The old switcheroo...

Philip Ratner does it again with his rendition interpretation of Esau receiving the (reluctant) blessing of his father Isaac. I was very excited last week when wandering my new Temple when I discovered amongst the collected Jewish art was a Philip Ratner sculpture. Now I know to where I will wander when I get shpilkes during services.This d'var is from Rabbi Dov Fisher....
In Parshat Toldot, we encounter the remarkable event described in Genesis 27, as Yitzhak prepares in blindness to confer an eternal blessing on one of his twin sons.

He wants to extend that blessing to the viscerally evil Esav, who nevertheless always has acted with the utmost respect for his father. Esav has Yitzhak figured out, and Yitzhak really loves him. By contrast, Rivkah is devoted uniquely to the simpler, gentler, less charismatic Yaakov.

Why the dichotomy? We have met Rivkah as a kind, young lady, offering water to slake the thirsts of Avraham's servant, Eliezer, and his camels. We have heard a midrash that her father, Betuel, attempted to poison Eliezer's food but died himself when an angel sent by God switched the plates. Later, we have learned of Rivkah's difficulty in conceiving and of her travails in bearing these particular twins to term.

We further will learn that her brother is worse than her dad. Besides her murderous father, Rivkah's brother, Lavan, is a prototype for Simon Legree. Lavan will squeeze some 20 years near-slavery out of his nephew and son-in-law, Yaakov, after switching daughters on Yaakov's wedding night, pulling the beautiful and desired Rachel out and slipping the sad-looking Leah in her stead. Even as Lavan steals from Yaakov for two decades, his own daughters will lament that he has stolen all he could from them, too, treating them as veritable strangers. That's Rivkah's bro.

So it emerges that although she is an incredibly sweet soul, Rivkah also grew up in a household with dramatic issues of dysfunctionality at its core. To put it simply, she grew up street-smart.

On the other hand, Yitzhak was intensively protected. Not only were his parents the progenitors and founding patriarch and matriarch of the Jewish people, but they further protected the spiritual elevations of their home by expelling the Yishmaels and Hagars who threatened Yitzhak's innocence.

The home was sterilized for spirituality, cleansed of any foreign influence. As a further protection, Avraham virtually hand picked Yitzhak's wife by setting guidelines when he dispatched Eliezer, his servant, to find a suitable match:

1) No one from the surrounding environs, thus no one who will bring along in-laws and other corrupting and disruptive influences;

2) Only someone from Avraham's own birthland in Charan, assuring both that the wife would be alien to the local environment, thus impeding assimilation into the morally perverse Canaanite culture, and that another set of prospective in-laws would be kept far out of reach.

Thus, Rivkah was raised in a streetwise milieu, while Yitzhak was extremely insulated. So Esav easily played to Yitzhak's innocence.

By contrast, Rivkah had the tools to read Esav like a roadmap. It then devolved on her to draw on her own street-smarts to save the day, to move her own intensely protected son, Yaakov, to the fore. For this, she drew on a tactic that seems unique to her family -- the switcheroo.

Few families practice the kind of prevalent switching that seems to have been endemic in the Betuel-Lavan-Rivkah family. Betuel switches the plates, trying to poison Eliezer. Lavan switches and disguises his daughters on Yaakov's wedding night. And Rivkah switches and disguises Yaakov for the blessing.

In time, as the family legends grow, Yaakov's sons one day will deceive him with animal blood they will say is Yosef's blood on the precious striped coat. And then Yosef will disguise himself from his brothers in the Pharaoh's palace.

In the end, is the switching of the brothers justified to assure that Yitzhak's blessing was conferred properly? The commentators are not all of one mind. What if Rivkah had tried reasoning with Yitzhak, even months and years earlier, trying to use her street-smarts to enlighten him, in his protected spiritual innocence, as to Esav's true character of evil? Perhaps she did try unsuccessfully, and we do not know. Perhaps not.

Yitzhak ultimately is satisfied that he acted correctly in blessing Yaakov; he reiterates Yaakov's blessing later with full scienter. But consider the price: Esav feels cheated and pledges to murder Yaakov as soon as his father dies.

Rivkah, hearing of the intent, desperately persuades Yitzhak to dispatch Yaakov to Lavan's house to find a wife. Yaakov ends up exiled for 20 years, victimized incessantly through two decades by an uncle and father-in-law so heinous, that the haggadah recounts that Lavan was worse than Pharaoh.

It is not clear whether Rivkah had an effective alternative to switching and disguising Yaakov to obtain Yitzhak's eternal blessing. But it does seem that the idea of switching may well have come from the culture of her upbringing, reared in the house of Betuel and Lavan. When in doubt, switch them out.

Sometimes it is useful for each of us to pause, too, and to wonder what practices and shticklach we practice in our homes, in full view of our children, with the attendant consideration of whether these behavioral quirks and anomalies that we sanction as normative and convenient will be passed down through our children and theirs in generations to come.

And in that light, we well might ask: Is it worth it? To deceive? To live by incessant white lies? To constantly criticize? To yell? To measure people by money? To deny fault and refuse ever to apologize? To always be the one who takes and never the one who gives? To be arrogant in one's self-estimation?

With children watching and emulating -- is it worth it?

From Shacking up to Blessed Union

This print is from the late artist Shalom of Safed or Shalom Moskovitz. We see Isaac holding a key leads his new wife Rebecca to their home. They are followed by Abraham, Eliezer and an entourage of followers. Note that while the male figures are dressed in some facsimile of eastern garb, Rebecca could have stepped out directly from the shtetl. The row of olive trees at the painting's bottom represents the couple's future children and their legacy of longevity and fecundity. Today's posting is from Holly J. Lebowitz. She discusses on making her home, a Jewish home and her marriage, a Jewish one.

I was in a taxicab the other day, and somehow it came up that I was a newlywed. The driver got very excited and launched into an impassioned monologue about how wonderful marriage is. His broken English put it simply:
"If you're not married, you're bad."

Well, I responded when he paused, it's not that you're bad if you're not married; it's just that your life is different.

In a way, this was a surprising answer from me, since I'd dated my now-husband for seven years and lived with him for two before we married last October. The door we walked through as newlyweds led into the same home that it had led into when we were just boyfriend-girlfriend, we kept our jobs, and professionally I've kept my name.

But what we've discovered is that the things that change between a two people when they get married are ineffable. Inadequately put, changes include the tiny thrill of referring to "my husband," the look of joyful amazement that we shared on our wedding day, the things we say to each other as we fall asleep.

The physical trappings of our life together, and much of the emotional content of our relationship, were things that we didn't want to change--this was precisely why we'd decided to get married. We looked to our wedding day as a celebration of our love as it was.

But as we planned our ceremony and reception, we wondered, how could we imbue separateness into something that we wanted to celebrate?


The last place we'd expected to find an answer was in traditional Judaism. What we found, oddly for our unobservant Reform selves, was that the traditional elements of a Jewish wedding ceremony are rich with ways of celebrating invisible changes.


Mikveh: Purifying Waters
The first thing I did was decide to visit the mikveh, or ritual bath, before the wedding. In preparation, I spent a few afternoons with the "mikveh lady," who instructed me in the Jewish laws of family purity and encouraged me to make mikveh a regular part of our marriage.
In the course of our discussions, she said, "You spend the time that you're dating putting bricks together, building the foundation of your relationship." For me, that was seven years' worth of bricks, with all the accompanying struggles and triumphs. When you marry, though, she said, "then you put in the mortar to hold the bricks together. Without the mortar, all you have is a pile of bricks. Which is fine, but it's not a permanent, sturdy home."
Slipping beneath the waters of the ritual bath, warm and scrubbed clean, I felt the beginnings of a separation--that there was a before period and soon there would be an after period. I was about to become married.

Havdalah: Sweet Separation
Our wedding was on a Saturday night, the end of the Jewish Sabbath. In a small room before the ceremony, we held a brief service in which we essentially got married. The larger ceremony would be a public affirmation of what we'd just committed to.
Before we could proceed, though, we had to separate the Sabbath, which ends at sunset, from the rest of the week. This is done through a ceremony called havdalah, in which a three-wicked candle is lit and a bag of spices is passed around to smell. The rabbi pointed out that just as we were separating the Sabbath from the rest of the week, we were separating single life from married life. The scent of sweet spices lingered, a reminder of what we'd just left.

Veiling: Bridal Transformation
After we signed the ketubah, or marriage contract, the groom placed the veil over my face. This tradition is rooted in Genesis--in which Jacob married the wrong sister because she was veiled before their wedding. It was at the moment when Rob lowered the veil over me--not when I put on my bridal gown, or saw Rob for the first time, or even signed the ketubah--that I felt transformed into a bride. Looking at my dearest friends and family through the hazy gauze of my veil completed my internal bridal picture.

Circling: A Nascent Family
At the beginning of the ceremony, the bride traditionally circles the groom seven times, a mystical number. This signifies many things, among which is the fact that the couple is now their own family, separate from--though obviously still connected to--the families that reared them. Rob and I decided that we'd circle each other three times, equalizing this spiritual creation of our new family. Of course I had loved Rob for many years, but not until that moment was he my family, nor was I his.

Chuppah: An Open Home
A Jewish couple publicly celebrates their marriage under a chuppah--a canopy that's open on all four sides but covered on top. Many couples have outdoor weddings with a chuppah made of a prayer shawl. Ours was draped in light fabric and ribbons of flowers. The rabbi explained that the chuppah is a symbol of the Jewish home--it's permeable, open on all sides to the joys and travails of life, but we're protected by its roof.

For us, it seemed the perfect symbol. We already had a home, had shared one for two years, but the act of getting married elevated our home to a new, sanctified plane. Sealed with mortar. Different.