Drawing Kindness from the Well

Hayyei Sarah 5777 / 26 November 2016

In the short time since the presidential election, my parents, sisters, and I have exchanged emails almost daily, sending articles and sharing reactions. In this, I suspect we’re like many other families and friend groups across the geographic and political map. I think it’s safe to say that almost all Americans, no matter what we expected or which candidates we supported, are still coming to terms with an unexpected, unpredictable, and ever-unfolding outcome.

In between family-wide messages, my older sister Rachel wrote to me directly to share her fear and confusion, especially when it came to the question of how to respond in concrete ways. “I just don’t know where to start,” she wrote, giving voice to the uncertainty that many of us feel. On Wednesday, when I wrote back, I offered several practical ideas drawn from conversations I have had with many of you as well as my rabbinic colleagues across the country. Today, however, I want to answer in an entirely different way. Where do we start? With ourselves.

One of the key concepts in Jim Collins’ Good to Great theory is “First who, then what.”^[1] In his research, Collins discovered that “great” companies always chose employees on the basis of their intrinsic qualities and attitudes, not their technical skill set. Rather than coming up with a strategy and then enlisting people with the capability to act on it, the best companies hired employees with the right character traits and then allowed the strategy to develop from the staff’s interactions.^[2]

I believe Collins’ theory holds true for our response to the election as well. Even before we get to the question of what we can do, we must first address the question of who we will need to become. It may well be impossible to develop a response right now to legislative and executive actions that won’t begin for another two months. The simple fact that our world is changing may be the only thing we can say for sure. As Collins teaches, “If you begin with ‘who,’ rather than ‘what,’ you can more easily adapt to a changing world.”^[3] In this moment of uncertainty we can still attend to the core question: who will I need to become in order to defend core Jewish and American values going forward?

This is a simple question without simple answers. Realistically, there isn’t a single answer at all. In the near future we will need many differentmiddot, character attributes, as well as the discernment to know which aspects of ourselves to employ, and when. This morning’s parshah, Hayyey Sarah, offers us a framework for one such quality: גמילות חסדים, acts of loving-kindness.

Eliezer’s mission to find a suitable bride for Yitzhak lies at the center of the parshah’s narrative this morning.^[4] Sent by Avraham to bring back a bride from Avraham’s relatives in Haran,^[5] Eliezer employs a strange method. Standing by the well as the young women go back and forth fetching water for their households, Eliezer prays to God and declares that he will know the proper wife for Yitzhak when he asks for a drink of water and the girl offers, of her own accord, to water his camels as well.^[6] We must wonder at this: why does Eliezer need this test? He knows the bride must come from Avraham’s brother Nahor’s family. Couldn’t Eliezer just look them up in the Mesopotamian equivalent of the yellow pages, go to the house, and announce his purpose? What are the odds against his “water test” precisely identifying one of Avraham’s nieces from among the dozens of girls milling around the well? 

Although Eliezer acts as Avraham’s servant, from the moment the Torah introduces him we see that their relationship runs deeper. Avraham acts toward Eliezer almost as if he were a surrogate son.^[7] It seems logical, perhaps even self-evident, that Eliezer would have learned his value system directly from Avraham.^[8] Given Avraham’s emphasis on חסד, loving-kindness, Eliezer properly concluded that any bride for Yitzhak needed to exemplify this same essential quality.^[9] His test — waiting for the woman who would offer water to his camels when he asked only for himself — deliberately sought to test any potential shidduch for the core value of Avraham’s household. After all, with Sarah no longer alive Yitzhak’s eventual wife becomes the dominant female presence in the family. Without her endorsement of the established value system, conflict would consume their household.^[10]

Eliezer’s tactic pays off. Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, past Chancellor of JTS, writes that “Rebecca embodied… gemilut hasadim, doing acts of loving-kindness.”^[11] When Rivkah fetches water for the camels, she demonstrates the prerequisite behavior for גמילות חסדים: doing more than what is asked or expected, going beyond the call of duty.^[12] I needed to look up what our ancestors would have known intuitively: a camel, coming off the kind of journey Eliezer just finished, will need to drink a lot of water. Each of Eliezer’s ten camels needed twenty-five gallons of water to recover from the trip.^[13] Do the math in your head, and you can easily understand Rivkah’s running back and forth to the well as she draws water for all of the animals.^[14] 

The middle of the parshah, preoccupied with גמילות חסדים, also helps us make sense of the beginning and end of this episode. Just as the parshah opens with Sarah’s death, Rivkah’s marriage to Yitzhak concludes with a reference back to his mother: “Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife. Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.”^[15] The reference to Sarah here initially seems superfluous and confusing: why does Rivkah go to live in Sarah’s tent, and how does marriage immediately soothe Yitzhak’s grief? Likewise, the initial reference to Sarah’s death notes her age but appears devoid of any substantive comment on her life.^[16] The picture only emerges when we connect the dots: Sarah’s death, Rivkah’s גמילות חסדים toward the camels, her marriage to Yitzhak, and the solace that emerges for him. Marriage comforts Yitzhak not just because his wife would care for him with tenderness and sympathy, but even more because Rivkah shared Sarah’s righteous qualities.^[17] Sarah’s death left their household deficient in גמילות חסדים; Rivkah restores the balance. Through this essential behavior, she earns the right to live in Sarah’s tent. When we pray, מַה טֹּֽבוּ אֹהָלֶֽיךָ יַעֲקֹב, “How good are your tents,” we look to our ancestors’ tents set the tone as a model for how our Jewish community should act.^[18] Here the Torah places גמילות חסדים in Sarah’s tent, right at the heart of the value system.

The Rabbis of the Talmud pick up this theme. Shimon HaTzaddik, the very first Rabbi, puts גמילות חסדים on par with Torah study and worship.^[19] Given that both of the other items in his list are essential acts of religious devotion, we can easily conclude that he believes גמילות חסדים, too, is an essential religious act as well as a worthy and beneficial behavior. In a striking midrash, the Talmud asserts that the Torah itself begins and ends with acts of גמילות חסדים performed directly by God.^[20] In the Garden of Eden, well before the revelation of Torah and establishment of worship, God provides the first clothes for Adam and Havvah. At the very end of the Torah, God alone buries Moshe just outside the Land of Israel. Throughout the Torah, the Promised Land has been the object and goal; but when the conclusion arrives, it’s not a scene of climactic triumph. Instead, we get a small private moment of גמילות חסדים, God laying Moshe to rest. Everything in between, for all its gritty detail and broad scope, ultimately serves this same purpose: instilling a deep, foundational kindness in people.

We must pay attention to the way the Torah frames these stories. The acts of גמילות חסדים described in the Torah — whether God’s kindness to Adam and Moshe, or Rivkah’s attention to the camels — are small-scale, personal acts. They unfold with intimate proximity. When we seek to cultivate גמילות חסדים in ourselves, we should also start small. Our work toward greater engagement with loving-kindness flows outward like ripples in a pond. “Start close to home,” writes Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun, “[and] gradually widen the circle of loving-kindness.”^[21] 

Ironically, the inner-most point of this circle — the חסד we show ourselves — can sometimes be the hardest place to start. As the Hartman Institute’s Yehuda Kurtzer noted earlier this week, most of us are still trying to make sense of the new reality. We haven’t yet reached any definite conclusions or found a specific direction to follow — and that’s OK. We don’t need to have it all figured out right now, barely three weeks after election day. As much as possible, we need to muster חסד for ourselves and trust that, as time goes on and the future becomes clearer, we will know how to act. At the same time, we can get a head start by showing חסד to the people in our lives who already naturally evoke feelings of kindness in us.^[22] Our acts of loving-kindness toward friends, family, even pets, have a positive impact right now; but the importance of גמילות חסדים reaches far beyond the present moment. We are in the midst of changes, and more are coming, in ways that we might anticipate but can not predict with certainty. The חסד we show now, in any sphere of life, conditions us to act more readily with חסד in the future, shaping the form our eventual actions will take.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, pioneering psychologistWilliam James observes that regardless of the specific religion, loving-kindness emerges from a sense of brotherhood: a belief that if we are all children of the One God, each of us deserves to be shown חסד by others.^[23] Unlike tzedakah, which manifests as food or money given to the poor, גמילות חסדים can take on an almost infinite variety of forms, and can be offered to the rich just as easily as toward the poor.^[24] Every single person in this room has the capacity and the obligation to act with גמילות חסדים.

Moreover, James’ proposition works in the inverse as well: by practicing גמילות חסדים, we can cultivate in ourselves a bond of solidarity with our fellow humans. When the time arrives for us to act, when the path forward becomes clear, we will depend on that solidarity for strength and courage. The ways we speak, write, and act now matter — not just around key social and political issues, but in every sphere of life, in our small, mundane, everyday activities. One of my yoga teachers pointed out that humans are unique among all the creations in our capacity to consciously and deliberately shape our instinctual natures. A sheep can not learn to hunt any more than a wolf could live on grass; but each time we choose a kind word, go out of our way to help, respond with compassion and sympathy, we change our tendency for the future. I am not certain what the coming months and years will ask of us, or how we will be called to respond on behalf of justice, liberty, and human rights — but I know that, come what may, we will all need גמילות חסדים, loving-kindness, in our tool kits.

---

Tags: Abraham, Change, Compassion, Hayyei Sarah, Isaac, Kindness, Rebecca, Relationship, Sarah