How Not To Measure Our Self-Worth | Investigating Our Own True Motivations
Last week, we celebrated the Bat Mitzvah of Sarah Tobacman. Sarah’s parashah (Torah portion) was Vayetze a phrase which literally translates to “he left,” as in Jacob, our ancestor, left his hometown of Be’er Sheva—fled it, is more accurate—after purloining the patriarchal blessing of his father Isaac, a blessing which had been intended for Jacob’s slightly older twin brother Esau, until Jacob, prodded by his mother Rebecca had resorted to disguise, tricking his ailing (and blind) father into giving him the blessing instead of Esau.
Jacob flees to the land his grandfather Abraham had migrated from, Haran, where he falls in love with Rachel, is then tricked in turn by her father Laban into marrying her older sister Leah, before ultimately getting to marry them both. (You with us so far?)
What follows (described also in the D’var Torah below) is that God sees the straits that Leah is in, being the unloved wife, and blesses her by “opening her womb,” leading her to give birth to four children. Rachel, unable to conceive herself, is jealous and, unable to give birth to children herself, gives Jacob her handmaid Bilhah who gives birth to two children on her behalf (an event we’ll never read the same way after encountering Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). Leah responds in kind, giving Jacob her handmaid, Zilpah, for the same purpose. Sara’s part of the portion closed with Zilpah bearing two children on behalf of Leah.
Sarah openly struggled with this portion. She empathized first with an element of what Leah and Rachel were experiencing and then lamented the depiction of Bilhah and Zilpah.
Sarah identified the way in whichLeah and Rachel appeared to determine their self-worth solely by one feature of their lives which was beyond their control: the ability to bear children. Leah, after giving birth to her first son, named him in relationship to the phrase, “now my husband will love me.”
Sarah analogized these experiences to many of us who might determine our own self worth by something not entirely within our control—like our grades in school or the profit margins of someone running a small business. Sarah invited us to find trustworthy sources to determine our sense of self worth—our own internal sense, or a trusted loved one or friend. It was a message of self-love and self-compassion.
Sarah also invited us to turn that compassion outward as well. She observed how flippantly the experience of Bilhah and Zilpah are handled in the story, and invited us to think about who it is in our own lives whose experiences we don’t fully take into account? Who in our own lives do we fail to see their full humanity? How can we do better?
These were messages of deep maturity and wisdom. We thank Sarah for her Torah.
I’ll also share the D’var Torah I offered on the eve of Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah:
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Sara’s portion is called Vayetze from the Book of Bereshit, the Book of Genesis. Vayetze means “he left” as in Vayetze Ya’akov, Jacob left Be’er Sheva, where we had been living with his family right up until the incident where he, by trickery, procured the patriarchal blessing from his father Isaac in the place of his slightly older twin brother Esau, who was due for that blessing, as the elder.
The portion of the story that we’ll read tomorrow takes place after Jacob has fled from his homeland and landed in Haran, the site his family was from in previous generations, and there he encounters and falls in love with the beautiful Rachel. Jacob asks her father Laban for her hand in marriage, which Laban says he will give him after working for him for seven years.
Jacob does so and the years, we read, feel to him but a few days because of his love for her.
They reach the night of their wedding, a festive event, Jacob marries the woman donning a beautiful veil, he wakes up the next morning and, behold, it is not Rachel, but rather Rachel’s older sister, Leah.
Aghast, Jacob exclaims to their father Laban, Mah zot asitah, “what is this you have done to me?” to which Laban replies “It is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older.
The trained ear hears what scholar Nachum Sarna calls the dramatic irony here. Of course, who else carried out a deceitful switch of siblings in the Torah, playing with the themes of younger and older but Jacob himself, when he pretended to be his older brother Esau to procure the fateful blessing from his father Isaac, when Isaac’s eyesight had been failing?
Which brings us to an interesting word choice in the Torah and the theme of this D’var Torah, this teaching. Following this switch-a-roo at the wedding, Laban agrees to give Jacob his daughter Rachel in marriage again, and so act two begins further on into Jacob’s marriages to both Rachel and Leah simultaneously. The first verse of this new act is as follows: Va’yar adonai ki senuah leah. Adonai, the Source of Being, saw, as the most prominent translation says, that Leah was, senuah, unloved.
Of course, those familiar with Hebrew know that this word “unloved” is very much a euphemistic translation. Senuah doesn’t mean unloved. It means hated.
Hated? Isn’t that a bit strong? What about Leah’s life and actions warrants her being hated? And by whom?
One commentator suggests: by Jacob, but not for reasons that you might think. “Knowing what we know about human psychology,” Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, “we can also suspect that Jacob did indeed hate Leah because, by reminding him of the fraudulent circumstances of their wedding, she reminded him of his most shameful memory, the time he deceived his own father.” We often recoil from people, he suggests, for confronting us with what we like least about ourselves.
Ouch. Leah finds herself in an unfortunate state. We don’t know how complicit she was in the deception of Jacob; we do know the ways in which this deception reminded him of his own most regrettable moment—that moment, where, like Leah, a parent, in his case his mother Rebecca, prodded him to deceive his own father through disguising himself as his sibling, his brother Esau, just as she was disguised as her sister Rachel.
It invites us to reflect, in our own lives, on who we might bear ill-will towards and what the source of this ill-will is. It doesn’t mean it’s alway about us rather than about them. But it sometimes is.
Another version of this is what we might call the resentment trap. Popular psychologist Brene Brown recently reflected on how we often think of resentment as a form of anger—we resent someone because they did something wrong, we’re angry at them—when in fact, she suggests, resentment is a form of envy. We resent someone because we’re envious of them, envious that they give themselves permission to do something we wish we could give ourselves permission to do. That they give themselves permission to not work as hard as we think we always need to be working, they give themselves permission to ask for help where we’re not sure we’d feel comfortable asking for help, permission to rest when we wish we could rest.
Again, this doesn’t mean it’s always about us. Of course we sometimes have legitimate grievances with people in our lives where they need to do better by us. As Rabbi Jacob Staub suggests, “this should not be used to silence real, heartfelt disputes with regard to what is right, just and sacred. We shouldn’t shrink from” expressing to others when then they’ve hurt us or when their actions are causing problems for the relationship, in order to help facilitate a change in behavior or in the relationship, but we should, he suggests, be attentive and curious about the source of our feelings. How much is it about them, and how much is it about us?
How much nourishment are we giving ourselves? How much compassion are we extending to ourselves? Has Jacob done the work of teshuvah, return/repentance, to allow himself to move on from his past actions, to forgive himself, and therefore to not turn his fire towards his wife Leah?
What work have we done in our own lives to be discerning about the source of our feelings with respect to our loved ones? How are we treating ourselves? Are we giving ourselves permission to be good to ourselves so we have resources stored up to be gentle to those around us?
These aren’t easy questions. Sometimes the answer is yes, we have been good to ourselves and this other person is taking advantage of our good graces. Still, when we encounter a text in our Torah, like, Va’yar adonai ki senuah leah, Adonai, the source of being, saw, that Leah was hated—a striking word for those circumstances, we’re invited to reflect on what those words might offer our own lives.
Tomorrow, we’re going to hear a teaching on the next part of the story from our Bat Mitzvah Sara, who came to her own conclusions about what this text has to stay, and how it affects our lives, and we look forward to her Torah.
