Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg writes:
Three moments in a marriage
There are two beautiful scenes early in Rebecca and Isaac’s marriage. Why then do they drift apart, extent that she surreptitiously deceives her husband, abusing the vulnerability of his blindness, to contrive that he blesses Jacob, not Esau as he had intended?
The first moving moment comes when Isaac ‘brings Rebecca into the tent of his mother Sarah, and takes her, and she becomes his wife, and he loves her.’ (Bereshit 24:67) There’s a gentleness to the verse, especially to that verb veye’ehavehah, ‘and he loved her,’ a tenderness continued in the words that follow: ‘And Isaac was comforted following the death of his mother.’
There’s a similar closeness in the way Isaac prays for Rebecca when they are unable to conceive. (Bereishit 25:21) Rashi comments: ‘He stood in this corner, and she in that corner, and each prayed.’ It’s all the more touching when compared with a Midrashic comment put into the mouth of Sarah when she vents her anger at Abrham for not protecting her from Hagar’s mockery at her inability to conceive:
‘When you prayed to God, you asked: ‘What’ll You give me, since I am childless?’ You prayed only for yourself! You should have prayed for both of us; then I would have fallen pregnant.’ (Rashi to Bereishit 16:5)
Unlike Abraham, Isaac prays for his wife, for them both as a couple.
How then does one account for what emerges as a growing distance between Isaac and Rebecca. Perhaps it begins because, as the Torah tells us, ‘Isaac loved Esau because [the taste] of hunting was in his mouth, but Rebecca loves Jacob’? (Bereishit 25:28) Perhaps it grows inevitably from their parental differences. But the contemporary Israeli poet Tamar Meir suggests a different kind of reason. She begins by alluding to the well-known Midrash that Sarah lit Shabbat candles and that the cloud of God’s presence hovered over her tent, the very same tent into which Isaac later brought his own bride. The poem takes us into Rebecca’s pain, and her feelings of helpless exclusion:
After your mother’s death you brought me into the tent:
‘Here are the candles,’ you said, ‘and here are the dishes.’
… But you didn’t explain
What to do with that cloud hovering
Over your heart,
Or how to restore blessing
To that childhood which turned sour,
Or how, from Shabbat eve to Shabbat eve, to light up
Love in the eyes.
The cloud of God’s presence has become the cloud of Isaac’s post-traumatic anguish following the Akedah. Rebecca, grown up far away, finds it impossible to penetrate its depths. She is bewildered by his bewilderment, lost by his absorption in his unresolved past.
How many partners, parents, children, struggle with the clouds and shadows hovering over the hearts of those they love!
