Tol'dot 5772

We met Rebekah at the well last week:  gracious, open, hospitable.  She’s a young woman who takes charge of her destiny, seizing the opportunity to leave her brother’s house and marry Isaac, her cousin in a far-off land.

I love Rebekah.  She’s vibrant, determined, perhaps even feisty.  In Collin Burgheimer’s words, she’s “spunky.”

But this week’s portion, Tol’dot, shows us Rebekah twenty years later, and then several decades older still.  She’s manipulative, controlling, even deceitful.  And I have to wonder:  What changed?  How did that caring young woman become that cold?  Is this an inevitable transformation of age?  Is it a result of the life she led?  Or was the woman she became always within her?

Rebekah’s lived with the pain of childlessness.  She’s lived with the pain of her husband.  She’s lived with pains unseen by the text.  We don’t hear her cry out until the feels the pain of the twins struggling inside her.  Then she asks that existential question:  “Why do I (even) exist?”  (Genesis 25:2)

This is one of adulthood’s essential tasks:  to retain the openness, freshness and suppleness of youth even as we mature.  What can we, as adults, do to fight off the slow creep of time, of resentment, of bitterness, of cold?  How do you keep the flame of your younger self flickering, laughing, growing, learning, dancing?