Parashat Toledot is the one time that we focus on the life of the adult Isaac. His parents, Abraham and Sarah are dead and buried. He is married to Rebecca, whom his father’s servant has brought back from their ancestral homeland for this purpose. He is in love with her and faithful to her and she is apparently barren. So Isaac entreats God on her behalf and she conceives his children Jacob and Esau, twins whose struggle begins even in the womb. Isaac is set up to follow his father, and to become the Patriarch of the next generation – a man who speaks to God and is heard by God, who is the head of a large household and the father of sons. One would expect now that the stories of this new Patriarch would take us further into our history, give us new aspects to consider. And this does happen, but in a somewhat unusual fashion.
Following the birth of the children and the parental choices that will forever mark the relationship of Esau and Jacob, Isaac and Rebecca go on to repeat the journey taken by Abraham and Sarah. They go to escape the effects of famine just as Abraham and Sarah did, but theirs is not simply a physical journey – by virtue of the repetition something extra happens and defines the process by which Isaac becomes himself. Isaac and Rebecca have almost the exact same experience in the same city of Gerar as did his parents, Abraham and Sarah, and its effect creates something quite new.
The famine is described to us as being a famine Bilvad hara’av harishon asher haya bimei Avraham – not the same famine as before, that happened in the days of Abraham, so we are already conscious once more of the journey that Abraham took in his response to the famine. On this journey however, God appears and warns Isaac not to leave the land, not to follow his father’s example and go to Egypt.
Isaac goes to Abimelech, the king of the philistines, in Gerar, according to tradition the very same Abimelech that Abraham and Sarah encountered all those years before. There he tells king Abimelech that Rebecca is his sister and not his wife, just as Abraham had done with Sarah in Genesis, chapter 20. Of course this caused problems in both cases as the king was taken with first Sarah and later Rebecca. Abimelech is very upset when he discovers that these women are none other than wives, not sisters. Can this really be the same king? one would have thought would have learned his lesson! But that is exactly what this week’s parasha is about. Lessons learned and lessons not learned; encountering the same thing again and again, and responding to it differently or not.
We see this story as a slightly weak repetition of the Abraham stories, and might be led into thinking of Isaac as somehow a weak and uncreative man. He is indeed often described as being the middle link, the son of a famous father and father of a famous son who himself has no claim to fame except as the link between the two. But we can look at this story in yet another way. We might see that Isaac, as patriarch of the next generation, must first walk in the footsteps of his father in order to make his journey grounded. He has to plumb the depths of his father’s experiences in order to move on and to make meaning for himself and his family, develop the traditions of his growing tribe. When confronted with similar moments in time, the choices that Isaac will make will not only shape him but shape generations to come. He has lessons to learn. Will Isaac learn from these lessons? Will he miss them and miss how they relate to incidents in his own life? And how will we, the readers, know?
Though Isaac may once have fled from a father he may have feared, (after the Akedah on the mountain top Isaac is not mentioned as returning with is father and we later see him come together with Ishmael to bury Abraham – neither of them seem to have had an adult experience with Abraham the patriarch), he now meets him in a different way, by re-living similar experiences.
We learn about our ancestors when we have to grapple with similar decisions and incidents. We gain valuable insights into who they were and their character. What we could not understand as children or earlier in our lives, we understand differently when placed in similar situations. It is often only when we become parents that we understand better the feelings our parents must have had toward us. Only when we have to bury a parent or care for a sick spouse that we truly understand what an earlier generation must have gone through.
This repetition of the story of Abimelech and the wives/sisters is a vital requirement for Isaac if he is to grow into being his own person, no longer overshadowed by his father. By reliving some of the major events in the story of his father’s life, he will have to respond to many similar choices.
Isaac was almost sacrificed on the altar by his father in response to the command of God. His father apparently was fulfilling a divine call. Isaac will do the same to his son Esau when he gives Jacob the blessing even as he senses that Jacob is masquerading as Esau. And though Isaac won’t literally hold a knife over Esau’s head, he will sacrifice him and his future in a different way. Sometimes we repeat our parent’s mistakes; sometimes we are able to amend them. Sometimes we repeat our own mistakes, sometimes we are able to learn from them.
The sedra concludes with Rebecca helping Jacob to receive the blessing by apparently deceiving the blind and dying Isaac. It is never clear quite whether she does so because she remembers the divine prophecy about the older child serving the younger when her pregnancy was so painful she too enquired of God; it is never clear if this prophecy was the reason she so favoured her son Jacob over her son Esau. But it is clear that she will act to achieve the succession for her favoured younger son Jacob, just as her mother in law Sarah acted in order to achieve the succession for her child, Abraham’s younger son Isaac.
With the help of the manipulation and skills of his mother, by the end of the sidra the focus is on Jacob, who has received the blessing of the heir from his father. Esau returns from his mission to get something special for his dying father and cries out in terrible pain “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too Father (27:36). He receives a blessing from his father which is perhaps more than Ishmael ever did, but not the blessing he so craved.
When we look at these stories of Isaac acting out the life of his more colourful and confident and arrogant father we see that Isaac does indeed walk in his father’s footsteps, and not only as a pale shadow. We see that Isaac was his father’s son, able to understand more about his father than perhaps he realized, able to repair some of the mistakes at least a little.
As we read his story in Toledot, maybe it will cause us to reflect a bit about ourselves, for perhaps all of us walk in our parents’ footsteps more than we would like to acknowledge, and maybe we have a chance to repair some of the damage done, rather than pass it on to the next generation.
rabbisylviarothschild 