on chayei sarah - toldot - vayeitzei, as shabbos floats in

I was trying to remember an elusive Chayei Sarah vort last week and it came up in conversation this Shabbos. What does it mean that Yitzchak's prayers were answered before Rivkah's before he was a tzadik ben tzadik (righteous man, the son of a righteous man)?

Perhaps (rather than the oft inferred idea that someone born into a righteous family is automatically holier than someone who gets there independent of their family) the lesson here is that to be a tzadik ben tazadik comes with its own heavy set of challenges. The torch is not easily passed forward, einah yerushah lach - Torah does not come as an automatic inheritance. It was to Yitzchak's merit that despite, rather than because of, being the son of perhaps the most righteous man who ever lived, he was a man of complete virtue and dedication himself. I once heard that the son of a prominent man said that "it's not easy being the son of the moral conscience of the world." Ouch. This comes to mind, though there is no question that Yitzchak Avinu would never have spoken that way.

A friend of mine noticed that forms of the word for approach (the root is comprised of the letters gimel and shin) repeatedly appear in the story in Toldot of Yaakov being blessed by Yitzchak. He understood this based on the idea that the word for connection, gesh, is related to the word for bridge - gesher, which makes sense if you think about it. The idea is this word for approach is used in the Torah to indicate a connection made between two entities that you wouldn't expect to be connected. This is similar to a bridge that connects two pieces of land that seem impossibly separated by water. The land of Goshen is named with the same root, as it unexpectedly tied to Jews to Egypt. Similarly, when Yehudah approached Yosef a form of this word is used because these two men represent two seemingly opposite ideals that somehow did and will again connect.

What was Rivkah so upset about? She would have twins and one would be good and the other not so much. Rav Schwadron used to like to offer the explanation that she initially didn't know that she was having twins. She thought there was one child growing inside her who was equally passionate about light and darkness. (A friend of mine once heard Rav Schwadron say this live and the way he put it was that "she thought she was giving birth to a Mizrachinik [sic]" - ).

This reminds me (minus the parenthesis) of the idea of Eliyahu leaving the people speechless by asking (Melachim 1, 18:21) how long they planned to skip on two branches, vacillate between two options, explaining that they should decide who is the true G-d and follow him. All this is not simple and inconsistency and vacillation is perhaps, to some extent, a part of life. More on this another time. maybe.

Here's what I wrote last year, just before Shabbos. Just like now, and I'm sticking to this VaYeitzei vort. And here's an, as usual, brilliantly out of the box thought on VaYeitzei, from Rav Chaim Schmuelewitz.

Shabbat Shalom. May we be blessed with small, personal peace that spreads and becomes universal.