Before the Holy One caused Sarah’s sun to set, he caused Rebecca’s sun to rise (Bereishit Rabbah 58:2).

As long as Sarah was alive, a cloud signifying the Divine Presence was tied to the entrance of her tent, the doors were open wide, her dough was blessed, and a lamp burned in the tent from one Sabbath eve to the next. When she died, all these ceased, but when Rebecca came, they all returned. When Isaac saw Rebecca separate dough in purity, “she became his wife” (Genesis 24:67) (Bereishit Rabbah 60:16).

Rebecca was worthy of bearing the twelve tribal ancestors (Bereishit Rabbah 63:6).

She came from Abraham’s country, from his kindred, and from his father’s house. When Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, met Rebecca at the well and she provided water for him and his camels, evincing both her remarkable physical beauty and gifts of lovingkindness, it was a combination of beshert (“destiny”) and familial “manipulation”(a shiddoch). She left her father’s house, the first bride-to-be in Jewish history to receive a veil and the accompanying blessing of bedeken. From a distance she saw her intended, the pensive and incomplete Isaac, praying in the field for comfort and consolation. “And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebecca, and she became his wife; and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted for his mother” (Genesis 24:67).

That Rebecca was perceived by the forlorn Isaac as the perfect replacement for his beloved mother Sarah has many implications, but surely the anxieties of Isaac’s formative years had already made him a worthy candidate for the psychiatrist’s couch. If Joseph was to become the Master of Dreams, Isaac was surely the Master of Ambivalence, but Rebecca’s strength of purpose resolved any lack of resolve that ever plagued this frailest of patriarchs. Rebecca however, continued to grow in stature and in dominion and it was her hand that determined her family’s destiny as she literally “pulled the wool” over the blind and enfeebled Isaac in order to insure the hegemony of the “chosen son,” Jacob.

These were simultaneously great and tortuous days when the Jewish people was still young. Family destiny became national destiny, and a bit of subterfuge left one child eternally enshrined among the heroes of our tradition and another child eternally fighting for recognition (read: Jacob and Esau). Did Rebecca unduly influence the fate of her twin boys? If so, she was in collusion with the Almighty, who in the only Biblical verse directed to a woman said to her: “Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be separated from thy bowels; And the one people shall be stronger than the other people; And the elder shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23). Alas, the familial conflict has been canonized. It is our task both to mitigate and to live with it.