by Rav Moshe Leib HaCohen Halbershtadt, Founder and Director of YORU Jewish Leadership, yeshiva.org.il, translated by Hillel Fendel.
In this week's Torah portion of
Chayei Sarah (B'reshit 23,1 - 25,18), we read that Avraham sent his trusted
servant Eliezer to find a wife for his son Yitzchak. Avraham asked Eliezer to
vow "by the Lord G-d of the heavens and the earth, that you will not
take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, in whose midst I
dwell, but rather go to my land and my birthplace, and take a wife for my son,
for Yitzchak." (24,3-4)
Avraham also insisted that the
designated wife not remain in her father's house in Padan Aram, but rather that
Yitzchak should marry her in Canaan, the land that G-d promised to give Avraham
and his descendants.
Was it too hard for Avraham to find
a wife of good character from the land of Canaan? True, the Canaanites were not
of the highest moral caliber, but could not Avraham have found one girl with
the traits of goodness and kindness that he sought? And what about the daughter
of Eliezer himself? He was Avraham's loyal student who lived a life of faith in
G-d, who knew the importance of kindness and dedication to others, both
spiritually and materially, and whose daughter grew up in Avraham and Sarah's
own house – would she not have been a fine match for Yitzchak?
Instead, what does Avraham do? He
sends Eliezer to find a wife for his son to Aram Naharayim, of all places - a
place filled with idol-worship! And he sends him to Avraham's family, which had
quite its share of moral defects: The father was an evil and lecherous idol-worshiper
who even tried to kill Eliezer! (See Yalkut Shimoni 24,109 and Medrash Lekach
Tov 24,33) And Lavan, Rivka's brother, was a known con-artist, with no respect
for his elders (Rashi to verse 50), and a glutton who even tried to steal from
Eliezer (Rashi to verse 29)! From that type of family Avraham wished to find a
wife for his son, just because they were his relatives!?
To answer this, let us take a look
at the Mishna in Pirkei Avot (Chapters of the Father 2,2), which teaches in the
name of R. Yehuda ben Teima: "You should be bold as a leopard, swift as an
eagle, fleet as a gazelle, and brave as a lion, to do the will of your Father
in Heaven." The great late saintly tzaddik and Mussar master Rav Dov Yaffe
(d. 2017) explained that the Mishna could have simply said, 'Be bold, be swift,
be brave,' etc. – but instead added that we should have these traits just as
the respective animals have them. That is, we must strive that these traits
should be so totally deep-rooted within us, just like a leopard's boldness and the
lion's courage. If these traits do not become a genuine part of our nature, we
can never know when we might fail to activate them when needed; it will be a
"sometimes yes, sometimes no" proposition.
Rav Yaffe even added that when the
great Rabbi Eliyahu Lapian sought a match for his own daughter, he asked the
venerable Rav Yerucham of Mir to find a boy whose good character traits were
less "acquired" and more based on his very nature.
The holy Torah wants to teach us
that we should follow in Avraham's footsteps when we seek a shidduch for
our children. He refused to find a girl for his son from among the Canaanites: "Cursed
is Canaan" (9,25). Avraham understood that the traits of Canaan
and his descendants were problematic from their very nature. Even if an
individual Canaanite had good traits, or lived among people with positive
attributes and consequently worked on himself to improve his character, this is
great – but a person like that is not yet on the level of one whose good traits
are totally imbued within him or her, and is therefore not suitable for the olah
temimah, "unblemished offering," his son Yitzchak.
Avraham Avinu understood that a family like his that was able to
produce someone like himself – we know him as the "pillar of chessed
(kindness)" – as well as someone like his wife Sarah, whose 127 years were
all equal in their goodness (Rashi, 23,1) – that is a family with the DNA of a
moral, kind nature. And in fact, Rivka had this nature as well, as evidenced when
she brought as much water as was needed for Eliezer's camels. And the ultimate
proof was the fact that she reached such a high level of kindness and modesty despite
having grown up in the family of Betuel and Lavan. The Torah even emphasizes
precisely this point by repeating more than once that she was "the
daughter of Betuel from Padan Aram, the sister of Lavan." As Rashi
says to verse 20: "This was her praise, that she was the daughter of a
wicked man, and the sister of a wicked man, and she lived among wickedness, but
did not learn from their actions."
Rivka was not an "occasional" righteous person, but
rather a naturally good person. Only someone like her was worthy of becoming
Yitzchak's wife, our Matriarch Rivka.
No comments:
Post a Comment