To the Editor:

In his unbridled admiration for the matriarch Rebekah [“A Woman for All Seasons,” September 1991], Leon R. Kass shares the opinions of most classical commentaries (Rashi, for example) who went to great lengths in justifying the stealing of Isaac’s blessing. Almost alone, the contemporary Israeli Bible instructor par excellence, Nehama Leibowitz, in her Studies in Bereshit, stands firm in insisting that an alternate view be presented: that Rebekah’s action was an unmitigated disaster for Jacob, and needlessly doomed him to great suffering and misery.

Jacob’s troubled life, discussed by Mr. Kass only in a brief footnote, may also be seen as retribution in kind for his dishonesty. Thus, Jacob is deceived on his wedding night, when, blinded by darkness, he mistakes one sibling (Leah) for another (Rachel). The parallel to his own indiscretion is strikingly clear; accenting it further is La-ban’s justification that in Haran (unlike Jacob’s home in Canaan?) it is not considered proper to have the younger child preempt the privileges of the first-born.

The midrash is even more explicit in stressing the principle of midah k’neged midah—measure for measure—as a major determinant of Jacob’s tribulations. It describes a bewildered Jacob arising in the morning to see Leah lying beside him. He berates her dishonesty in having answered to the name of Rachel throughout the night but now to the name of Leah; she retorts that in the practice of chicanery it was Jacob who served as her role model, for was it not true that when his father called him Esau he responded, as he also did when his father called him Jacob?

The consequence of Jacob’s unplanned marriage to two sisters was a home racked by unceasing strife. The rivalry between Jacob’s wives, one loved and the other scorned, would eventually be transferred to their respective children. Joseph’s tragic conflict with his brothers, bringing in its wake many years of inconsolable anguish to their father, was its natural outcome, as was the exile that ensued.

Unlike the other two patriarchs, both of whom died “old and full of years” in Canaan, Jacob was to end his “few and troubled” days in a foreign land. Genesis ends on a darkly somber note; its concluding chapter is pervaded by a palpable sense that the vise of Egyptian oppression is already beginning to tighten. Rebekah’s ill-conceived advice turns out to have cast an indelible pall over the life of her son from which he and his immediate descendants never escaped.

The appeal of the biblical sense of justice is its universality; everyone, even revered patriarchs, must respect it or suffer the consequences. Ends never justify means; thievery in the final reckoning remains just that—no matter how lofty its motives or exalted its perpetrators.

Norman A. Bloom
North Miami Beach, Florida

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To the Editor:

I find myself in agreement with Leon R. Kass’s major theses in “A Woman For All Seasons.” He is right in saying that Rebekah is the most fully developed and most endearing female character portrayed in the Bible, and in pointing out that diplomatic manipulation is likely to be more beneficial than confrontation in interpersonal relations, just as it is in international relations. Brutal honesty may be more brutal than honest. I would like to suggest, however, that Isaac may have been less naive than Mr. Kass, tradition, or even Rebekah perceived him to be.

Isaac clearly favored Esau over Jacob. Was that naive? Perhaps. But the Esau (of Genesis 33) who greeted his brother warmly upon Jacob’s return from Aram is as sympathetic a person as Jacob ever was. He may have been mercurial, but he had qualities that a father could cherish above those of Jacob. The Bible certainly does not conceal Jacob’s deviousness and self-pity.

And so Isaac chose to bestow a blessing of prosperity upon Esau that included material lordship over his brother. That is the blessing which he mistakenly gave to Jacob. Later, with every reason to be angry with Jacob for his deception, Isaac nevertheless gave an alternative blessing of material good to Esau. The important blessing of Abraham, however, Isaac neither gave to Esau nor intended to give to him. Only when Isaac knowingly had Jacob before him did he bestow that blessing of the possession of the land promised to Abraham.

It appears to me that Isaac knew his sons as well as Rebekah did. He may have favored Esau, and may have had good reason. But he knew that Jacob, and not Esau, was qualified to transmit God’s covenant to posterity.

Jerome Lefkowitz
Albany, New York

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To the Editor:

Leon R. Kass’s article is both remarkable for its insights into the character of Rebekah and delightful for its style. . . . Equally penetrating are the author’s closing remarks, where he points up the relevance of Rebekah as a model for women’s role in the family today. My one criticism is that Mr. Kass fails to mention that many of these insights are also to be found in the classic commentaries on the Bible.

For example, in discussing the words spoken by Eve after the birth of Cain—“kaniti ish et adonai”—Mr. Kass takes issue with the conventional translation of these words as “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.” “In my view,” he writes, “[t]he context favors ‘I have gotten a man (equally) with God’—or in plain speech, ‘God created a man, and now so have I.’” But Rashi’s commentary on this same passage is very similar. According to Rashi, the meaning of Eve’s words is as follows: “When [God] created me and my husband, he did it alone; with this [the birth of Cain] we are partners with God.”

Similarly, in the matter of Isaac’s blessing of his son Jacob, Mr. Kass praises Rebekah for her role in amplifying the words of Isaac (“and I will bless you before God”) so as to ensure that the blessing, and hence Jacob’s assumption of his birthright, has divine sanction. Mr. Kass’s observation on how Rebekah, “reporting her husband’s words to Jacob, improves them, placing God’s name, so to speak, onto Isaac’s tongue, and also into Jacob’s mind” is brilliant. Again, however, a similar commentary on the same verse is given by Nahmanides, who points out that the words “before God” are not spoken by Isaac, but only by Rebekah. According to Nahmanides, “In this entire chapter there is no mention of the words, ‘before God’; it is only the mother who said this to Jacob, so that the blessing would be in the holy spirit [ruah ha-kodesh].” Finally, there are several other interpretations offered by Mr. Kass which are to be found in chapter 40 of Bereshit Rabah, a commentary on the Book of Genesis. . . .

True, none of the sources I have quoted portrays Rebekah in Mr. Kass’s striking fashion. Still, had he quoted, or even referred to, some of these midrashim, they would have lent greater authenticity to his description of Rebekah as a “woman for all seasons.”

[Rabbi] Mayer Abramowitz
Jewish Leadership Institute
Miami Beach, Florida

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To the Editor:

Many thanks for Leon R. Kass’s “A Woman for All Seasons.” What an excellent thing that one can still be reminded of how to read by an article in a magazine available at any good newsstand.

Daniel Lehrman
Minneapolis, Minnesota

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Leon R. Kass writes:

First let me express my gratitude to all the correspondents for addressing my interpretation of the text. Frankly, I expected something of an outcry about the inferences I tred to draw regarding the role of women and the problem of transmission in today’s society. I shall not assume from the silence that everyone is persuaded that Rebekah might still be a woman for all seasons.

Norman A. Bloom, following Nehama Leibowitz, does not think Rebekah was admirable, even in her day. He raises important arguments, mostly based on the troubles in the life of Jacob, which he regards as measure-for-measure “retribution” for the deception of Isaac, in turn to be blamed on—who else?—his mother, Rebekah. With part of his argument I concur: Jacob does indeed suffer in kind for his own shrewdness. Like Odysseus, whom he resembles, he is made to wander far and endure much before he is truly fit to inherit the blessing of Abraham. In the wonderful moral universe of the Torah, “misdeeds,” even when justifiable on grounds of necessity, are not simply lost and forgotten; the biblical author is not Machiavelli. But the trouble with Jacob is not mainly his mother’s fault; post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy. Jacob was even in the womb a supplanter (see the episode of Jacob’s birth, with his “hand on Esau’s heel,” Genesis 25:26), and his guile and aspirations to self-sufficiency precede the deception of his father. Rebekah helps to start Jacob on a course—full of traps and troubles, to be sure—that does eventually educate Jacob in the ways of God and righteousness, precisely by means of his troubles. But this argument is for the essay I have not yet written.

What Mr. Bloom and other moralistic readers of Genesis fail to appreciate is the sociopolitical problem human beings face—especially in a period of founding and before the coming of law and its morality—of how to transmit “the way” in the face of almost insuperable obstacles: weak fathers, sibling enmity, foreign dangers and temptations, and the usually wayward leanings of the uninstructed human heart. Let the critics of Rebekah, remembering the context and the task of transmission (and remembering especially the story of Cain and Abel), find a better answer than hers to the question she faced, and which I had put as follows: “How to replace the order of birth and strength with the order of merit, without fratricide. Second, how to do this with the support and blessing of a less-thanright father who, to begin with, foolishly prefers the wrong son.” Only prudence—not moralism—can find the just-right-thing-to-doin-light-of-the-circumstances, and Rebekah the prudent surely found it.

Jerome Lefkowitz is not persuaded that Isaac is foolish in preferring Esau. I grant that Esau had his virtues—who doesn’t?—not least his loyalty to Isaac and his more direct and “manly” ways. But the text undercuts Isaac’s expressed preference for Esau by linking it immediately with the story of the sale of the birthright, in which Esau shows his radical defectiveness by despising his inheritance. Paternal preference which ignores and subverts the paternal work of transmission can only be called foolish. Further, there is no textual evidence that Isaac originally intended to give the blessing of Abraham to Jacob. Indeed, there is no evidence that he intended to give to either son any blessing except for material prosperity and lordship until after he is brought to his senses thanks to the deception, which, I argue, teaches him for the first time that he has long deceived himself. Before this episode, Isaac’s piety—regarding both Abraham and God—cannot be taken for granted, and a careful reading of the text calls it into question.

This leads to a general comment on my approach to the text, which will serve also as a reply to Rabbi Mayer Abramowitz. I am, of course, always pleased to discover that my insights are not my insights alone, for I seek neither originality nor priority but understanding. But I have deliberately chosen to approach the text without the benefit of the traditional commentaries, for many reasons. I try in my classes on Genesis to enable all my students to make this book speak to them, directly and without regard to their prior religious commitments. I am less interested in the religious use made of the text than in the “teachings” of the text itself, which I believe must be accessible to any careful reader without intermediaries. Because I read the text “philosophically”—that is, in search of wisdom—and find that, so read, it addresses enduring questions of moral and political philosophy, I cannot count on much help from sources that often supply simply pious answers to genuine perplexities opened up by the text. (An example: Abraham’s smashing of his father’s idols, proving his precocious monotheism, closes off a great question raised by Genesis before it can be pondered: why does Abraham harken when God calls? Does he really know who is speaking?) Other traditional commentators expound the text apologetically or with a view to law and observance (i.e., with halakhic concerns), practices which, however illuminating, may not help sufficiently in finding the meaning of the text as an unfolding book. Though I fully expect (and hope) that my unmediated readings will often agree with tradition, I think we are well advised, if it is the book itself that we wish to understand, to try to read it as directly and naively as possible.

It should now be clear why I regard Daniel Lehrman’s letter as one of the finest compliments I have ever received. I thank him for it.