The Wells of Love

ESSAY: Redigging the Wells of Love
Who was Isaac? The longest lived of the Patriarchs, we are told virtually nothing about his life and work-other than the fact that he dug wells

INSIGHTS:
Straw Man
The difference between chaff and stubble
Percentage of the Dough
In how many of the day's one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes does a person do what he truly wants to do?

“And all the wells that were ... dug in the days of Abraham his father were stopped by the Philistines and filled with earth...”

“And Isaac redug the wells of water dug in the days of Abraham his father... And he called them by the same names that his father had called them.”

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are more than the forebears of the Jewish nation: they are the founding fathers of the Jewish soul. So we study their lives and analyze their every word and deed, for these are the foundations of our identity and the building blocks of our psyche and character.

In Abraham we see a fountainhead of Jewish generosity and social commitment. “I know him,” says G-d of the first Jew, “that he will command his children and his household after him, that they shall keep the way of G-d, to do charity and justice.”[1] Abraham, whose home and heart were open to every wayfarer, regardless of who he was and where he was coming from, offering food, drink, companionship and guidance.[2] Abraham, who challenged G-d's decree of destruction on the evil city of Sodom.[3] Abraham, who traversed the land bearing light and enlightenment to a dark and befuddled world.[4]

In Jacob we see a prototype of the Jew's devotion to learning. “The voice is the voice of Jacob, and the hands are the hands of Esau”—Esau lives by the sword, while Jacob lives by the word.[5] For the first 77 years of his life, Jacob was “a dweller in the tents of study”[6]; his first act upon his arrival in Egypt-where he would live his final seventeen-was to establish a house of learning.[7] In Jacob we also find an archetype for the Jew's epochal perseverance under conditions of exile and adversity: in a foreign Charan, in the employ of the deceitful Laban, he built his family and fortune; in an alien Egypt, he imparted a lasting legacy to the fledgling nation of Israel. If Abraham exemplifies love, Jacob epitomizes truth-the quest for truth, and the consistency and persistency of truth.

But who was Isaac? The longest lived of the Patriarchs, we are told the least about him. The Torah recounts the story of the Akeidah, the “Binding of Isaac,” but tells it as Abraham's story, Abraham's test. Then comes the long chapter describing the process of finding of a bride for Isaac; but it is Eliezer, Abraham's servant, who is dispatched to Charan and who is the key figure in the drama of the choosing of Rebbeca, while Isaac's whereabouts and activities at the time remain unknown.

What does Isaac do? Basically, he stays put. By divine command, he is the only one of the three Patriarchs never to set foot outside of the Holy Land.[8] And he digs wells.

The Torah devotes an entire chapter to Isaac's well-digging activities. We are told that he reopened the wells that had been dug by Abraham and stopped by the Philistines after Abraham's death, and of a series of new wells he dug himself. Then, although he has at least another 80 years to live, we are told nothing more of Isaac's life other than his blessings to his children before his death.[9]

At his confrontation with Laban at Mt. Gilad, Jacob attributes his perseverance and success in Charan to “the G-d of Abraham and the awe of Isaac.”[10]

Therein lies the key to the enigma of Isaac: Isaac was awe to Abraham's love, restraint to Abraham's expansiveness, self-effacement to Abraham's self-assertion. Abraham's love of G-d and humanity took him on a journey from self outward, a journey etched in the roads of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Canaan. Isaac's was an inward journey, a journey into the depths of self to the essence within.

Isaac is the fear of Heaven in the Jewish heart: the Jew’s self-censoring discipline, his silent sacrifice, his humble awe before the majesty of its Creator. Isaac was a digger of wells, boring through the stratum of emotion and experience in search of the quintessential waters of the soul. Boring deeper than feeling, deeper than desire, deeper than achievement, to the selflessness at the core of self.

“One opposite the other, G-d made,”[11] is a cardinal law of creation. Every virtue has its corresponding evil, every positive force its negative counterpart.

Love, too, has its rival evil. Love, after all, is an assertion of self-the extension of self to give and relate to another. Corrupted love is when the self asserts itself not to give but to take; not in Abrahamic love but in Philistine lust; not in caring compassion but in egotistic self-gratification.

As long as Abraham was alive, only pure love flowed from his righteous wells. But after his death, the Philistines commandeered the fountainheads of love he had established in the land. The Hebrew word plishtim means “open-ended ones”[12]; a plishtim love is an uninhibited, undisciplined love, a profane love bereft of the focus and commitment of Abraham's holy love.[13]

It was Isaac who redeemed Abraham's legacy of love. As redug by Isaac, Abraham's wells became immune to Philistine corruption. For love that flows from a well of selflessness and fear of Heaven flows faithful to its source and true to its objective.

Every Jew is the child of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Every Jew has their love, awe and truth encoded in the spiritual DNA of his soul.

The Abraham in the Jew rushes to embrace the world, to champion its downtrodden, to extend himself heart, soul and checkbook to his fellow man. But love, to be true, must be restrained: the father who embraces his child with the full intensity of his love will hurt rather than comfort him. And love, unchecked, eventually disintegrates to the destructive, everything-goes “love” of the Philistine. Isaac is the Jew’s source of discipline, humility and reverence; of his appreciation of the nullity of finite man before the infinity of G-d.

The issue of this marriage of love and awe is truth; truth that focuses the Jew's outpourings of love in giving, holy expressions; truth that cultivates his inward retreat to selflessness toward creative and constructive ends. This is the legacy of Jacob, in whom the love of Abraham and the awe of Isaac alloyed into invincible truth.

Straw, being animal fodder, is absolved from the obligation of tithing,[15] which applies only to produce grown for human consumption. Esau inquired of Isaac as to how to tithe straw, wishing to impress his father with a demonstration of copious piety; in doing so, he also demonstrated a fatal flaw in his approach to life.

Man, the Kabbalists tell us,[16] is vitalized by no less than two souls: we each possess both an “animal soul” and a “G-dly soul.” The animal soul is the motor of physical life, incorporating the instincts, drives, desires and faculties that serve the survival and perpetuation of the physical self. In this, the human being is another animal, however intelligent and sensitive an animal. What distinguishes him from the animal world is his G-dly soul, which embodies his striving to transcend the animal state and relate to the Divine.

All endeavors of man are either “human food” that fuels the spiritual life of the G-dly soul, or “animal fodder” that nourishes the material life of the animal soul. Both are indispensable to our purpose in life, for the soul can operate and achieve its goals only via a physical self; but one must take care not to confuse the means with the end. One must always be able to distinguish between the sacred and the mundane in one’s life, and remember which exists to serve which.

Esau wished to tithe the straw of life, to attribute spiritual worth to animal fodder. Instead of exploiting the material to serve the spiritual, he wished to invest the material with a significance and value of its own.

The end, of course, was that the “dew of the heavens and the fat of the land”[17] intended for Esau was given to Jacob, who could be trusted to “tithe” or idealize only what nurtures the man in man—the G-dly drives and aspirations that distinguish the human from the animal.

In the end of days, prophesies the prophet, when the purpose of creation will reach its fulfillment, “the house of Jacob shall be fire... and the house of Esau, straw.”

This is not the same straw of which Esau spoke to Isaac. The Hebrew word used in that connection by the Midrash is teven, while the prophet describes the house of Esau as kash. While both words loosely translate as “straw,” teven is more precisely the chaff that is harvested together with the grain and is subsequently fed to the livestock, while kash is the stubble that remains in the field and is too coarse even for animal consumption.[18]

Esau was initially entrusted with the teven, the straw symbiotically related to the grain—the straw that feeds the animal that serves man. But when he sought to reverse this relationship—to make straw the focus and object of life—his teven turned to kash, into a hollow husk depleted of all nutritive potential.

In the perfect world of Moshiach, such empty materialism will cease to be—the kash of Esau will be utterly consumed by the spiritual fire [19] of Jacob. Teven, on the other hand, will become the staple of the animal kingdom, as the prophet says, “the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw (teven).”[20]

Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar ruled: “A woman may fill her entire oven with bread [when baking on a festival day] since bread bakes better when the oven is full”

The festivals are days of rest on which all creative work is forbidden, as on Shabbat. However, there is a major difference between the festivals and Shabbat: on the festivals it is permitted to do all work that pertains to the preparation of food (kindling a fire, cooking, etc.),[22] as long as it is food that is needed for the festival.

This applies also when the labor involved only improves or enhances the food, hence, the above-quoted law: since bread bakes better when the oven is full, it is permitted to bake an entire ovenful of bread, even if only a single loaf is actually needed for the festival.

Often, a careful study of one's daily schedule can be extremely disheartening. So much time and energy expended on earning a living; so many hours each day devoted to eating, sleeping and other bodily needs; so much squandered on one's social obligations-how much time is left to attend to one’s true needs and desires? How much time is left for prayer, study, and other spiritual pursuits, for which one's soul descended into physical life in the first place?

Says Rabbi Shimon: If a dozen baking loaves contribute to the quality of a single loaf, they are all a legitimate part of the single loaf's baking. If a person makes his spiritual moments the focus of his life, regarding all else as but the means to their end, then his entire day is a singularly holy endeavor.

[2] Talmud, Sotah 10a-b; Avot d'Rabbi Natan 7:1; etc.

[4] Midrash Rabba, Breishit 39:24; Rashi on Genesis 24:7; etc.

[6] Ibid. 25:27; see Rashi on Genesis 28:9.

[9] Actually, Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau some 57 years before his death. Yet Isaac himself describes these blessings as his parting words: “Behold, I have aged and I know not the day of my death... I shall bless you before I die” (Genesis 27:2-4). The Torah, which describes Isaac as one whose “eyes had grown heavy with age” at the time, says no more of his life and deeds.

[10] Genesis 31:42; meaning either G-d, the object of Isaac's awe (Onkelus), or Isaac's awe of G-d (Ibn Ezra).

[12] As in mavo hamefulash, “an open-ended alley” (Talmud, Eruvin 95a.)

[13] Cf. the modern usage of “philistine” to connote a coarse, unrefined individual

[14] Likkuttei Sichot vol. XV pp. 118-121.

[15] Giving a tenth of one’s produce to the Levite or the pauper.

[16] Rabbi Chaim Vital, Shaar Hakedushah; Etz Chaim, Portal 50, ch. 2; elaborated in Tanya and Chabad Chassidic literature

[18] Talmud, Bava Metzia 103a and Shabbat 36b.

[19] “My word is as fire, says G-d” in reference to the Torah, the “voice of Jacob” (Jeremiah 23:29; Talmud, Berachot 22a; midrashim on Genesis 27:22).

[22] With important exceptions; see Laws of the Festivals in Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim, sections 495-429.

[23] Likkutei Sichot, vol. XV, pp. 116-117. See Ethics of the Fathers 2:12, and Mishneh Torah, Laws of Human Character 3:3.