Parshah Commentary
This week’s parshah, Chayei Sarah, begins by detailing Sarah’s death and Abraham’s subsequent aging; though he has been blessed with wealth, as Abraham nears the end of his life, he faces a ruptured relationship with the beloved son meant to carry on his legacy—a son whom he nearly sacrificed in last week’s reading and who is now alone, with no wife or heirs. The largest narrative chunk in this slow, meditative parshah begins with Abraham seeking to rectify this situation, charging his senior servant—identified by the rabbis as Eliezer, a servant mentioned earlier in Breishit—to return to the land in which Abraham was born and find Isaac a wife. Although Abraham only instructs Eliezer regarding the geographic constraints of his search, Eliezer devises a specific test to find a suitable partner for Isaac. He positions himself by a spring outside the city, declaring to God, “Let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’—let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac.”
Eliezer is seemingly interested not just in the location and lineage of Isaac’s prospective wife, but in the quality of her character; most commentators identify the trait he’s seeking as chesed, or kindness. Improbably, he’s scarcely finished speaking when Rebecca—who the omniscient narrator informs us is from Abraham’s family—arrives; she fills her jug with water, offers it to Eliezer to drink, and then offers to water all ten of his camels until they finish drinking. She carries out the task with great alacrity: In a single verse, the text relates that she hurried (“vatimaher”) and that she ran (“vataratz”) to and from the well to fill the camel’s trough.
Even at first glance, this is an act of admirable generosity—to meet a stranger’s call and then offer more. But its full significance becomes clear when we consider the magnitude of the task. As Bible scholar Jack Sasson notes, one camel can drink up to 100 liters at a time, especially after a long journey. To provide ten camels with roughly 1000 liters of water would have taken dozens upon dozens of trips. Rebecca doesn’t commit to a mere gesture of kindness—she commits to lengthy, grueling labor on behalf of a stranger. And she does so with urgency! The test Eliezer devised was, it seems, not meant just to find a suitably kind match for Abraham’s son; if that had been the case, a woman who simply offered water to Eliezer would have sufficed. But this is a matter of perpetuating a legacy, building a world. Isaac, as the inheritor of Abraham’s mission in the world, needs a partner who is not merely pleasant; she needs to be committed.
In the past few weeks, I have been inundated with messages from organizations, friends, comrades, and strangers about how to move forward—what we need to do to face this mask-off fascism, to make sure as many people as possible survive. One theme that arises frequently is the need to be kind to one another, to be gentle in our interactions. And this kindness is good, vital, even essential—but it is also insufficient. Moments of care alone cannot sustain us as our broader systems collapse; what we require is labor. We all need a draught of water, but that offers only temporary reprieve. The 19th-century commentator the Malbim, describing Rebecca’s thought process, imagines her registering Eliezer as too weak even to tilt the water jar for himself, in pain and in need; surely, she thinks, if he can’t manage this, he can’t draw water for ten camels. What good is the reprieve of this drink if he remains stranded at the well, his camels too weak to go on? In Rebecca’s response, she registers Eliezer’s immediate needs as well as the support he requires for a long journey ahead, understanding both as necessary and urgent.
If anything is clear from the weeks since the election—and this past year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which our movements have been unable to stop—it is that we need to build. If the world we live in is one collapsing around us, one we cannot stand to perpetuate, we must build in the rubble. Our care for one another must take the shape not only of response to immediate needs, but also commitment to that long, slow work, even when it’s grueling. Daily kindnesses and care must be accompanied by a broader orientation towards our community, our world—toward forging structures that will sustain us, as we continue to toil with and for each other.
Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.
