Normally, beauty is associated with young women and innocence with small children. To be innocent at seven years old, however, is no accomplishment. “Innocence assumes the possibility of guilt; to be not guilty implies to have had a struggle against the pull of one’s senses and passions and to have conquered,” writes Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch. “[O]nly the girl matured to womanhood and the boy matured to manhood can crown their head with the wreath of innocence.”

Thus, Chazal associate the virtue of innocence with “mature adolescence,” and Sarah was righteous – not because she was innocent at age 7 – but because she was innocent at age 20 and remained innocent even at age 100.

Her daughter-in-law Rivkah was also a paragon of purity. The Torah tells us that she was “a virgin, and no man knew her” (Bereishis 24:16). The Torah doesn’t waste words, so what does the phrase “no man knew her” tell us that we don’t already know from the word “virgin”?

Rav Hirsch explains that “no man knew her” means that Rivkah “was so extraordinarily modest and retiring that…no man had dared become intimately friendly with her.” (He offers this interpretation in part because the Torah uses the phrase “v’ish lo ye’daah” instead of the normal “lo yadah ish.”)

Rav Hirsch continues: “The truly modest Jewish girl has such a high innate morality and dignity that quite unconsciously she makes such an impression that the wildest boy doesn’t dare make nasty jokes in her presence, let alone approach her with an indecent look.”

May we all – men, too – merit to make such an impression on others.

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) – head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years – was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.

Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.