Parashat Toldot: On Anxiety, Control, and Expansiveness

I am missing Avraham these days.

Think of how he went through trial after trial with faith and trust in the divine process, and a long range perspective. There was no worry or hurry or attempt to control the future; if the land had a famine, he simply went abroad. If his wife was not having children, he trusted that somehow God’s promise of great progeny would still work out. He beheld the vastness of the sky and the sea and kept those in his sights at all times. Sent to sacrifice his promised son? No worries. HaElokim yireh lo haseh le’olah. The Lord will see to the sheep for the sacrifice. The Lord will provide. Avraham merely follows the path the Lord has set out for him, and trusts in all its twists and turns.

Not so the next generations. Underneath all the squabbling and fighting and extreme manipulation over lentils and blessings and birthrights is a deep sense of anxiety. There is no trust that things will simply work out according to God’s plan, no going with the flow. Yaakov is a reacher, a striver, a manipulator. He does not feel that blessings flow down to him by divine grace; he feels he has to micromanage the situation (with the aid of his mother) and connive his way into such blessings. Food is not pictured, as in Avraham’s household, as an abundant cornucopia that flows freely even toward the stranger, but on the contrary, becomes an instrument of barter in a constant negotiation over scarce resources. As Esav comments when Yitzhak seems unable to find him a second blessing -- habrachah ahat likha, avi? Do you really only have one blessing, my father? Is the divine blessing really so limited and scarce that we have to fight over it like this? How can that be what it means to be blessed?

Yitzhak’s well experiences mirror this sense of scarcity. Fights erupt between his shepherds and the neighboring shepherds over fresh water resources, each claiming ownership of the same wells, so that the wells are named “Contention” and “Harassment.” The feeling is that there is simply not enough to go around. Think back on Avraham and Lot. What was Avraham’s attitude when there was fighting? There is plenty of space. The land is vast and expansive; you go one way and i will go another. There is plenty to go around. Avraham seems to keep this sense of expansiveness -- the image of the stars of the sky and the sand of the sea that God has shown him --- with him at all times, and he is guided by it, trusts in it, is patient and generous because of its calming influence

Thankfully, hints of this perspective do remain in the family. After “Contention” and “Harassment” there is a third well which is named Rehovot, or “Expanses,” with the explanation: “Now at last the Lord has granted us ample space.” Ah. There is that sense of openness and vastness once again; trust comes back, and generosity, too, in place of competitiveness. We can relax into the expansiveness.

That Rehovot perspective feels messianic. It is what we aim for, not where we are. The world is generally in a place of squabble, scarcity and anxiety over how things will work out. We are more often in the place of controlling things like Rivka and Yaakov do than we are in the place of trusting and going with the flow and simply waiting it out, like Avraham.

Our anxiety is not without good reason. I suspect that Yitzhak passes on a basic anxiety caused by the trauma of the akedah, the experience that life might at any moment be cut short in a cruel merciless way. Yitzhak does not experience the vastness of the sky but instead the tightness of the bonds of the lamb bound up for sacrifice -- the narrowness of its horizons and the shortness of its life span. He is old before his time, and talks and worries about dying (as does Esav) in a way that Avraham never does.

And so anxiety is born and brought into the family, passed along subtly to his children, this sense of scarcity and uncertainty, leading not to trust and faith but to an attempt to control the future -- a ceaseless backfiring attempt -- that will never succeed and never rest.

We, as a people, have inherited Yitzhak’s trauma. Not just that one trauma, but the many that have transpired since then. And so we are not really only the children of the pure simple trusting faith of Avraham, but always also the children of the restless controlling anxiety of Yaakov.

Still, we hold on to those hints of expansiveness, the places that can feel like Rehovot, where we can see the entire sky and the entire sea, and feel how divine blessings are not scarce, but unlimited and regenerating, and how our paths, though seemingly crooked, are divinely guided, and not to be fought, but to be trusted with patience and faith. Ours is a harder task than Avraham’s, but ultimately what the world needs -- to bring trust and expansiveness into our way of being, not just before the trauma, but also after it -- to see and understand the anxiety and the resulting impulse to control, and to integrate those, too, into the vast sky of divine trust.