Parashat Vayishlach: The Sun Rose For Him

I was taking a walk the other day, feeling a little glum, when I noticed the ginkgo tree up the street. The sky was blue and the sun was shining on it just so, making its yellow leaves radiant and aglow. I stopped in wonder and thought, “Thank you, God, for this gift today.” I felt a tiny sliver of warmth enter my system. At that moment, it seemed that that tree’s beauty was created just for me, to give me joy and remind me of God’s care.

Was I wrong? Wasn’t the whole world created for each and every one of us? At all moments this is true; the world was created and continues at each moment to be created and to exist for our sakes; it runs off the energy of divine love. This is true at all moments, but we only perceive it on rare occasions.

Yaakov had such a moment in this week’s parsha. After his struggle with the angel on the night before he meets Esav, the Torah says vayizrah lo hashemesh, “The sun rose for him” (Gen 32:32). What does that mean -- “the sun rose for him”? Didn’t the sun rise over that whole part of the world and all the people in it? Why “for him”? Rashi explains that a miracle occurred and the sun literally did rise for him -- a little early that day – because God wanted to heal him from his limp injury.

God wanted to take care of Yaakov in his time of need, and the expression of that care was the shining of the sun. Miraculous sunrises don’t happen for most of us, but maybe this miraculous one is a symbol of all the regular everyday signs of God’s continuous care of us – the daily rising of the sun and blooming of the trees and flowers, the daily gifts of life and nurturing in us and around us.

Did Yaakov feel taken care of? Did he notice the sun rise early and think, “God did that just for me?” We don’t know. We only know that it was intended “for him.” So much may be intended “for us” that we don’t notice or appreciate, not just God’s love, but also the love and care of those around us. Sometimes we are in a place where we can take it in and sometimes, often when we most need it, we don’t see it and we don’t feel it; we are alone in our neediness. This sunrise of Yaakov’s is a good reminder in those low moments that there is always love and care “for us” available in the universe; it is always there; we just have to remember to notice it and feel it.

Parashat Toldot: Rivka's Love

The Torah says that Yitzhak loved Esav ki tzayid befiv, “because” of the hunting that Esav used to bring him to eat, while Rivka loved Yaakov. There is no reason attached to Rivka’s love; she simply loved him. The rabbis cite this love as an example of ahavah she’einah teluya badavar, a love that, unlike Yitzhak’s, is not dependent on anything.

The rabbis explain that while love that is dependent on something fades easily, as soon as the thing is gone, love that is not dependent on anything lasts forever. For this reason the pasuk uses the present tense to describe Rivka’s love, ohevet, instead of the past tense as it does for Yitzhak. Rikva’s is a love that is ever present, ever growing, ever constant, not capable of becoming past tense.

The Sefat Emet connects this model of love to God’s love for us. It is forever. It is constant. It is not capable of being annulled because it is not dependent on anything. As he says, God loves us just because we are His; there is no reason; His love is not dependent on a single thing, af lo bema’aseyhem, “not even on their deeds.” Not even on our deeds, not even on the doing of the mitzvot He commanded us to do. Yes, God wants us to live a good life, so He gave us the Torah and advised us how to live, but we need to know that His love for us does not depend on our following His command. We are simply loved.

Do we feel this love? Do we feel its constancy, its unwavering stability, the way it holds us in whatever place we are? Do we feel its present tense – like Rivka, God is ohev – He loves us right now, at this moment, whatever the moment. Do we feel its unconditional nature – how we do not need to earn it or deserve it in any way? We don’t have to measure up. We are simply loved.

Yes, yes, God also has expectations of us and wants us to be good in the world and follow His mitzvot. But it feels to me that the only real way to spread love in the world – our ultimate goal – the only real way is to first of all feel that you yourself are loved totally and unconditionally. It is only out of this place of love that we can let that love spread out in streams to all those who need it. Change, goodness, fixing only happens in such a loving embrace. May we love and feel loved in this Rivka way.

Parashat Haye Sarah: On Pittsburgh, Yitzhak and Love

In the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, what I feel and what I think many of us feel, is vulnerable, insecure. We are suddenly acutely aware of what has always been true – that there are people who hate us and want to kill us, that we may at any time be killed for being Jews.

Looking at the end of last week’s parsha and this one through this prism, I am struck by the realization that Yitzhak must have had a similar feeling of vulnerability. He would have been the first martyr, the first to be sacrificed for the sanctification of God’s name. He was saved from the knife, yes, but that experience of being under the knife, of being so close to mortal danger, surely must have inscribed into his psyche the constant spectre of being killed as a child of Avraham.

But of course he doesn’t die, and nor do all of us at any time. What we are left with is, like Yitzhak, to figure out how to live with this spectre of the knife hanging over us.

When we next see Yitzhak after the akedah, he is standing in a field, “contemplating.” Perhaps he is contemplating precisely this question – how does one continue to live in such a world, where God seems to sometimes want Jewish souls as sacrifices, how does one face the constant fear of danger and annihilation?

The answer comes soon afterwards, as the camels carrying Rivka rise on the scene. The Torah tells us that Yitzhak takes her into his mother’s tent; she becomes his wife; he loves her; he is comforted over the loss of his mother.

The loss of his mother. Sarah, in some ways, ended up being the real sacrificial lamb of the akedah. Her death is told to us immediately after that story, and she dies young – almost 50 years younger than Avraham when he dies. The midrash says she dies when she hears the news that Avraham had gone to sacrifice her son, not knowing that he would be spared.

And so Yitzhak is left with a double burden post-akedah. Like us, he has on the one hand to mourn those that did die, and on the other hand, to figure out how to continue to live in the face of the knowledge of such tragedy and perpetual danger.

The answer is LOVE. I believe that this is the first time in the Torah that the root ahavah , love, is used. Through his encounter with suffering, Yitzhak discovers love. Yitzhak discovers that the only comfort in such a situation, the only way to move forward is to focus on love. He loves Rivka and that love is itself a comfort.

Love is more than a comfort. It is an anchor and a purpose in a tops- turvy, inexplicable and occasionally miserable world. Connection to others – whether in synagogue at a memorial service, in school teaching Torah to students, or at home with my family – these connections, these places of love are indeed what comfort me and give me hope. Not hope for myself, necessarily, but hope for our people and for all of humanity. Love lifts us out of ourselves. We are attached to something beyond ourselves, to other humans and to a force that is stronger than hatred, stronger than death, stronger than any individual’s life. There is nothing that can destroy love.

Viktor Frankl famously recounts how, on one frozen miserable forced march from the concentration camp gates to the inmates’ working trenches, a fellow inmate whispers to him: “If our wives could see us now!” Frankl tells how he is reminded of his wife and completely transported by this thought and his intense love for her:

"My mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love."

Yitzhak knew this. The salvation of man is through love. Having seen the knife, he knew that love was the only answer.