Dvar Torah on Parshat Chayei Sarah

"I don't believe in excess, success is to give I don't believe in riches but you should see where I live... Don't believe in forced entry, I don't believe in rape But every time she passes by wild thoughts escape... I don't believe in deathrow, skidrow or the gangs Don't believe in the Uzi it just went off in my hand." (From 'God Part II', U2, 'Rattle and Hum') After the death of his wife, Sarah, Abraham decides that he needs to find a wife for his son, Yitzchak. He sends his trusted servant, Eliezer, to Aram Naharayim (modern-day Iraq), Abraham's birthplace, to find a bride from among his relatives. The mission is a success: Eliezer meets Rebecca, brings her back to the land of Canaan, and the marriage works. However, Rashi, quoting from the Rabbinic Midrash, tips us off to something we might have missed: some tension between the major protagonists of the story. When Eliezer gets to Aram, and sees how kind (and therefore appropriate as a wife) Rebecca is - she offers him and his camels water - he goes with her to her home to arrange the marriage with her family. When he meets them, he explains himself and his purpose, and recounts how Abraham has asked him to find a wife for his son: "Now my master had me swear, saying, 'you are not to take a wife for my son from the women of the Canaanites, in whose land I am settled. No! Go to my father's house, to my clan, and take a wife for my son.' I said to my master: 'perhaps the woman will not go after me.' He said to me: 'God, in whose presence I have walked, will send his messengers with you, he will grant success to your journey, so that you will take a wife for my son from my clan and from my father's house.'" It all looks OK, but Rashi points out that the word in Hebrew for 'perhaps' - 'oolai', is spelled without the letter vav, so that it can be read as 'ailai', meaning not "perhaps" but, rather, "to me". Rashi sees this as a subliminal statement by Eliezer saying that if the prospective bride from Aram refuses to go, and he fails to find a wife for Yitzchak, he would then like to see his master's son marry his - Eliezer's - daughter, so that Yitzchak would be related by that marriage - "to me". In other words, Eliezer, all during his trip to seek a bride for his master's son, is really wishing for failure, so that Yitzchak will, by default, marry his daughter. Rashi then volunteers some fascinating additional information. As he tells it, Abraham understands what Eliezer is saying. He understands his desire to have his own daughter marry into his master's family, and he responds to this hope on Eliezer's part in a way that has bothered me for over forty years: "Abraham said to him: my son is blessed, and you are accursed [for you are a descendant of Canaan, who was cursed for treating his grandfather Noah shamefully shortly after the flood], and an accursed one can not be united with a blessed one." Can you believe it? Eliezer, the trusted servant, who has gone to find a wife for his master's son, and is all the while hoping that perhaps his own daughter might be considered for this role, is spoken to in this way by Abraham, and he still remains faithful! He still discharges his duty loyally! And he still, according to what Rashi thinks he says to Rebecca's family, really wishes that his own daughter could marry Yitzchak, the son of the man who has spoken so cruelly to him! Ever since I first learned this Rashi, I've been embarrassed at the way Abraham treated the loyal Eliezer, and I have been unable to comprehend Eliezer's continued loyalty. Perhaps we can understand Eliezer's behavior this way: We each have a set of beliefs and values; things we believe, intellectually and theoretically, to be right. However, there are also other forces at work around and within us. As the U2 song above says, we may believe certain things, but that doesn't necessarily prevent us from having emotional responses to certain stimuli which are at odds with those beliefs. And the reverse: our belief system may not always make sense in terms of some of our most deeply felt hopes and desires. We may have a problem with certain aspects of our belief system. We may not, in every respect, actually live in accordance with it. But we can still choose to remain, generally, convinced of that system's essential rightness, and try, at least, to act accordingly. This seems to be what is going on with Eliezer. He is ever-loyal to Abraham, convinced of the truth of his monotheistic faith and value system, committed to serving him. When faced with some of the less than attractive elements of that system, elements which, in fact, specifically exclude him from full participation in Abraham's world, he remains loyal to the larger framework of that faith. His unintentional (semi-intentional?) revelation that he still hopes that Yitzchak, if all else fails - if he, Eliezer, fails - will marry his daughter, indicates that, emotionally, he has not really come to terms with the contradictions of his working within a faith system which has treated him so badly, and which, ultimately, rejects him. He has not solved the problems he has with the beliefs he has chosen, he simply lives with them: loyal to the framework he has chosen as a follower of Abraham, and yet, rejected on one level by that system, unable to fully realize himself as an individual within it. I would add that this confusion over conflicting values, emotions, and desires is connected to questions about our identity, to the question of who we really are. Although it is easy to explain these kinds of contradictions between a person's behavior and his or her value system as hypocrisy, or cowardice, it is, I think, facile to do so. It may be more true to see them as expressions of complexity and confusion. These contradictions are actually just the gap between certain things we think, other things we think, things we feel, and things that happen to us. They are the distance between who we are and who we would like to be, how we would like things to be and how they really are. Just the normal way people function. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix