his father, he overcomes God’s initial plans.

Why was it necessary for Isaac to overwhelm God’s own wishes? Here is a possible midrash: We can assume that eventually God would have granted Rebecca a son. After all, this had been solemnly promised by God. But, apparently God was waiting to fulfill that promise at some later date, perhaps in order to heighten the miraculous quality of the birth, as was the case with Isaac’s birth. But Isaac was not willing to play along with that plan. Isaac poured out his prayers “l’nokhah ishto – with his wife’s situation before him” (v. 21). Isaac was not willing to sacrifice his wife’s sorrow and suffering in order to aggrandize God’s Glory. He implored God to dispense with the miracles and to respond to his wife’s yearning.

Who knows? Perhaps he said to God something like, “You owe me one.” And God was overwhelmed.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Greenstein


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image:  “Pregnancy” © Tatiana Vdb altered and used with permission via Creative Commons License

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