Author’s disclaimer: Please note that what follows is a modern, exploratory and creative midrash, centering on Leah Immeinu’s narrative in Parashat Vayeitze which was originally written in 5777, was subsequently amended in 5779 and at the time of your reading may not necessarily reflect my current thinking and approach. In this midrash, I seek not to offer an absolutest reading or make factual claims–quite the contrary. Modern midrash is a spiritually creative, exploratory art, opening a door of possibility. The art of the modern midrash is about emotional, spiritual and psychological inquiry. My interest in writing was to explore Leah’s inner life and spiritual yearnings which is also as much about my evolving understanding of this episode in our Torah. In this piece, I imagine Leah practicing hitbodedut. When a person engages in the practice of hitbodedut, they are davka supposed to express the full range of their raw human emotion, which I try to do here as well.
Dear God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and my husband, Jacob,
I am in such anger and despair. Sometimes, I honestly don’t know if you are a God I can turn to in joy and sorrow. I am angry at you, which means I clearly care about you, but I can’t take the next step of imagining that you might care about me as I apparently care about you right now. I’m still puzzling that one out, and that matters for what I have to ask you next.
Why did you make it appear that I never was able to find satisfaction in the life I was dealt, in the cards I was handed? Why is it that when I am introduced, the only thing that anyone hears about me are that my eyes were weak? And why is it that in later tradition, my eyes are explained away as being weak because I cried and cried upon learning I’d have to marry Esau?
I am portrayed as a woman earnestly yearning for the love of a man whom I knew never loved me, no matter that I bore six sons. With each subsequent birth, my despair grows, and yet I never find the love I want. All that was important to record about me was these births and my attempt when naming each child to pick something that fit my emotional and spiritual state, which was one of great, even existential anguish. Here I am, hoping with each son my husband will love me and nothing ever changed, I fear. Interesting. No thought was given to my inner or spiritual life. I can’t see too well, but that male gaze is bearing down very hard on me, so hard I can feel it. Many people like me, who don’t see as well as others, speak about feeling the stares of others as they go throughout their lives. It’s not the stares of my family I feel—I feel nothing from them, only exclusion. I know a lot of people who are like me feel excluded from their families and God, that makes me feel such sorrow and heartbreak.
I don’t see as well as others. That’s always been true. And when the midwife discovered that my eyes were weaker than they should have been at birth, she told my mother that they should try to pass me off as sighted as possible because otherwise there was no reason for me to stay alive. So I have always, always, felt like I was at the bottom of a ladder I never created or consented to climb. The expectation was that if Rachel, my charming, beautiful younger sister was to land a handsome man, I’d marry him, too, because that was the best outcome they could possibly imagine. Nonetheless, I was not able to completely flourish in my society, and in our world, ability means everything. People don’t know what to do with people who aren’t like them, God. I don’t know why.
I thought you said something in the book you write about me, towards the beginning I think it is, though I don’t know for sure that every human being is created in your image. When you made such a statement, did you forget me? Sometimes I feel like everyone else but me was created in Your image, but I know that can’t be true, right?
So when I was supposedly deceptively married to Jacob that was to ensure my survival, literally. And I have to tell you, those signs Rachel gave me were really helpful. But I had to act like I wasn’t sad, didn’t know in the depths of my soul that this treatment is the exception, not the rule. That I might never feel so loved again. That hurts more than I can articulate.
Eventually, as you know, I bore six sons and a daughter, Dina, and that wasn’t enough. With each birth, I named my child something that reflected my deep yearning and seeking, both spiritually and also, more immediately, for my husband’s love. And I never got that. Hope would arise within me whenever I conceived, only to be dashed. God what is wrong with me? I always felt like no one in my family thought that perhaps I am a human being worthy of love and acceptance. Pregnancy was as close to another human being as I ever got. How sad for me and how utterly tragic.
I have had a lot of time to think about my life, now that my elder years are upon me. This world is such a cruel and unfair one, God. I am grateful that I found a way to empower myself in this world through giving birth to children, but the body you gave me never met man-made standards. Did I perhaps allow those man-made standards to dictate my worth? God, I know my worth to you is inherent, unconditional. Why do I struggle so mightily to internalize that?
I thought it was you who says don’t put obstacles before the blind. Those aren’t just physical, God. How many obstacles have I had to overcome, and none of them needed to exist? Just because I am a woman, just because my eyes are weak, did I have to bear these burdens? NO! My life means something!!! As I said before, I am grateful you gave me one redeeming feature, but come on! No one cared about my heart and soul. We all have feelings and desires you know.
Don’t you tell Moses—some distant descendant of mine or so I understand—that is you who creates deaf people and blind people, people who speak verbally and people who communicate in other ways? Don’t you say, without any question or hesitation that Aaron will speak for him, that Moses’ speech impediment was fashioned by you, that it is not something that will hold him back from leading our people out of Egypt where we sojourned and were later enslaved? You made me, too, God. My weak eyes are no punishment. They are part of me, but not all of me, a part that many so-called normal people allow to wholly define my life, because they cannot imagine living in this world as I do. I am so sorry for people’s narrowness of imagination and lack of generosity of spirit. I really am. I am grateful that you gave me a way out, God, a way to assure my status. But I do have to say—though my social status and survival were assured through my sons, I never was afforded a more nuanced understanding. I feel like I’m just the unloved one, yearning for love with every son she bears. That’s not me. I don’t want sympathy or pity. I want community. I want to be seen in my fullness; I want people to recognize me as a person, no different than they are. Don’t You uniquely stamp each of us so-to-speak—just like coins are uniquely stamped–because all of our neshamot are precious and matter to you? Even when other people treat some of us neshamot differently, we all matter to You, right?
But You aren’t doing anything to change how people think and act! Ok so you give human beings free will I get it. And I understand that they use that free will to conceal their own divine spark by acting in ways that aren’t aligned with how to treat people in this world. But how can I turn to you in times like this when I feel like nothing ever changes? It’s like what Shlomo HaMelech—I think he comes along a lot later—writes in Kohelet—there’s nothing new under the sun. Are humans always going to be so narrow?
I want to believe that you are always there for me, that you are a God of resilience that you side with the oppressed and that you don’t abandon me, though I certainly feel like you’ve hidden your face from me. Sometimes I do wonder, though, God. Being on the outside looking in, I get a unique perspective on how others behave and I get a good read on people’s characters. I’m trying to co-create a better future with you, God through figuring out what kind of person I want and yearn to be—someone who isn’t interested in superficiality, someone who tries to treat everyone with proper kavod—even my husband who I know doesn’t love me. That still cuts like a knife, God, but sometimes I wonder. Have you given me a gift? The ability to challenge the status quo? To move my family towards a better future?
Vayetze 5781 — The Humanity Of Our Ancestors
There’s something so richly rewarding about returning again and again to our foundational stories in sefer Bereshit year after year. As we learn in Perkei Avot, often translated imprecisely as ethics of our fathers, turn it turn it, for everything is in it. I approach Torah year after year with the intuitive sense that something new will emerge—Torah will reveal herself to me in an entirely new way this year. My experiences, like Torah, therefore, can never be static. The inner life of the spiritual seeker is one of profound self-inquiry, uncovering layers of our past and present experiences as if we were pulling back the endless layers of an onion.
These twelve weeks of inhabiting and immersing ourselves in the profundity, tragedy, trial and triumph of sefer Bereshit are weeks of such richness that determining how one ought to focus one’s Torah teaching is an exercise in self-limitation. Though we divide the Torah into 54 parshiyot designed to be read over the course of a calendar year, the narrative flow and contiguity between parshiyot, particularly in Sefer Bereshit is something we must not lose awareness of.
We were introduced to Yaakov Avinu, our third and final patriarch last week in parashat Toldot when we learn that he emerged into the world grasping the heel of his older brother, Esav. We later learn that Yaakov was a simple man, a tent-dweller, perhaps in our pandemic time we might call him a natural introvert or homebody. By contrast, Esav is a man of the outdoors, someone who loves to hunt. Their relationship was a rocky one from the get-go—perhaps our Torah is hinting at discord when it presents us with contrasting profiles of the two brothers, just as it will contrast two sisters in our parsha this week. This discord comes to a head at the end of parashat Toldot following Yaakov’s stealing of Esav’s blessing through an act of deception orchestrated by Rivka. Numerous commentators, contemporary and historical alike have offered insights into Rivka’s decision-making process, Yaakov’s choice to go along with it despite initial misgivings and Yitzchak’s reaction—did he know what was going on or didn’t he?
What interests me most of all is something deeper and yet more profound. Ours is a tradition that does not shy away from the hard, messy reality of human life. How many of us find ourselves part of deeply flawed, profoundly imperfect and truly, deeply human family structures? Our Torah records these foundational ancestral narratives, and we return to them year after year because we know in our bones that they are just as human as we are, and we are no less human than they were. Our western conception of religion seems to tell us that religious figures whom we revere and look up to, in one fashion or another, must by their very nature and designation as holy be without flaw. By contrast, our Jewish tradition argues the opposite. Our humanity in all of its messy, complex and contradictory reality has existed from the very beginning and we will continue to contain multitudes far into the future. Our Torah, speaking to us in every generation and throughout time and space records these foundational narratives because they have the power to reveal so much about ourselves. It is easy, perhaps, to look at Rivka’s orchestration of a tremendous act of willful deception and respond assuredly that G-d-forbid, we would never act so crassly. If we hold to the idea that progress is inherently linear, a notion deeply popular in the west, then it is easy to look at an ancient, far-removed text, read this episode and dismiss it outrightly as a relic from a bygone era. Our Torah cautions against this smugness and asks us to look deeply within and engage in some soul-accounting or cheshbon nefesh. When have we acted deceptively, deliberately or accidentally? Have we made choices that resulted in someone feeling stripped of their human dignity or agency? What were the underlying conditions, physical, psychological, spiritual and emotional that lead us to that point?
Our Torah also demonstrates to us repeatedly that our decisions and actions have consequences, consequences which can last for generations. In our parsha this week, Laban, Yaakov’s uncle and the father of Leah and Rachel engages in an act of deception which mirrors in some important respects that which Yaakov and Rivka perpetrated against Yitzchak when he reverses the marriage order. Yaakov awakes after what he believes to have been his wedding to his beloved Rachel only to discover that he had married and spent the night with Leah, the elder sister, whom our Torah contrasts with Rachel by describing her eyes as being dim, weak, not as beautiful. Though Yaakov does marry Rachel, he is never settled. His father-in-law, Laban, mistreats him, changing his wages many times. Rachel and Leah’s relationship is a challenged one and Leah, knowing in her very soul that Yaakov’s affections are squarely with her sister is left seeking, yearning for that which remains distant from her.
Leah, often seen, unfortunately in my view, as the least consequential of our matriarchs offers us a glimpse into the complex but all-too-real reality that so many experience of being made to feel like an outcast in their own families. From the very depths of what I can only surmise was unspeakable grief and pain, upon the birth of her fourth son, Yehudah, Leah says she will now thank Hashem and names Yehudah thusly. We am Yisrael, the Jewish people, carry that sense of gratitude, of hoda’ah because of Leah’s expression of pure gratitude. And we know that that gratitude does not erase the pain, the injustice, the unfairness of it all. Oh, do I wish the circumstances of Leah’s life had been dramatically different. And indeed, how might Yaakov’s life have been different had he not engaged in willful deception? Furthermore, how would Yitzchak’s life have been different had the Akeida—the near-sacrifice—not taken place? One can only imagine the permanent psychological imprint of that trauma.
When we revisit these narratives year after year, we are asked not merely to immerse ourselves wholly in what we might comfortably describe as the dysfunctional lives and family structures of our ancestors. We are also asked to immerse wholly in the stories of our own lives. What an opportunity our Torah presents us with if we choose to accept it. It is certainly not easy but toiling in Torah is never meant to be simple, straightforward, without struggle. May Torah continue to reveal herself in all of her beauty, uniqueness and profundity to each of us, individually and collectively.