‘וַיִּזְרַ֤ע יִצְחָק֙ בָּאָ֣רֶץ הַהִ֔וא וַיִּמְצָ֛א בַּשָּׁנָ֥ה הַהִ֖וא מֵאָ֣ה שְׁעָרִ֑ים וַֽיְבָרְכֵ֖הוּ ה
Isaac planted seeds in that land, and in that year, he reaped a hundredfold and God blessed him
(Genesis 26:12).
How does one attain a true divine brachah, a true blessing? There is in this parsha a lot of grasping, manipulating and chasing after blessing. But there also is another model, the model of Yitzhak the contemplative who plants seeds and receives the blessing of a hundredfold return.
Yitzhak the Contemplative
We know that Yitzhak was a contemplative from last week’s parsha when the Torah tells us:
vayetze Yitzhak lasuah basadeh lifnot arev. Yitzhak went out lasuah, “to meditate,” in the field towards evening (Genesis 24:63). We can imagine Yitzhak – and ourselves – going out in the evening to be on his own in this vast open field, watching the sun set over the hills as he prays and meditates and contemplates his day, alone with the tall blowing grass and the breeze that caresses his skin, feeling connected to the divine and to that place of peace and stillness inside him. This is Yitzhak’s meditative field, his place of centeredness and peace.
But then Yitzhak gets married and has two squabbling children who fight from morning to night about birthright and blessing, lentils and who was born first. Conflict and strife enters your life and your body, swirling about you and inside you like a raging storm. You feel overwhelmed, embattled, anxious, despairing. And yet you are still Yitzhak the contemplative and you can always return to your field, to that perfect still point in your middle, your anchor in a turbulent sea.
Blessing in the Field
Now in our parsha this week, something important happens in this field of Yitzhak’s. Vayivarkhehu Hashem. Yitzhak receives divine blessing, brachah. He plants seeds in the field and they produce 100 fold what was expected of them, great abundant produce, gifted by divine blessing.
What is interesting about this brachah, this blessing, is that in the rest of the parsha, people are trying to get precisely such a blessing, with great desperation and effort, and yet here it comes to Yitzhak almost unbidden, as a gift of divine grace.
Yaakov’s (And Our) Desperate Chase After Blessing
Blessing comes to Yitzhak as a gift here in his contemplative field, but his son Yaakov fights tooth and nail to try to get such a brachah. Yaakov is born with his hand grasping the heel of his brother– yado ohezet ba’ekev Esav (25:26) – urgently trying to get out of the womb first to receive such a blessing. Later, he tries to manipulate and control the situation in other ways, by selling Esav the stew and by dressing up, with Rivkah’s help. in Esav’s clothes, all in an effort to receive the kind of divine blessing that Yitzhak gets just by planting seeds.
I want to pause here to acknowledge and feel into how we do this, too, how we run after blessing, how we control and manipulate and grasp in order to make sure things come out right for us. Maybe you can sense inside you that churning desperation and urgent activation we get sometimes, the tightness in your jaw and shoulders and head and arms, the clenching of your fist – yado ohezet – the feeling of chasing after blessing and security, not trusting that if we let go, things will be ok.
Yitzhak’s Approach: Plant Seeds
And now consider Yitzhak’s approach to brachah: Vayizra Yitzhak. Yitzhak planted seeds. What a different motion in our bodies that is, to loosen and unclench your arms and your fists – no longer holding tight like Yaakov – to open and release something, to release seeds into the dark earth, to let them fall without worry or control.
To plant a seed is the ultimate act of trust and patience. When you plant a seed, you don’t know the result. You have to wait and trust in the rain and the sun and the life force inherent in the seed to gradually do their work. You don’t keep digging up the earth to check how the seed is sprouting. You plant and then you wait, you let it do its work. And you don’t know what will come. You plant your seeds and trust that what happens next is up to God.
We can experiment with this approach inside us, first noticing our tendency to be in a grasping controlling mode when we are trying to accomplish something. Allowing that tendency, and then also exploring what it might be like to take a seed planting approach, both in relation to other people and yourself, very gently planting seeds, little offerings of yourself, things you want to grow in the world, from your calm center Yitzhak place, sprinkling them around the field, letting them drop into the earth, and trusting the rain and the sun and God to help them sprout as they are meant to sprout. And then you stand back and wait patiently, maybe even taking a seat in the field to rest as you wait, trusting the blessing to come.
This is how blessing comes. When we relax and trust that there is divine grace, it is then that blessing comes overflowing towards us, without our effort, like rain. We could drag bucket after bucket of water to the garden, or we could let the rain pour over us from the sky. Feel yourself letting go of the bucket and opening to the rain. The gemara in Taanit (8b) says that brachah does not come to things that are measured (madud), but only to those that are hidden from the eye (samuy min ha’ayin). If we measure and count and control and manipulate and analyze, there is no room for the divine. We have to plant the seed beneath the earth, hidden from our worrying, controlling eye, and trust the magic and the mystery of the universe to do its work.
Blessing is Unpredictable
And blessing will come. Maybe not in the place we expected it. Hazorim bidimah birinah yiktzoru. Those who sow in tears will reap in joy (Psalm 126:5). There is a gap between the sowing and the reaping where the mystery lies and we can’t predict which seeds will sprout or when. We have to let go of knowing and predicting. Yitzhak did not plant these seeds in his home field. It was a time of drought and famine and he was exiled in the land of Gerar, and it was in that place, ba’aretz hahi, and that year, bashanah hahi, that Yitzhak’s seeds received this great blessing. We can’t predict. We plant, we wait, we trust, and at some point, blessing comes.
Blessing is Beyond Our Imagination
And the blessing that comes is me’ah she’arim, 100 fold beyond our expectations, our calculations. We are often like Yaakov – all we can see is the heel in front of us. We don’t even know what is possible; we are closed to the existence of things beyond our imagination, beyond our analysis, beyond our tightly controlled manipulations. But when we can open – wow – me’ah shearim, 100 fold. It’s like an explosion of color and bounty, a different plane of the possible. Now the field you look at, where you sprinkled your seeds – it turns out they were magical seeds, pieces of your own magical self, and they have sprouted into colorful, brilliant, sparkling blossoms all across the field. Can you sense the possibility of that explosion in you, 100 fold compared to your expectations, compared to your limited human vision, beyond what you thought is possible, more light and color than you thought you had inside you? When we let go of control, we open to this type of brachah, to the brachah we could not have imagined or anticipated. We open to the divine flow.
Gateways to Heaven
She’arim means gates, and in some way, this blessing is indeed one of gates, a new opening inside us. We become like a huge flower with petals that open up completely to the shining sun, to heaven above, to God’s ever flowing blessing..
As Yaakov will exclaim after the ladder dream in next week’s parsha: zeh sha’ar hashamayim. This is the gate, the sha’ar, to heaven (28:17). When we let go of holding tight to control things, we make a discovery: this place I am in is already a gateway to heaven. Every place I am in is a gateway to heaven. The famine, the conflict, the strife at home, the beauty of the night sky, the song of a bird and the melancholy that arises in the evening, all entry points, a thousand portals to heaven all around us. Bashanah hahi, ba’aretz hahi, it was in that difficult year, in that difficult place, that Yitzhak found gateways to heaven and blessing. We can find those right here now, in our own difficult moments.
We couldn’t see these gateways before because we had our heads down to grab on to the heel in front of us, our vision narrowed by anxiety, control and mistrust. But now we look up, we look around, and we see portals everywhere, everything and everyone a portal to divine flow and connection, to life energy, to the eternal and the miraculous. Maybe looking around the field right now, you can see all those gateways, the plants and people and even the problems all around you, all me’ah she’arim, 100 gateways to heaven. Malah ha’aretz kinyanekha. The world is filled with ways to access You, God (based on a Hasidic interpretation of this phrase from our morning prayers).
A Joint Field of Blessing
We are all in this field together, each of us opening our clenched fists and sprinkling our precious divine seeds in this joint field with trust and patience, watching the sparkling flowers that emerge 100 times more splendid than we could ever imagine, sensing the endless portals to the divine in one another, opening our hearts to each other in this giant brilliant field that we plant and sow and reap together with both tears and joy.
As we return to the conflict ridden outside world from this place of peace and blessing, we can stand like Yitzhak in the evening field, strengthening ourselves from all the bounty and returning with a sense that our own center is always in this field.
Photo by Pixabay at Pexels
Rachel, Thank you. I needed to read this.