Parashat Vayetze 5775 Rabbi Michael Safra Let's Talk About Love

Love Languages – Parashat Vayetze 5775 Rabbi Michael Safra Let’s talk about love … a complicated subject. A friend pointed me to a book by Dr. Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages. The thesis is simple. There are five “languages” that people use to express love: gratitude/appreciation, quality time, service, gifts, and touch. But different people speak different languages. A husband may enjoy buying gifts for his wife and wonder why she doesn’t seem too impressed, but it turns out that her love language is “quality time”, and no gift will replace an hour of uninterrupted conversation. A wife cooks fabulous meals, pays the bills, cleans the house, and wonders why nothing seems good enough; but it turns out that her husband understands the language of gratitude; he is really just starving for a compliment or an expression of appreciation. The challenge in a successful relationship, says Chapman, is figuring out your partner’s language and learning to speak THAT language in order to fill the emotional tank. Our Torah portion Vayetze is usually read as another example of dysfunctional relationships in Genesis. Jacob runs away from home because he stole his brother’s blessing. He falls in love with Rachel but is tricked into marrying Leah … who bears six children but never feels Jacob’s love emotionally. Meanwhile, Rachel is loved, but she is barren and she also complains about her husband’s lack of emotional support. Fast forward to the end of the story when Rachel dies and is buried on the road and Leah dies and is buried in Hebron … and for some reason, Jacob chooses to be buried next to Leah and not Rachel. I’ve put together some key verses, which were passed out, in order to unpack this a little. At the beginning of the portion, Jacob is madly in love. He arrives at a well, and the shepherds are standing around waiting for others to arrive because the boulder that covers the well is too heavy to move. When Jacob sees Rachel for the first time, he rolls the boulder off the well by himself. That’s the power of love. In the first sources on the page, the Torah is explicit: Jacob loved Rachel, so he said [to Laban]: “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel. Jacob served seven years for Rachel; but they seemed in his eyes as but a few days on account of his love for her. But all is not right. For one thing, Jacob is also married to another woman. And even with Rachel, it seems that his love cooled after a while. To put it in Gary Chapman terms, Jacob failed to speak the same love languages as his wives. 1 Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah, but that can’t be the whole story because Leah gave him six children, and we “know” how that happens. Let’s look at section II: Leah conceived and bore a son, and she named him Reuben, for she said, “The Lord has seen (ra‐ah) my affliction, for now my husband will love me. She conceived again and bore a son, and she said, “The Lord has heard (shama) how I am hated and has given me this one also;” then she named him Simon. She conceived again and bore a son, and she said, “This time my husband will spend time with me (y’la‐veh ishi eilai), for I have birthed for him three sons;” therefore she named him Levi. She conceived again and bore a son, and she said, “This time I will give thanks (odeh) to the Lord;” therefore she called him Judah. Then she stopped bearing. The Talmud says in source B that Leah was the first person in the world to express thanks to God, and it is appropriate on Thanksgiving weekend to ask ourselves what it means – or should mean – that the very name Jew, Yehudi, our very identity means “to give thanks.” But even as she has plenty for which to be thankful, there is clearly something missing in Leah’s life. I can paraphrase her childbearing years: God has seen, God has heard, that although my husband knows me (in the biblical sense), he doesn’t speak my love language, because he refuses to spend quality time with me. The crazy thing is that Rachel has the opposite problem. She spends plenty of quality time with Jacob, but she wants to know more. Flip the page to section III: Rachel saw that she had borne no children to Jacob and Rachel became jealous of her sister. She said to Jacob, “Give me children; for if not I will die.” Then Jacob became angry with Rachel and said, “Am I a stand‐in for God, who has denied you the fruit of the womb?” If you know the Bible by heart, you might connect Jacob’s words to those of another husband who had two wives, one of whom he loved and another who bore him children. I’m talking about Elkanah, whom we read about on Rosh Hashanah. When his wife Hannah complained that she wanted children, his response was, “You have me. We spend so much time together. Am I not better than 10 children?” That seems insensitive, but plenty of people would be jealous of that kind of quality time. Leah certainly was, as we read in the B source: Reuben went out during the days of the wheat harvest, and he found mandrakes [a fertility plant] in the field; he brought them to his mother Leah. Rachel said to Leah, “Please give me of your son’s mandrakes.” She said to him, “Is it not enough that you have taken my husband – that you want to also take my son’s mandrakes?” You can imagine what Rachel is thinking: Why do you need mandrakes? You have already given him FOUR children! To which Leah responds, “Yes, but even with all that, what I really want is the one 2 thing that you have. Why won’t my husband spend any time with me? Why won’t my husband tell me that he loves me? And why can’t you, Rachel, just say thank you for what you have? Indeed, Rachel has a problem expressing gratitude. Look at source C: God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb. She conceived and bore a son, and she said, “God has gathered up (asaf) my disgrace.” She named him Joseph, saying, “The lord will grant me another (yosef) child.” That’s a funny way to say thank you: Please God, give me another one! And Jacob had a similar problem. The book of Jubilees is not part of the Hebrew Bible. But it is a Jewish book, written by a Jew around the time of the Maccabees, and it is essentially Midrash, which is to say that it comments and embellishes and interprets the stories from Genesis. The Torah doesn’t mention Leah’s death, but in chapter 49, Jacob tells his sons that he wants to be buried in Hebron because that is where Leah is buried; and we are left to wonder why, if Jacob loved Rachel so much, he wanted to be buried near Leah and not with Rachel in Bethlehem. The book of Jubilees offers an answer in section IV: And Leah his wife died in the fourth year of the second week of the forty‐fifth jubilee, and he buried her in the double cave near Rebecca his mother to the left of the grave of Sarah, his father's mother and all her sons and his sons came to mourn over Leah his wife with him and to comfort him regarding her, for he was lamenting her for he loved her exceedingly after Rachel her sister died; for she was perfect and upright in all her ways and honoured Jacob, and all the days that she lived with him he did not hear from her mouth a harsh word, for she was gentle and peaceable and upright and honourable. And he remembered all her deeds which she had done during her life and he lamented her exceedingly; for he loved her with all his heart and with all his soul. Jacob wanted to be buried next to Leah because he really loved Leah – and that’s how he had seven children with her. The problem is that he never told her until it was too late. … She went to her grave miserable because her husband didn’t know that her “love languages” were gratitude and quality time; he spoke those languages to Rachel but she really wanted what Leah had. Not to belabor the point, but there are some lessons: For one thing, especially this weekend, be sure to express gratitude to the person or people you love most. Don’t assume it is “understood”, and don’t wait until it’s too late. And second, we could all spend time thinking not only about what we say, but how we say it and how we are heard. Sometimes we tell people we love them, but we just aren’t heard because we say it in the wrong language. How different would this story have looked if Jacob had figured out how to tell both Rachel and Leah how he felt about them. Love is complicated indeed! Shabbat Shalom. 3 .

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