Parashat Vayishlach ~ and he sent

Saturday 6 December 2014        Kislev 14  5775

Parashat Vayishlach ~ and he sent                                                by Shelley Wood Gauld
Gen 32: 3 ~ 36:43, Obadiah 1:1~21, Heb 11:11~20. Matt 2:3~6 and 2:16~18

“Thus says the Eternal One, A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more…”  Jer. 31:15 and Matt 2:17~18

The prophet Jeremiah invokes the name of Rachel as the consummate ’mother’ or matriarch of Israel ~ the one who would share the sorrow and suffering of her descendants.  The searing words are emblazoned on the Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial and this deep dark lament reverberates in a large sculpture of a woman holding her dead child…

We learn in this parashah that Rachel died in childbirth on the way to Ephrath-Bethlehem and was buried in a lonely grave on the roadside, outside of that city. She is the only matriarch not to have been buried in the Cave of Machpelah ~ and the rabbis teach that this was in keeping with later Torah commands concerning a man having only one wife; that it would have been an embarrassment to the ancestors of the Patriarchs if Jacob had been buried with two wives. Rachel was his first and only love, but Leah was his first wife…

Beautiful Rachel, the one who welcomed Jacob the fugitive and showed kindness to him on his arrival in Haran ~ the one with whom he immediately fell in love and desired to marry ~ was to have her natural and rightful place as Jacob’s wife usurped by her older sister. She was to be forced to take second place and to share him not only Leah, but two handmaidens. And it was Rachel alone, of all four women, who was to suffer the degradation and grief (within that social context) of barrenness and childlessness…  

We notice that when Laban caught up with Jacob and his family after they had fled from him, that it was Rachel who had stolen her father’s idols ~ and who then lied to him saying that she could not get up from the camel bag on which she was sitting and in which she had hidden the idols because she was menstruating. Jacob then inadvertently appeared to put a curse on her by saying to Laban that the one who had stolen his idols ‘would surely die’…. Stealing idols? Lying? Cursed? Why is Rachel considered to be the greatest of all the matriarchs?

It is possible that Rachel resorted to appealing to her family idols in her desperation to have a child ~ and that even after Joseph was born, she held on to those idols because she longed for another child? She also ‘bought’ mandrakes, ‘dudaim’, a supposed cure for infertility, from Leah. So it seems there was a crossing of the line in terms of her trust in HaShem...  It appears that her suffering, her heartache, made her investigate alternate means of achieving what she most desired. And yet HaShem understood her plight, her heart. Suffering can deepen the bonds of faith in HaShem.  It can also be a source of bitterness and rebellion; a catalyst for apostasy. But HaShem sees all.  

The birth of Rachel’s baby ‘Ben-Oni’ (Aramaic: Son of my Mourning) was a breach birth. The midwife declared it to be a boy before the child had been fully birthed ~ that is, the baby emerged feet first. Hence the difficult birth. Jacob quickly renamed him Binyamin, meaning “Son of the right hand” ~ the right hand being a symbol of strength. He thus declared the birth of the twelfth son, the only son to be born in Canaan, to be a blessing to him.

Rachel’s life was hard, anxiety-ridden. It was a full of heartache, disappointments and delayed gratification. Hers was a marriage with a shocking trickery-ridden beginning and a sad untimely ending. Her joys were short-lived and her victories few. She did not labour in child-bearing, she laboured in sorrow. ‘Rachel’ means ‘ewe’ ~ and her life has the undertones of a lamb of sacrifice … Her voice is that of the beloved of HaShem; her grief, the suffering of a sorrowful heart sore bride…
The sages teach that Rachel was buried outside of Bethlehem, because that was the route that the exiles would take as they journeyed to Babylon... She would mourn for them... She is also the grandmother of Ephraim, the ‘bechor’ of Joseph, the leading tribe of the exiled Northern Kingdom. She would mourn for them... The birth of Yeshua in Bethlehem was drenched in the blood of Jewish boys under the age of two.

She would mourn for them too (Matt 2:17~18). But this last Bethlehem birth would end in the premature sacrificial death of the Son (of the Right Hand of God) and His mother would proclaim “My soul magnifies Adonai…. from now on all generations will call me blessed.”