Nothing is Lost
Parashat Toldot
Rabbi Noa Kushner
November 5, 2021
Nothing is Lost
1.
There’s a teaching in the zohar that nothing, not one soul is lost in the world
That is, God has made everything and everyone to have a place
Everything and every soul, without exception has its place
No matter how lost we feels or seem, no one was created without their place
Now I’m not saying that everyone has their day in the sun.
Torah could care less about 15 minutes of fame or the number of likes. We do have a
teaching in kohelet, that everything has its season, but this is different:
I’m saying
No soul is lost, no soul is without her place in the world
It’s just that sometimes the effort involved in finding that place,
Or more accurately, remembering it, recovering that place is a whole other story
2.
Speaking of stories
In this week’s Torah
We have a story of twins
Jacob and Esau
And it is a famous story about how one dresses up like the other to steal a blessing, a famous story, a fraught story
If you want to feel better about your family I do recommend reading Genesis
But I want to talk about the beginning of the parasha before the famous twins were even born
I want to talk about the beginning of the parasha when Isaac and Rebecca
The parents of the twins
According to tradition
Lived together for twenty years without getting pregnant
And I want to talk about how Isaac prays for them
And the Hebrew word for his praying is a strange one / וַיֶּעְתַּ֨ר
Typically translated as he pleaded or he prayed
But that word can also mean a shovel
And my teacher Avivah Zornberg taught me that they say in Midrash Rabbah
that the prayers of the righteous
Are like a shovel because
Just like a shovel turns over the earth
Real prayers change the acts of God
Now I don’t know
I have prayed for a lot of things, good and righteous things and they didn’t happen
But I do know that praying changed something in me
Not unlike a shovel turning earth over and over
And so I was very interested to learn that when Torah says Isaac finally prays
(Not sure what he was doing for the first twenty years)
Pirke D’Rebbe Eliezer it says Isaac took Rebecca up to Mount Moriah
“Sure!” You say
That is the cite of the future temple, a holy place, of course that’s where they went!
But see, although that is all true
Mount Moriah, literally, “the place where God will see”
Is also the place where Isaac went through the most confusing and painful moment in his life
And I can say that without equivocation because it is where his father bound him on an alter and raised a knife over him —
Only stopping when an angel called out and forbade Abraham from going any further
There’s no question this is a place where Isaac experienced great fear and pain
He lived, of course, we know it, but famously, there’s no record of him ever speaking to his father again, it is not a resolved place
So this choice of location for the prayer captures our attention
Why there, of all places?
Maybe because he wanted a place to pray that would help him turn everything over
You see
Real prayers allow us to inhabit moments that are too difficult to inhabit otherwise
They enable us to consider forgiveness in places and circumstances where we could not otherwise find forgiveness, forgiveness for ourselves, for one another, God
Real prayer, this kind of turning over prayer allows us to wish for things we didn’t know we needed
And so I want to suggest that maybe in those twenty years of marriage
Maybe Isaac never told Rebecca his whole story
Couldn’t say it out loud
Who could blame him?
But when the idea arose in him to pray
Really pray
To turn the fixed things over and over, upside down
Isaac knew the prayers would have to be up there
And so he took Rebecca to the place
the most frightening formative place in his life
He takes her to the mountain
And finally tells her the whole story
He takes her to the place and in no small way, finds his own place in his own life
And then and only then Isaac could pray as he had never prayed
He created a prayer, his prayer, their prayer, a prayer that could overturn the world
And indeed, Rebecca gets pregnant with twins.
3.
But that’s not the end of the story, never is
And, in fact, there is a second prayer in the very next verse
It is Rebecca’s prayer
וַיִּתְרֹֽצְצ֤וּ הַבָּנִים֙ בְּקִרְבָּ֔הּ
וַתֹּ֣אמֶר אִם־כֵּ֔ן לָ֥מָּה זֶּ֖ה אָנֹ֑כִי
וַתֵּ֖לֶךְ לִדְרֹ֥שׁ אֶת־יְהֹוָֽה׃
“And the twins struggled in her womb
And she said, “If this is how it is, why do I exist? Why am I here?
And she went to seek God”
Now some say וַיִּתְרֹֽצְצ֤וּ means the twins were running around or fighting in her but I don’t want to focus on those boys for once,
On this shabbat, I want to focus on Rebecca
Because Chizkuni offers the word וַיִּתְרֹֽצְצ֤וּ
suggests something was about to be broken [1]
And I think the rabbinic comments that start with the fact that Rebecca is praying and asking these strange, existential questions
Simply because she is in physical pain
“Hard pregnancy” that sort of thing
These comments seem, at least to my experience and the experience I have had in knowing many mothers
To lack the usual rabbinic imagination
I have known mothers who threw up seven times a day
I have known mothers who had to be bedridden for months at a time
I got stories
But while mothers might surely complain from time to time
While they might ask, “When is this going to be over? Or how am I going to get through this day?”
Even the most difficult pregnancy does not cause a person to ask the kind of question Rebecca seems to be asking,
“Why am I here?” “What is this all for?”
But the Or haChayyim notes that actually Rebecca is worried about tragedy striking
about the pregnancy ending altogether —
In other words
She’s not just worried about the pain
She’s worried about pain for nothing [2]
She’s worried:
“If this is how it is all going to end up, why am I here?”
And this prayer is deep prayer, it is a difficult prayer
It is prayer worthy of her going to seek God for an answer
4.
This is an exhausting and destabilizing time in our country and our world
While we are returning to some aspects of life
So good to be inside, together, thank god
While we are returning to some aspects of life
Some aspects may never return
And many people in our country, some our friends and family, will never return
There are years that will never return, not in the way we’d like
And I think it is safe to say, parts of us will never return
We have changed and aged and sobered up
Our expectations forever altered
And unlike at the beginning of the pandemic when we had lots of energy to make up zoom cocktail parties and god knows what else
That energy is, for the most part, gone, burned off
And all we have is remorse for what was lost
Not to mention
Somehow in the haze
We’ve been called to attention long enough to see the depth of the problems in our democracy, problems in our country and our tax codes and the way we communicate with one another and who gets educated and who has health care and who gets a house and who has to drink what polluted water and breathe what toxic air
And while we maybe knew these problems were there before
Now they seem compounded, close up and personal
Two people were shot in SF a block from my kids’ school yesterday
My kids’ school was on lock down yesterday
We just got a new office and we’re so excited you should visit but I was told that if I get there early, there could be someone who has no house sleeping in the doorway
Because there seems to be someone without a house sleeping in all the doorways these days
So while maybe we knew these problems were there
Now וַיִּתְרֹֽצְצ֤וּ
They run around inside us
Now it feels like something is about to break
We, too, might want to cry out to God
To pray
To say, “אִם־כֵּ֔ן לָ֥מָּה זֶּ֖ה אָנֹ֑כִי”
If it is always going to be this way,
If it is going to end this way
Why am I here?”
5.
But you know in Pirke D’Rebbe Eliezer
It is not only Isaac who prays on Mount Moriah
We notice that one verse later when Rebecca prays her prayer
Midrash says she also goes back to Mount Moriah
To that same fraught place where souls were bound but then unbound
“Sure!” You say
“That’s where the Temple will be built! It is a holy place! Everyone knows that! Of course she goes there!”
But I’m telling you
This is Genesis
She could pray anywhere
Any well, any tree, any tent is already beyond iconic
It’s Genesis! You can go to sleep on a rock and angels appear
So why does she go there of all places?
It’s not like she also went through something up there (!) god forbid
And she doesn’t even bring Isaac with her, she goes alone
But, you see, she does learn from his example
B/c Rebecca goes back up that old mountain
Which I’ll just say is not easy when you’re pregnant with twins (!)
She goes all the way back up there because, like Isaac,
she too wants the kind of prayer that will dig up old habits, old ways of thinking
She, too, wants to reach for something else, something not yet
“אִם־כֵּ֔ן לָ֥מָּה זֶּ֖ה אָנֹ֑כִי”
Doesn’t just mean for her, “bring me relief ”
It means
“With everything as it is and even as frightening as it might be, why do I exist?”
It means that on some level Rebecca knows
It is forbidden for us to forget that that god made a place for every one of us,
for each and every soul god made a place, a purpose
That even in times that are painful (even when we can’t see out) our soul has this god given place
And so if there is pain,
and I know there is pain
If it seems we are about to break —
Sometimes we just have to cry or be furious.
If you feel you are about to break, you can just cry and we will carry you —
But sometimes, like it was for Rebecca, the need to find our place can rise up through the pain
And then we know it’s time to climb the old mountain again, to ask and pray and turn things over until we find our answer.
6.
I’ll tell you a secret: In this room there are people who have quit their jobs in order to figure out things like voting rights. There are people in this room who make sure that anyone who is grieving in The Kitchen receives the support and meals they need. There are people who, right now, are signed up to make phone calls and demonstrate to protect the air and the water and the people — people who are signed up to organize for others who don’t have a house, there are people in our community who get up in the morning and feed those who don’t have food, who give out clean needles in the evenings, who walk the streets of the tenderloin seeing who might need a vaccine, who collect beds for those who need beds, who fight against corrupt political redistricting, or go head to head against the regular invasions of our privacy and rights by the tech companies. They’re too modest to say anything but they are sitting right in this room — maybe right next to you — those who have asked Rebecca’s question,
“אִם־כֵּ֔ן לָ֥מָּה זֶּ֖ה אָנֹ֑כִי”
“If so, why am I here?” and have found an answer for themselves, maybe not a permanent answer, but an answer for now, an imperfect answer in a broken time, a place for their souls — they won’t tell you but take my word, we’re sitting among giants tonight.
See Chizkuni to 25:22
Or HaChayyim to Gen. 25:22
