Toldot

Toldot - Jonathan Ariel 

Jonathan Ariel is the Executive Director of Makom - the Israel Engagement Network, an initiative to renew the place of Israel in Jewish life.

Our patriach Isaac is an intriguing personality. He often appears to live in the shadows of his father Abraham and his son Jacob. He has little of the Torah text devoted to him. Furthermore, the two most well-known episodes in his life appear to place him in a passive role. Firstly, we have the traumatic episode in which his father Abraham takes him on a journey so that Isaac will be bound to a makeshift altar and sacrificed by his father's own hand. Secondly, we have the also highly-charged scene from Parshat Toldot in which Isaac's younger son Jacob deceives his elderly and visually impaired father to receive the birthright supposedly destined for Esau.

I have often wondered - is Isaac really so naïve? The common understanding of Isaac's age in the sacrificial episode is as a youth. Anyone familiar with teens knows that the rebellious tendencies to determine their own path are well in evidence at that age. Can it really be that Isaac goes willingly with his father through the tense moments leading up to the sacrifice, before the dramatic intervention from the angel that saves his life?

And at the other end of his life: even though he is blind, does he really not recognize Jacob, as he comes to receive the blessing that will ensure that he, and not Esau, becomes the significant heir to the family legacy? Does Isaac not figure out that it is Jacob that speaks lovingly to his father with animal hair affixed to his arms? A life lived in close proximity to your children surely gives you a heightened sense of their voice inflections, their bodily movements and odours.

I think that the key to Isaac's personality can be found in the other episodes related in Parashat Toldot. During the time of a famine Isaac seeks shelter in Gerar in the land of the Philistines. After a tremendously successful period in which he becomes prosperous by dint of his own hard work rather than as the result of gifts bestowed upon him, Isaac is told to leave the area. The wells that had been dug by Abraham, and that were re-opened by Isaac, were even filled up by the Philistines to ensure that Isaac understood that his clan was not welcome. Without acrimony Isaac diligently continues to move further away to a place in which he can establish a camp in tranquility. He digs his own well at a place he names Rehovot, which he interprets as "For now the Eternal has made room for us and we shall be fruitful in the land" (Genesis 29:22). Eventually the Philistines come to make peace. The meeting is marked by an exchange of oaths and the wells dug there mark the spot, Be'ersheva, the well of the oath (s hvu'a).

Between the marked obligation of the akeda and the generative dedication of the blessing to the disguised Jacob, comes the hard work of digging wells and finding ways to make commitments work in the real world. In the midst of hostility, and sandwiched between patriarchal devotion to God and the zeal of youthful promise, comes Isaac's remarkable trait: heroic self-control. I suspect that he had at least a strong inkling of what was afoot with both his father and his son and yet he chose to play the role of aiding them in making communities of faith live in a complex world. He worked hard to avoid acrimony and through his own labours he managed to secure a safer environment within which Am Yisrael could eventually emerge to inherit the future.

In observing Limmud conferences I have often been struck by the multi-generational nature of the gathering. The grandparents are brought along by their children to feast at the wells of inspiration, and the children witness parental oaths to Jewish life, as a prelude to creating commitments of their own. As the Zionist thinker A.D. Gordon wrote "without family life, no nation can be built". Isaac, amidst the drama of his life, embodied that truth as he honored his father and committed to Jacob for the good of our people.