Parshat Toledot 5768: Why I Can’t Write This Title.

This week Isaac and Rebecca are childless. After some praying, Rebecca gets pregnant with twins, who won’t sit still in her womb, and so God tells Rebecca about her two sons. After the Birth of Esau and Jacob, the two are as different as can be, each preferred by opposite parents. Once the kids are older, Esau sells his birthright for a bowl of stew. The family then has to move into Philistine territory for a while, though they are eventually kicked out for Isaac trying the “sister” tactic of his father, though he gets caught when he can’t keep his hands off the lovely Rebecca. There is some trouble at the wells, and then Esau marries someone who his parents don’t particularly like. Finally, Isaac asks Esau to get him some venison, and that he should prepare him a meal, and then Esau will get the blessing. Rebecca helps Jacob trick his father into giving the blessing to Jacob instead of to Esau, which enrages Esau to the point he’s swearing to kill Jacob. Rebecca then makes a timely suggestion to Isaac that it is time to find a wife for Jacob among her family, so Jacob sets out toward Padan-Aram.

I started this week having absolutely no clue what I was going to write about here. In many ways, I felt a lot like our hapless couple at the beginning of our portion, totally childless, and a bit frustrated about that. So I did something with the text I do when so stumped, and walked into quite the story. One interesting thing to do with Biblical text is to note inconsistencies or riddles in the text. The Talmudic Rabbis, who believed all the inconsistencies in Tanach were there for a reason, often used these as the springboard for commentary. For example, we have the verse in the week’s portion:

20. And Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebecca for his wife, the daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Padan-Aram, the sister to Laban the Aramean. 21. And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebecca his wife conceived. [Genesis 25:20-21]

But we read a few verses below that:

26. And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob; and Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them.

There is a gap of twenty years between Isaac’s marriage to Rebecca, and the birth of Esau and Jacob. Did it take nearly 20 decades of prayer to get the result, or was something else going on? Was this a 20 year pregnancy? Where does this lead us?

One source of commentary is the Aramaic translation to the Torah, the Targums. The Targums often add information to the biblical text to enlighten the reader about what is going on. When I checked Targum Pseudo Jonathan, I not only had a shock, but more of a mystery on my hands:

And Isaac went to the mountain of worship the place that his father bound him. Isaac changed with his prayer the intention of the Holy One Blessed be He from what he decreed concerning his wife. Because she, along with him, was barren twenty two years. It was changed on his account By the Holy One Blessed be He from what he decreed against him that he also was barren then he was able to beget children then Rebecca his wife became pregnant. [T. PsJ Gen 25:21]

Rebecca’s barrenness isn’t the only issue, but Isaac also is barren. To add to the mystery, the Targum says twenty two years, not twenty. What is going on? The Talmud confirms Isaac’s problem:

R. Isaac stated: Our father Isaac was barren; for it is said, ‘And Isaac entreated the Lord opposite his wife.’[Gen 25:21] It does not say ‘for his wife’ but opposite. This teaches that both were barren. [Yebamot 64a]

In this Text, R. Isaac confirms the Targum by noting a linguistic oddity. When someone prays they usually pray for someone. But Isaac prays ‘opposite’ his wife. There word for opposite also means in front of, or facing. R. Isaac relates that they prayed together because both were affected the same way.

But what is the point of Isaac being sterile? One possibility comes up in the Talmud, where there is a discussion of reproductive rights, in this case the right for a woman to bear a child. The Talmud reads:

Our Rabbis taught: If a man took a wife and lived with her for ten years and she bore no child, he shall divorce her and give her her kethubah, since it is possible that it was he who was unworthy to have children from her.[Yeb 64a]

Essentially it is grounds for divorce if a man does not give his wife a baby within ten years of marriage. However, there is no mitzvah that directly states this or that this could be derived from, so the rabbis try to find a story for justification. One they try is Isaac, and it doesn’t work too well. Yet the rabbis in this discussion do relate Isaac’s problem. Key to the issue of why Isaac doesn’t work as an example is that it was twenty, not ten years that Isaac and Rebecca are infertile – they should have been divorced for decade!

The Targum’s assertion of twenty two years of infertility hint at a possible reason. And there is one more hint in our text:

8. And it came to pass, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebecca his wife. [Gen 26:8]

Given context of that episode, “sporting” is better translated in this text as fondling. Why is Isaac, in all of Tanach, caught red-handed in foreplay?

It is by calculating ages that the mystery begins to clear. First there are the ages of Sarah and Abraham one year before Isaac’s Birth:

1. And when Abram was ninety nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram…(17:1)

17. Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born to him who is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, who would be ninety years old, bear?(17:17)

Of course a year later this comes true with the birth of Isaac when Sarah was 90. Genesis 23:1 tell us that Sara dies at 127. Therefore Isaac was 37 when she died. As we already discussed, the kids are born when Isaac is 60, giving us the twenty years of marriage between their marriage and the birth of the twins, and twenty three years between the time Of Sarah’s death and the birth of the Jacob and Esau. People do not have kids instantly. Subtracting one year for Rebecca’s pregnancy equals the 22 years the Targum mentions.

The death of Sarah, therefore is an important issue in this calculation, and thus must have more meaning. That meaning is related in the Targum passage. Isaac goes to Mt. Moriah of all places to make his prayer, the place of his biggest trauma. There is also a midrash relating to the immediacy after the Akedah that we read of Sarah’s death from grief over the what her husband was doing with her precious son [Gen R. LVIII:8]. Isaac therefore was 37 when Abraham bound him, and he has been infertile since the Akedah on Mt. Moriah.

Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew however do not differentiate between true infertility and impotence. Even though the incident with Abimelech catching Isaac red-handed happens after Jacob and Esau are born, it indicates something else – Isaac, more than any other biblical male knew how to satisfy his wife without intercourse. He had a lot of practice in nineteen years of sexual dysfunction. Isaac must have been impotent, not sterile.

Isaac’s impotency in my mind was a matter of post traumatic stress syndrome. On one single day, his father ties him up and tries to kill him and his mother dies from worrying about that. It had to have had some effect on Isaac. Impotency appears to be one of those things that happened. If we follow the Targum’s story then, we find a very interesting solution to his problem, and it had nothing to do with the v-word which would get this post banned by every spam filter out there. He went back and prayed at the very spot the trauma occurred. Not only him, but Rebecca too went up there with him, to face him -- to be opposite him, to remind each other that this is something they both have to do. As a couple they are strong, and can overcome this problem, as a couple praying for the child they can’t have, and thus succeed.

I started this Drash like Isaac and Rebecca, barren but with a little work I came around to a very rich and interesting commentary on a text. As I discussed a few weeks ago when talking about Lilith, the bible is a place where everyone looks for archetype to validate their own situation. Isaac provides us with an archetype of a man who dealt with a great trauma, was severely affected by it, but healed. Isaac as a PTS archetype still leaves a lot to be explored, but here at least is a beginning. I started barren this week, but now I am pregnant with ideas for dashes to come.