A well-told tale

PARASHAT TOLDOT/GENESIS 25:19 - 28:9
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch

Thus when Isaiah calls out, "Ho, all who are thirsty, come for water, even if you have no money (Isaiah 55:1)," the Rabbis take his words as an invitation to enter the world of Torah. The bedrock of synagogue practice, the regular reading of the Torah, rests on this analogy. No more than three days are to go by without a public recitation of Scripture.

According to the narrative of Exodus, after crossing the Sea of Reeds, the people of Israel wander in the wilderness for three days without sign of water, quickly erasing any memory of previous miracles and leading to popular unrest (Exodus 15:22). The Talmud treats the episode metaphorically: Three days without exposure to any word of Torah was more than Israel could endure. And so at some point, prophetic leadership established the custom of reading from the Torah liturgically, not only on Shabbat morning, but also on Shabbat afternoon and on Monday and Thursday mornings. On the day we complete one parsha in the morning, we start the next one in the afternoon, and we do so twice more during the week. To be removed from Torah is as fatal as a drought.

The rabbinic analogy of Torah, like water, as giver of life offers a clue to interpreting an obscure fragment in the life of Isaac. Although the parsha bears the name "This is the story of Isaac," it recounts tantalizingly little about his adult life. Yet the Torah devotes a half-dozen verses (Genesis 26:17-22) to tell of Isaac's efforts to restore to working order the wells built by his father.

The imagery of a son seeking to reappropriate the wells that sustained his father resonates with symbolic overtones of healing a grievous breach. It is no accident that the first time Isaac perceives that the God who addresses him is the God of his father occurs directly after the restoration of the wells (26:24).

There is much in the Torah narrative to imply that Isaac's loyalty to the faith of his father was badly strained by the ordeal of the binding at Mount Moriah. For one, Isaac does not return to Beersheba with Abraham (22:19). Second, Isaac mourns intensely when Sarah dies, remaining unconsoled until Rebecca enters his life (24:67). Did he, perhaps, attribute his mother's death after the binding, as the midrash does, to the unfathomable behavior of Abraham? Had he taken shelter in her protective love, rather than in his father's? Third, after his sons are born, Isaac prefers Esau, "a skilled hunter, a man of the outdoors (25:27)," who exhibits little interest in such matters as justice and righteousness that we identify with Abraham (18:19).

The tale of the wells is intended to modify that impression. Isaac did not remain permanently estranged from his father's faith. He struggled to overcome the scars of his terror, to understand the silent anguish of his impervious father. He returned to remove the debris, which had covered and contaminated the wells, so that he might drink again from their sacred water. But to internalize that legacy, he needed to prune it of its overwrought accretions, to regain its balance and integrity.

Transmission is a dynamic, interactive process governed by both responsiveness and reverence. The custodians of tradition must feel the pain of the faithful even as they heed the voice of God. No one has caught the creative spirit of this dialectical relationship more sharply than the incomparable German writer Goethe: "What you have inherited (passively) from your ancestors, take hold of it (actively) in order to make it your own."

Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.