Genesis Cycle Six Toledoth

 Toledoth

This parsha is volcanic. It dares us to pull our inner juices from places of soul we hardly ever visit, let alone grasp.

What is really happening here?

First, we need to understand that the reporting of toledoth (or generations) is important.  In Torah we are often served up with what (sometimes) seems like useless reports of who was born after who. We get the line of the descendants. Then, suddenly, a specific myth or story is infused within this tight structure. Without toledoth therefore there isn’t anywhere to put myth.

   

Here, after receiving the toledoth of Ishmael in the form of births (how it usually is revealed), we don’t even begin to receive the toledoth of Isaac except with the connection of Abraham to Isaac. The infusion of story happens right at the jump start of these chronicles in the form of Isaac’s plea.

   

The plea, according to rabbis of Talmud, rises up after 20 years. It seems that either Isaac or his wife Rivkah is infertile (it depends on the modern or ancient rabbi we want to heed) and  Isaac is pleading with God.

In terms of our process and experience, we are waiting for the continuation of the toledoth…something at least in line with what we’ve been reading….but it is buried so deep that the plea must rise-up first. The toledoth, the chronicles, the structure of family that creates history and story is suddenly born of one man’s absolute guttural yearning. It re-manifests itself in the rest of the parshah. It becomes a yearning that is buried so deep in the guts and the womb and the heart of each man and woman. However, here in the beginning of Toledoth it is manifest in Isaac’s opening plea. And it’s a yearning that is so unbearably human that God can only turn it (as with a pitchfork) and rebound it right back. The fact that God does this (as we read in Talmud) shows His great mercy. And it really does. Because God here is handling something that is not completely God-like. It’s as if the yearning has not yet immersed itself in the God-essence, the breath of the heavens. It has come from the clenched fist of humanity, the pain of man.  It’s a yearning that grips so callously to man. It catapults itself up to God but it can’t enter the realm of the holy.  It can’t push itself into the relief of knowing and purity.  It rebounds the surface of God-knowledge and this is about as close as it can get. Therefore, to us, to our human mind, it feels quite holy.

It feels holy like any one of our meditations and creations, like that moment when we think we have it and we know there’s more. It feels holy like the desperation of people looking for love in a bar late at night, like a man looking at the face of his deceased mate or like an extended stint at alone-time when we are left with that gnawing feeling of almost. The plea feels holy because God answers it when often in our day to day life we feel unanswered or partly answered if we are lucky.  How amazing, we think. Isaac makes a plea and Rivkah immediately does become pregnant. It feels like a whole response in our English translations. In Hebrew though what exactly is going on?

The word atar, ayin tov resh, is the word that is used.  The fact that the same word is used to show that God grants his plea is what interests me. For, after all, why isn’t another word used? Why not the word to answer? Or the word to give? Why not the word to gift? To satisfy? To grant?

The sameness of the word used is important. It's our word being reflected right back at us.

 For those interested in grammar, first we see the word atar in the active (as the energy moves from Isaac to God) and then we see the word in the passive or niphael (as the same energy moves from God back to Isaac). The true translation therefore is that God is yearned-to. He is reflecting back the yearning to the active participant. In Midrash when we look at the line  “the Lord let Himself be entreated” 25:21, Rabbi Levi compares this to the son of a king who digs through to his father to receive a pound of gold from him, and thus the king digs from inside while his son digs from outside. The plea is the tunnel. The miracle from God happens within the boundaries of this tunnel.

However, a pound of gold...even that metaphor...underlines our human limitations.

  

No doubt, this gift that results from the plea is of human value. What we need to realize is that while entreating God therefore, God could only return that entreaty on human terms.

 This is satisfying to a certain degree. God is re-structuring our plea, our shadowed wishes and dreams into something we can relate to. However what is bound to result is a manifestation of the very dichotomy we are faced with today, the very pain, the very struggle. That's because that dichotomy is so deep within us all and therefore was the foundation of the plea to begin with.

 One day my hope is that we can yearn-up a light from our souls that moves beyond earthly wishes and limitations, that will move beyond the heart breaking dichotomy that we all experience in so many ways, whether among friends, with our husband or wife, with siblings, and with our very inner and private meditations, a yearning free of the very setting and environment that is ours, a yearning beyond the grip of everything we think we know, beyond this continuum within which we have been born,  a yearning of such purity and realness, a yearning of breathless magnitude, of angelic merging, of yes spiritual orgasm and out-of-mind fertility like a simple ray of light rising from our one heart to infinite heaven. 

What we must remember though for now (I repeat and repeat) is that this is the Isaac-yearning energy that creates us all, that marks our attempts at creation. It’s fantastic and holy and powerful even if still on the gnawing edge of absolute wholeness. 

And this is the energy that creates the conception of Rivkah and therefore her twin sons and therefore us.

Do with it as we must, smile at it, love it, cradle it, soothe ourselves with it,  this plea is our inheritance. So as with all toledoth or inheritances, we want to handle it carefully and with gratitude. For this is the same inheritance that can grow beyond even our wildest dreams.