(Oriignally published in 2020)
I want to focus on one word from our parsha — Rehovot.
Rehovot means “wide open spaces.” It is the name that Yitzhak gives to the well that is not fought over after many of his earlier wells are contested. He calls it Rehovot because he says — Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu ufarinu ba’aretz. “Now God has expanded space for us and we can be fruitful in the land” (26:22). There is no longer any need to fight over water. Now we can feel a sense of spaciousness and plenty.
So much of the parsha deals with the opposite feeling — a sense of constriction and scarcity and competition. There are the other two wells — when the shepherds come and say: No! That water is ours! — one well named “Contention” and the other “Hatred.” And there is the strife at home, the continuous squabble between Yaakov and Esav over the birthright. The feeling behind all of these scenes is that there is not enough blessing to go around so that there is a need to fight tooth and nail and heel to get a piece of it.
The Rehovot moment then is a tiny glimpse of spaciousness amidst general tightness, a hint at a possible answer to all this suffering, a glimmer of light in the pervasive darkness.
The sense of scarcity and tightness that they — and we — often feel is very real. We do live in a world of limitation — there is a limit to physical resources like water and food, and a limit, too, to our energy and time and emotional capacities as human beings.
At the same time, on a different plane, the divine plane, we also have access to a world without limitations, a world of great spaciousness and abundance. Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu. Yitzhak recognizes that it is God that does the expanding for us. When we can make contact with this other plane, suddenly it feels like there is plenty of room. As the tradition goes concerning the crowded Temple on a holiday, even if the people were tightly packed standing up, they would somehow be able to bow down with plenty of room. To enter God’s sanctuary — the divine plane — is to feel the expansion of space and to know that there is ample room for all. .
This divine spaciousness is the merhav Yah that we speak of in the phrase from Hallel — min hametzar karati Yah, anani bamerhav Yah. “Out of the narrow straits I cried out to you, O God; You answered me with divine expansiveness.” Merhav (expansiveness) comes from the same root as Rehovot, only here it is in construct with God’s name, meaning that when we cry out in our human constriction, God answers us with divine spaciousness; we enter a different plane.
I want to consider with you some of the ways that this divine spaciousness can work inside us. We will go through each character in our story and see how we can help them with some spaciousness, and by helping them, also help ourselves.
Rivka is the first on the scene who needs help. She is finally pregnant but suffering from some strange violent movements in her belly as the twins begin to fight inside her. She cries out — “If so” — if this is how pregnancy is going to be– “why me?” What am I doing this for? All this pain is too much for me to bear.
We know something of this feeling. It is a loss of perspective. We become so completely blended with the pain or the uncertainty or the crisis of this moment, that we can’t see past it or around it. We just want it to be over; we want to quit in despair.
A similar thing happens to Esav when he comes in from the field, famished. Yaakov asks him to sell his birthright for the soup he has just made, and Esav says, in language similar to Rivka’s but the teenage boy version — I’m about to die here, so who cares about the birthright? Again, there is a loss of perspective. The current predicament — hunger — looms so large that it excludes any other consideration. He has become blind to anything but the current moment’s intense feeling.
Rivka knows how to deal with such moments of intensity. She seeks out God and is given some larger perspective of purpose and time– in the future these babies will actually be two entire nations. Set against this larger picture, Rivka can better bear the pregnancy.
Esav, though, does not know how to do this, so we will do it for him. Imagine for a moment yourself in such a moment of intense pain, physical or emotional. The sharpness of it takes over your whole system, narrowing your vision so that you can think of nothing else. Now imagine that there is, surrounding all this tightness and pain, some larger aura of spaciousness. The hunger is real but you can see that it is a moment in a larger tapestry; it isn’t all of you. There is air around it now and you can think clearer, breathe through the hunger.. Atah Hirhiv Hashem lanu. Now God has expanded space for us.
Next, Yaakov. He needs a lot of help, which he will get next week directly from God in his ladder dream. But for now, we will try to help him. He comes into the world already worried about his place in it. He has the sense that only the first born will really be loved and blessed, and so he struggles mightily to be first, reaching out to hold on to the heel of his brother. Feel the tension in that grip on the heel — the sense of life and death desperation; I can’t let go or it won’t work out; I won’t get what I need. Such tightness. And then, again, with the soup — feel how tightly wound Yaakov is, always on the lookout to control things and make them go his way, waiting for that moment of his brother’s weakness and pouncing on it. And again, when he tricks his father, feel here, the sadness of the situation, Yaakov’s belief that he needs to pretend to be someone else in order to be loved and blessed by his father, his sense of not enoughness. There is an inner emptiness underneath all that tightness.
So Yaakov, maybe more than all the others, really needs Rehovot, really needs this sense of spaciousness. Let’s take his tight hold on the heel and see if it can relax a bit if we let him know that there is a love and a blessing that is beyond what either of his parents can give him and this love and blessing will come to him no matter what he does. It is ok that he is tightly wound and controlling and energetic; we don’t want him to change all that; these are useful parts of him, but they can relax a little — rest — in the knowledge of the vastness of the blessing that is already his, in the sense of space that surrounds him – yama vakedma tzafona vanegba, west and east and north and south, the directions that God shows him next week. Yaakov’s competitive parts can relax, too, in the knowledge of this spaciousness, in the feeling of divine plenty, and the sense of enoughness and no scarcity. There is enough to go around, for both him and his brother, and also, he is enough, little Yaakov, enough to deserve the blessing without manipulation. You don’t have to be the best or the first; you don’t have to be someone else; just be yourself and know that you, as you are, have a place in God’s vast universe.
Next is Yitzhak. Yitzhak has seen a glimpse of the Rehovot expansiveness in his interaction over the wells, but he doesn’t always remember to apply it at home. When Yaakov takes the first blessing and Esav shows up wanting one as well, Yitzhak actually thinks that there are no more blessings to give. He is in his very human mindframe of limitation and scarcity. Esav knows this isn’t right, asking habrachah ahat hi likha avi? “Do you only have one blessing, my father?” Yes, your father — as a limited human being — only has one blessing to give, but if he could get himself connected to that divine Rehovot plane, he would know that there is no limit; he could put some space and perspective around your pain, Esav, your sense of loss, helping you see that this is just one incident in a long span of history, that in fact you, too, will be blessed in many ways, that God has infinite ways of bestowing blessing even if your father does not.
We don’t blame Yitzhak for not being able to bring Rehovot into every aspect of his life. That is the way we are as humans. We get glimpses of the truth; we know it somewhere inside us, but we don’t remember it at all times; in fact, often at the most important times — in our moments of greatest stress — we forget it, we are tight and constricted and can’t remember the truth of that spaciousness. The only thing to do is to put a lot of space around this human frailty, too, to let it be ok for Yitzhak and all of us to forget, to rest even this forgetfulness in a sea of divine forgiveness.
Putting all these examples together, we can see how a sense of divine spaciousness can help us to relax and even begin to heal in many difficult situations. It is like taking whatever hurts and putting it inside a warm bath; the pain melts into the water that surrounds it. Space is like that. That’s why time heals. Time is a kind of space, temporal space. Esav wants to kill Yaakov at the end of this week’s parsha, but when they meet 21 years later, they make peace. The space of time has softened the sharp edges, made each hurtful incident seem less significant, and allowed some healing to take place. Consciously bringing a sense of divine spaciousness to mind can have that effect in a more immediate way. The problem can relax into a bed of infinite love and be held; that is most of what we need anyway, simply to be held.
This sense of spaciousness is actually our national cultural treasure. Avraham — who was exceptionally good at beholding vastness and could even see 400 years into the future — was told repeatedly that his descendants would be like the sand of the sea and the stars of the sky. Normally we understand these images to mean that his offspring would be numerous, but perhaps, in light of Rehovot, we can also interpret them — the stars and the sand — as symbols of spaciousness. The promise to Avraham, then, was not just that his descendants would be many, but also that they — we — would carry this sense of divine expansiveness — the vastness of the sky and sea — inside us through life, that we would have the capacity, in moments of constriction, to open and turn toward the spaciousness, Rehovot, that is always dwelling inside us.
As the parsha shows — and our experience bears out — more often than not, in this world of limitation and scarcity, we are not aware of this spaciousness. Yitzhak gets only a glimpse of this other plane. And yet that glimpse — if we all keep adding our own tiny flashes — may be enough to point us in a direction, a direction of redemption and healing and inner and outer peace. Yitzhak says: Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu. Now God has expanded space for us. Yes, there was constriction and tightness, but now — the eternal now, in this moment of the present, in this moment of presence, in this very moment, right now — we can open up to the spaciousness and loosen that tightness. What happens after this Rehovot experience is that Yitzhak makes a covenant of peace with those around him. Knowledge of this divine spaciousness is what leads to peace inside us and outside us, and ultimately, to the final messianic peace, may it come speedily and in our day.
Photo by Nuril Adi saputra at Pexels
