Tumultuous Trembling: Toldot
Tumultuous Trembling: Toldot

 

The Torah records only the seminal events in the lives of our Patriarchs of blessed memory, yet among these, only two have warranted a reaction of trembling.

The first may be readily understood, without necessitating any explanation even on its simplest level: Yitzchak is bound upon the altar. His father is standing over him with the slaughtering knife held aloft, ready to kill him and complete the sacrifice to the Ribbonoh shel Olam.

The second time occurs in this Parsha. Yitzchak has unknowingly blessed Yaakov thinking him to be Esau. When Esau comes in for his blessing on the heels of Yaakov’s departure and asks for his father’s blessing, Yitzchak “trembled a very great trembling.”

From this wording, our rabbis deduce that this trembling was even greater than the trembling Yitzchak felt anticipating his imminent death upon the altar.

First, when Yitzchak was bound and ready to die for the sanctification of God’s name, he understood that the nation to eventually descend from Avraham (whether through him or some future son) would face challenges when they too must be willing to give their lives in the service of Hakodosh Boruch Hu. But as difficult as that would be, as Rabbi Sternbach explains in TaamVodaath, it is a test that one can only face once in a lifetime.

Here was a different, more difficult challenge. Here, as Yitzchak understood, was the constant challenge of living one’s live with Torah values even amid an alien world whose values were much different. Would Yaakov be able to remain true to his ideals when thrust among other cultures, or would he adapt to their practices and assimilate? For here Yaakov was already being forced to practice the trickery of Esau.

Rabbi Frand in Listen to Your Messages clarifies this idea in the vernacular of our culture. Generally, when we ask someone upon initially meeting them, “What do you do,” we tend to get the reply of, “I am a [doctor/ accountant/teacher/etc.].” We tend to define ourselves by our career, when our essence is really our inward soul. “I am a God fearing Jew who earns his living as a [doctor/etc.],” should be our reply.

Our society starts this crossover of identity and career already with our children. We ask them what they want to be when they grow up and they reply with the profession, anything from a fireman to an astronaut. While we generally are forced to earn a living within the framework of the secular world, we must continually strive to maintain our inner voice of Yaakov. It was the fear that his descendants might lose that inner soul of Yiddishkeit that so frightened Yitzchak.



We tend to define ourselves by our career, when our essence is really our inward soul. “I am a God fearing Jew who earns his living as a [doctor/etc.],” is what we should say.

But there were other reasons for Yitzchak’s trembling. We who are so far removed from the exalted level of our patriarchs may find Rav Dunner’s suggestion that Yitzchak trembled for fear of having erred in the order of giving the blessings difficult to understand. Yitzchak’s association with Hakodosh Boruch Hu was so close that any deviation from the straight and correct behavior was traumatic to him.

Rabbi Yaakov Hillel develops this theme in his seferAscending the Path. He relates the horror of the Vilna Gaon at the possibility of having desecrated Shabbos by touching something which may have been muktzah. He tells us of the nightly weeping of the Yismach Moshe who berated himself for learning only fifty two pages of Talmud instead of his usual fifty six.

We are so ignorant of the impact of our slightest deed that we minimize our wrongdoing. But to a Yitzchak, every minor mistake, not even a real sin, caused him tremendous heartache and trembling. How much more aware must we become of our day to day actions, let alone our real transgressions. How much more must we apply ourselves so that we don’t feel exonerated by doing the bare minimum required in the performance of a mitzvah. After all, in the World to Come, we may also be delegated to the “bare minimum” level, notes Rabbi Menachem Azariah of Pano.

Rabbi Goldwicht in Asufat Maarachot offers a profound insight into the cause of trembling and thereby connects the two events in Yitzchak’s life. Rabbi Goldwicht explains that the core cause of trembling is the upheaval of our perception. Yitzchak knew that his father Avraham’s defining trait was chessed, yet he was now witnessing his father about to perform an act of unrivaled cruelty, of slaughtering his own son.

With the reversal of the blessings Yitzchak again saw the incompatibility of Yaakov’s actions with his defining trait. Yaakov was the man of truth, yet here he was forced into deceit. The contradictions in each of these cases led to Yitzchak’s trembling. But here the deceit was compounded, for Yitzchak’s loyal wife Rivka was the major participant in this deceit, and so the trembling was even greater.

Rabbi Goldwicht cites yet another example of Biblical trembling, the trembling of Boaz at finding Ruth at his feet in the middle of the night. Boaz too was caught off guard, for his impression of Ruth was one of extreme modesty, but this action appeared quite brazen.

Yet Boaz blesses Ruth, for he realizes that sometimes in doing the will of Hashem one must depart from one’s normal behavior patterns. It is for this same reason that Yitzchak validates his blessing of Yaakov, for he too realizes that Yaakov was deceitful in order to perform the will of Hakodosh Boruch Hu.

As the Daas Schraga states, each person must view his perception of truth not against a barometer of his own making, but against the barometer Hashem Himself provides. When a mother bird forces her nestling out of the nest to teach them to fly, is she being cruel or practicing “tough love” and responding to a higher truth. There are times in life when we must also act against general character to maintain a truer integrity.

Rabbi Chaim Shmulevitz cites another case of bewilderment and confusion, although “trembling” per se is not written even though it was probably felt. When Yoseph revealed himself to his brothers, Rabbi Shmulevitz surmises, their shame and speechlessness was due to a complete sense of disorientation. Their entire belief system and the actions they had taken was overturned. They had always believed Yosef was a rodef, a pursuer with murderous intentions towards them, whose overriding desire was to be the chief heir of their father.

But now, in Egypt, he proved them wrong, for he not only was their savior but also attributed all that had befallen him to a manifestation of the Divine plan rather than to their evil intentions. How could they now justify having hated him, trying to leave him to die in the pit, selling him into slavery? The end they thought was necessary, of preserving the tribes of Israel was erroneous; the means they  had used to achieve this perceived end were now proven to be false. Their entire lives were now delegitimatized.

Similarly, explains Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, Yitzchak’s world was also turned upside down. All his life Yitzchak had assumed that Esau was the righteous son, worthy of being the firstborn. Only now did he suddenly see how blind he had been, how easily he had been fooled all his life as he was now fooled with a little goatskin over Yaakov’s arms. Yitzchak therefore trembled at the magnitude of his errors.

If Yitzchak could be so easily fooled, asks the author of Letitcha Elyon, how much more so are we being fooled in our lives? How much of the time we devote to various things in our lives is the result of erroneous assumptions? How often do we put careers ahead of family time in the mistaken belief that our children need more things when what they really need is time  to be together with their parents?

Yitzchak trembled for us all. He trembled lest we lose the inner voice of Yaakov and assimilate into the foreign culture. He trembled from his sensitivity to the slightest hint of wrongdoing, and he trembled at the realization that things are not always what they seem and that sometimes we must even go against our innate sense of right to achieve real Truth.

http://download.613.org/smiles/videos/5772/5772-11-toldos-tumultuous-trembling.mp3   is link for audio.

http://www.613.org/smiles/sources/pdf/5772/5772-11-toldos-tumultuous-trembling.pdf is link for source sheets.