Toledot — The Two Feuding Brothers

So, let us continue our reflection on the parasha, because I must tell you that true history begins with the marriage of Yitzchak and Rivkah. It is after this union that the Torah named the parasha Toledot. Toledot means “engenderings.” But were there not engenderings already? Eleh toledot hashamayim veha’aretz, “These are the engenderings of heaven and earth” (Bereshit 2:4) — these were engenderings, that is, the setting in motion of history, of heaven and earth, of spirit and matter. And then there was Parashat Noach, with Eleh toledot Noach, “These are the engenderings of Noach,” which also began with the word toledot. Why was Parashat Noach not called Toledot? Why did we wait for Ve’eleh toledot Yitzchak, “These are the engenderings of Yitzchak,” to give the parasha the name Toledot?

For a very simple reason: true engenderings mean that history does not repeat itself, that history is not merely a succession of events. No — history moves forward. Mutations take place within history, and these mutations began with the union of Yitzchak and Rivkah. So we must not belittle this event — the marriage, the union — as though it were a minor occurrence, a drop of water in the ocean. In reality, we must understand that history began with Yitzchak and Rivkah. Yitzchak and Rivkah will remain the model of a union — the first union, the union formed within a monogamous home — in which the two partners, the future husband and the future wife, are not like Avraham and Sarah. When Avraham and Sarah married, they remained within the cocoon of a very close family, since Sarah was Avraham’s niece, the daughter of his brother Haran; there were ten years between them; both had the same culture and shared the same convictions. “Avraham would bring the men into the faith, and Sarah the women” — and both were borne along by the attribute of hesed, kindness. But that is not the model of the first union. Avraham, after all, had a maidservant in the person of Hagar, and afterward — whether it was Hagar under the name of Keturah, or Keturah was another woman — for there is a midrash that Avraham married a daughter of each of Noach’s sons: Sarah descended from Shem, Hagar from Cham, and Keturah is said to have descended from Yefet. We have been taught that these three sons of Noach do indeed represent the three generative forces of history, the basic components of its progress. And Avraham wanted to fuse them into one whole, for the sake of their unity, rather than leave them separate: Shem, wholly spiritual; Cham, wholly material; Yefet, turned more toward art, toward forms, toward the beauty of things. None of this is retained in the union of Yitzchak and Rivkah.

When one analyzes the situation, this shidduch (match) is somewhat anachronistic in relation to our own times. Here is a man who, by the age of forty, had reached a lofty spiritual level. He had undergone a sublime trial in his life, and I imagine that life beside his father was not very easy either. You know, people speak of a tzaddik ben tzaddik, a righteous man son of a righteous man. It is much harder to be a tzaddik ben tzaddik than a tzaddik ben rasha, a righteous man born of unbelievers. When you make a revolution within your family, when in the end you take the opposite side and try to found another direction of thought, that is relatively easy. But when you are a tzaddik ben tzaddik, you are not going to repudiate your father or your grandfather. So how will you move forward? By calling your parents and your grandparents into question?

And there lies the problem. What is he to do? If he only continues, repeats or copies his father’s life, then history does not move. We would be in the same situation as the engenderings of Noach: Eleh toledot Noach, Noach — “These are the engenderings of Noach: Noach.” Noach engendered only himself. History does not advance; it only repeats itself. By contrast: Ve’eleh toledot Yitzchak ben Avraham, “These are the engenderings of Yitzchak son of Avraham.” Yitzchak stands at an angle, in a perspective, entirely different from the path his father took. He is the man of rigor, the man of equity. He is a different kind of tzaddik, but an indispensable one, because to confine oneself to Avraham’s path was to take only one aspect — and we know very well that this did in fact divide: Yishmael inherited this attribute of Avraham, hesed, to the extreme, while Esav took rather the path of pure reason, of pure logic. And so, on either side, the descendants of Yishmael aspire to justice and wage wars of din, of strict judgment; and the one who inherited rather the current of logic will aspire to love — he will become the apostle of love, the apostle of hesed.

Now we need to fuse them, to bring them together. And that is what the Jewish people does in kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles — the ingathering of the different identities through these two poles, chiefly the pole of Yishmael and the pole of Esav, the pole of the West and the pole of the East. These are the two fundamental tendencies within the Jewish people: those who lived the exile of Sefarad and those who lived the exile of Ashkenaz; those who lived their exile within Esav and those who lived it alongside Yishmael. And here we must be on our guard. For if, by some mischance, we do not recognize ourselves within ourselves, if we do not manage to unite, within ourselves, what we brought back from Yishmael with what we brought back from Esav, then the war between Yishmael and Esav will go on and on — since we are, so to speak, the people capable of fusing things. For that is what Egypt was.

Why were we in Egypt? We passed through the crucible of humanity in order to fuse the different identities within ourselves and take them with us. That is why we left very many losses behind us: four-fifths of the people of Israel perished in Egypt. Only the fifth that had prepared itself came out. Remember that when Moshe came to announce that he was preparing to bring the people out of Egypt, the people did not recognize him — that is, they were not preparing for it. True, they felt Jewish. […] True, they followed the traditions of the fathers and had preserved them — but it was tradition. When they were put to the test, they were incapable of responding and of showing that they were ready to sacrifice everything to carry out the very convictions they professed. And so only those who, in the end, proved consistent [with those convictions] merited the revelation of the Torah and accepted the Torah. That is what history is about: bringing the ben Adam, the son of Adam, to fulfillment. The son of Adam is the one who carries within himself the different values of this identity — betzelem Elokim, in the image of G-d — and who is able, every day, to knead it and to work it, so that […].

That is the project of Toledot, and that is why, as I have often told you, the toledot that are perfect are those of the beginning. The toledot at the moment of creation, as projects, are perfect. But when man takes this history upon himself and sets out to bring it to its end, then it is indeed jolting and lame — sometimes unsteady for lack of the first vav, sometimes unsteady for lack of the second vav [in the spelling of the word toledot]; it will be whole only when [the Mashiach comes]. When we have succeeded in forging this identity of the ben Adam — that will be the true Toledot. For the moment we are in gestation, in the process of coming into being; but we have the merit this requires. Lefum tza’ara agra, “according to the effort is the reward” (Avot 5): at the end of every effort there is a wage. As the tzaddikim go forward in what they do, they move history forward; they bear the merit of the generations before them and of the generations to come.

And that is why this union of Yitzchak — there is an enormous age gap between Yitzchak and Rivkah. Yitzchak is forty when they marry. Forty! There are rabbis who advised taking one’s time before marrying. And yet — ben shemoneh esreh lachuppah, “at eighteen, to the wedding canopy” (Avot 5); that is when, after all, one begins to think of a wife […]. There is a fear in a premature union: that it is driven more by carnal desire, by the pleasure of the couple’s intimacy, than by the aspiration to build the house of Israel. That is not the case with Rivkah — whether one follows those who say she was three years old, or even those who say she was fourteen.

The age gap is enormous — twenty-six years between Yitzchak and Rivkah; that is enormous. And yet this is the first time we find the expression of love between a man and a woman. It is said of their union […]. Before that, it did not exist. Why? Desire prevailed over love, over spiritual aspiration. But here there is truly a man of great spiritual flight. When she sees him for the first time — she who had torn herself away from an idolatrous, dishonest world: bat Betuel ha’Arami… achot Lavan ha’Arami, “the daughter of Betuel the Aramean… the sister of Lavan the Aramean” (Bereshit 25:20) […] — she who is likened to shoshanah bein hachochim, “a rose among thorns” (Shir HaShirim 2:2) […] — then one grasped the difference between Yitzchak and Rivkah.

And she, when she sees this man for the first time, wholly absorbed in prayer […] — in a certain sense she grasps the gulf that lies between herself and Yitzchak. Yet she did not lack the essential attribute, that of modest reserve, proper to the house of Avraham; and that is why, incidentally, we will never hear of her […] discussing other matters with her husband. She is full of admiration for her husband […]. But be careful — one must not think there is an absence of love, for Avimelech notices that they are — as we would say today — flirting at that moment. Only, they do so in the intimacy of a bedroom, without exposing themselves to the public […].

Love is there. The only time she voices anything is when it concerns the marriage of the children: yes, if he allows himself to take daughters of Chet, daughters of Canaan, then there is a problem. And Yitzchak was already traumatized by the akedah he had lived through — for we do not find, when he returns from the akedah, that the text speaks of him. It says only that Avraham returned: Vayashov Avraham el ne’arav, “Avraham returned to his young men” (Bereshit 22:19) — to Yishmael, to Eliezer. And Yitzchak — where was he? There are various explanations, but there is one I like very much, which says that Yitzchak was so traumatized by the ordeal of the akedah that he was [in another world]; he did not even dare speak of it — he had seen something extraordinary. You know, it was the same, alas, in an entirely opposite register, for those who lived through the great concentration camps and no longer dared to speak of it. It had marked them so deeply that we had to wait a very long time before we could gather a few testimonies from their lips.

Yitzchak, certainly, was in a bad way. So imagine this union of Yitzchak and Rivkah — and yet it was pure in itself, because it was Rivkah who led the way; it is she who takes the destiny of the people into her hands. […] She is the one who will carry it; it will be she. She will succeed. And that is why I would not wish to pass over in silence the continuation of the chapter of the marriage — or rather, of the union of Yitzchak — which concludes as follows.

Vayevi’eha Yitzchak ha’ohelah Sarah imo, vayikach et Rivkah vatehi lo le’ishah vaye’ehaveha — “Yitzchak brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother; he took Rivkah, she became his wife, and he loved her” (Bereshit 24:67). “Into the tent of Sarah his mother” — […] The Shabbat lamp that remained lit; hafrashat challah, the portion separated from the dough, from the bread; and the cloud that hovered — the Divine Presence hovering over the tent. There were these three essential elements. The first: to illuminate the home with the spirituality of Shabbat. The second: to see to it that one’s house is not a closed house but an open one; to give of one’s bread — to raise one’s bread to the idea of sharing it with the kohen, to serve spiritual causes through one’s bread before even enjoying it oneself. And then the cloud: to watch over the purity of the couple’s intimacy, so that it does not sink into vulgarity — to preserve spiritual values even in intimacy. So when he saw this — vatehi lo le’ishah, “she became his wife”: she was truly his wife; these were the criteria. Vaye’ehaveha, “and he loved her”: love began then — this is the starting point of love. Marriage is not the culmination of love but its starting point — you see. And this is the only union in which there is no pilegesh — no concubine, no maidservant, no second wife. That is why this union remains the model, and why the Torah — which at times merely alludes to a fundamental halakhah — here allowed itself to spread the account of the union of Yitzchak and Rivkah over two chapters.

Two chapters — so be it. But it is this union that is the bereshit, the genesis, of the toledot, of the true toledot. Now, before speaking to us of these engenderings, the text tells us that Avraham took a wife named Keturah — who, according to many commentators, is Hagar. Do not forget that Hagar is ha-ger, “the stranger,” the convert. To put it differently, she is the ger in the full sense of the word, the ger of whom the Torah speaks […]. But she came of her own accord — don’t forget: she aspired to be even a servant in Avraham’s family, though she was a princess of Egypt, Pharaoh’s daughter. Then she almost went back to her origins, when she saw — when she witnessed — the […] of a providence that had come into play and saved her child Yishmael.

In response to the love Avraham bore Yishmael — Lu Yishmael yichyeh lefanecha, “If only Yishmael might live before You!” he said (Bereshit 17:18) — that is to say, Yishmael too integrated these Jewish values, this recognition, at the end of his epic, of his story. And we cannot eradicate him, we cannot ignore him, and we do not want to cast him onto the margins of history, do we? It is history that moves forward, one way or another, […] with ups and downs. But these are indispensable mutations, because we ourselves live these gestations from within; and when we have brought them successfully to term, the fruit will show itself outside, in the annihilation, the elimination, of that declared aggression of Yishmael toward Yitzchak and of Esav toward Yaakov.

So the first to offer this image, this path, is Hagar, who took the name Keturah. You know very well that even today, when one wishes to change someone’s destiny or identity, one changes his name. For a sick person in danger, one adds a name — a way of praying for him and of saying that he is no longer the same person, that he wears another garment, lives another dimension of life. Well, Hagar — and that is also why a change of name takes place for a candidate for conversion — took the name Keturah. Keturah: the word from which ketoret, incense, is formed.

In the incense there was one ingredient, chelbenah (galbanum), which, if burned on its own, gave off an unbearable, nauseating smell. But when it was blended into the ingredients that made up the ketoret, it was the one that — just as salt awakens the ta’am, the flavor of food — awakened the fragrance of the incense. So in what way is this integration of Keturah positive? It is positive because she showed the way of return, of teshuvah (repentance): which makes every ger a Keturah in potential. As it happens, she gave Avraham other children — six of them. But, as the Holy One, blessed be He, had told Avraham, [Yitzchak] would be the sole heir; the others were the children of the pilagshim, the concubines.

Now pilegesh: our grammarians point out that the word pilegesh contains the word peleg, “a part.” That is to say, the relationship of a pilegesh, compared with that of an ishah, a wife, is not whole. A pilegesh is a situation born of a need, one not always carried by a primary aspiration; there have been accidents along the way, and then one recovers. So it is, too, in the forging of identity — of Jewish identity, which begins with Avraham. There are many believers in humanity, many tendencies, many movements, and they certainly have their value. And so Avraham recognizes them — but they must not live together with Yitzchak. That is incompatible, because afterward we would no longer keep the values in their authenticity, in their original state and worth.

So these children of Avraham, born of Keturah — what will Avraham do with them? They are indeed movements generated by Avraham’s descendants […] — the children of the pilagshim, these secondary beliefs. “I recognize them; but they too must make their own history, rub up against the reality of life, and not stain the original values — and the shifchah, the maidservant, must not become the gevirah, the mistress of the house,” as Hagar tried to do with Sarah. So there it is: natan Avraham matanot, “Avraham gave gifts” (Bereshit 25:6). What are these matanot, these gifts? […] Money? No, not money. What he gave them were messages — that is, very limited lines of philosophical thought, very limited spiritual lines.

You know, one can take a single spiritual line, a single spiritual path within Judaism, and when one holds to it alone, it can indeed give rise to a whole range of sorceries — that is, magical beliefs of every kind. To think along one line and hold to it alone is not possible. One must try to take in the luminous beam of all the values that we carry, that Judaism carries within itself through the Torah. So [to the sons of the concubines] he gave [gifts]. Very well — but there are, you know how many, scientific and philosophical movements and the like, which can be very convincing, very seductive. But that is not Jewish monotheism.

It is not. These are not the values of the Torah — which, though divided into 613 mitzvot, is preserved as a unity to which one may neither add nor take away. So he sent them away to the lands of the East. We know today that they are based mainly in Asia. And then we are told — and this in no way diminishes Avraham’s worth — that he carried with him not only his years, but his days: Ve’Avraham zaken ba bayamim, “Avraham was old, advanced in days” (Bereshit 24:1). And for this reason: Ve’eleh yemei shenei chayei Avraham, “These are the days of the years of Avraham’s life” (Bereshit 25:7). For Sarah it was said shenei chayei Sarah, “the years of Sarah’s life” (Bereshit 23:1). Here it says days: every one of Avraham’s days matters. And that is why he is zaken vesave’a, “old and content” (Bereshit 25:8): when he leaves this world, he is at peace.

[…] He has everything. […] He is honored, acknowledged in common by all his children. But those who bury him are, once again, Yitzchak and Yishmael. And after his death, the question of succession arises. Avraham did not want to decide it, and did not want to bless Yitzchak in his lifetime, lest Yishmael take it very badly and his hatred of Yitzchak be fed by that frustration. And so it is: Vayehi acharei mot Avraham vayevarech Elokim et Yitzchak beno, “After the death of Avraham, G-d blessed Yitzchak his son” (Bereshit 25:11). It is G-d who takes over, G-d who gives the blessing to Yitzchak. But afterward Yitzchak will pass it on to Yaakov. And that is the story of Avraham.

And there is what is called Be’er Lachai Ro’i: vayeshev Yitzchak im Be’er Lachai Ro’i, “Yitzchak dwelt by Be’er Lachai Ro’i” (Bereshit 25:11). The notion of Lachai Ro’i: the One who sees us constantly — providence, which can be neither ignored nor evaded. Now, was not Lachai Ro’i in the vicinity of Yishmael, in the vicinity of Hagar? And now, with Yishmael, come the toledot of Yishmael (Bereshit 25:12). In the toledot of Yishmael, both vavs are missing. The two missing vavs — the vav stands for stability, for being firmly set in place, like balance, the right orientation, the ideal gear. But here […], for the moment, nothing yet emerges, because these engenderings resemble Hagar more — whereas Yishmael is [described as] the son of Avraham.

But the other children resemble Hagar more — Hagar haMitzrit, Hagar the Egyptian. There are twelve children, as we have already said; they are the counterpart: he brings them into the world before the twelve tribes of Israel. Shenem asar nesi’im le’umotam, “twelve princes according to their nations” (Bereshit 25:16) — twelve princes for twelve nations. And at the death of Yishmael — [he had done] teshuvah. And we know that he did teshuvah because it is noted of him, too, vayigva, “he expired” (Bereshit 25:17): he had a gentle death — kemishchal beinita mechalba, “like drawing a hair out of milk” (Berachot 8a), as when one draws a hair from a bowl of milk. That is to say, he died […] surrounded by all his disciples, all his […] — you see?

But for us — meChavilah ad Shur asher al pnei Mitzrayim, “from Havilah to Shur, which faces Egypt” (Bereshit 25:18) […]. Al pnei chol echav nafal, “he settled — literally, ‘fell’ — in the presence of all his brothers” (Bereshit 25:18): in the very lifetime of all his brothers. Al pnei chol echav — who are his brothers? Yes: those who clung to him, those who supported him […] — frankly, it is a burning question of our own day. But the Ba’al HaTurim [sees in this] a projection onto the future, for when the fall [of Yishmael] comes to pass at the end […]; for the problem at the end of days is not chiefly that of Esav, but above all that of Yishmael.

There — I will stop here. If you have questions to put forward, […]. Shabbat shalom — the Shabbat of Ve’eleh Toledot. Thank you for watching this video.