Rivkah (Rebecca), featured in this week’s Parsha, Chayei Sarah, is one of our most active matriarchs. She has agency and she uses her voice, and the verses we read of her are full of verbs, comings and goings, actions. At the end of the chapter that is full of Rivkah’s movement, she agrees to marry Isaac. She goes with Avraham’s servant, who has been on the mission to make the shidduch, and then she receives a beautiful blessing:
אֲחֹתֵנוּ אַתְּ הֲיִי לְאַלְפֵי רְבָבָה וְיִירַשׁ זַרְעֵךְ אֵת שַׁעַר שֹׂנְאָיו Our sister, May you grow Into thousands of myriads; May your descendants seize The gates of their foes (Bereshit 24:60)
Rivka will be the one who carries on the nation that Avraham has begun, so perhaps it makes sense that her blessing mirrors the one that he received last week. In the moments after the Binding of Isaac, after Avraham offered a ram on the altar instead of his son, God told him, “I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore; and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes” (Bereshit 22:17). These blessings offer the same message, promising a future of numerous descendents - a full nation - and one that will be secure and safe.
There’s something powerful to me about Rivkah, on the cusp of becoming our matriarch and continuing the growth of our nation, receiving a nearly identical blessing to that of her future father-in-law. Rivkah has this ability to be action oriented, to make moves, to accomplish, and also to inherit. It’s a delicate balance of receiving from the past and also taking things into her own hands. While Rivkah’s relationships with her children are complicated at best (we’ll see that next week), she is committed to the project of this new people and who the nation will become. She is ever devoted to the blessing she received and ensuring that it comes to fruition.
Rivkah inspires me to think about what blessings are specifically ones that I’ve received from my ancestors, ones that I carry on, ones that I hope to give as well. What are the blessings and commitments that I inherit, that I can live into? And if there are greater values that are important to the perpetuation of my own ideals, what is most important to carry through the generations? Rivkah’s life is a reminder that intentional action is required to make blessings come to life. May we be inheritors of those blessings as well. May we live bold lives of action and agency, of voice, to inherit blessing, to be a blessing, to give blessing.
