From Veils to Goatskins – The Female Ruse
Dr. Rachel Adelman, “Kol Isha” article for December 2009
Rebecca begins the chain of deceit, which forms a fault line in Jacob’s family history. Yet she, not her husband, Isaac, uniquely understands God’s will and actively guarantees the fulfillment of the divine oracle. Experiencing an overwhelming tumult in her belly, she asks, “If so, why do I exist?” and goes “to inquire of the Lord” (Gen. 25: 22). She is the first biblical character to initiate direct contact with God.
According to Ramban, her existential question reverberates with Job’s: “”Why did You let me come out of the womb? Better had I expired before any eye saw me” (10:18). Like Job, Rebecca questions the meaning of her life and intimates a wish that she had never been born – that the womb had been her tomb, or that the tumult of child in her body did not bode ill omen. Overwhelming pain compels her, perhaps, to regret her fervent prayer for pregnancy after twenty years of barrenness. (See Avivah Zornberg’s, The Murmuring Deep, 2009: 208-215).
. In answer to her plea, God tells her what he does not tell Isaac, and (perhaps more importantly) what she does not tell Isaac: the twins born to her – the older a ruddy, hairy man-of-the-hunt, the younger, a smooth, heel-grasping, dweller-of-tents – will establish two separate nations, “and the older shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25: 23). Does this prophecy reassure her? Now, she knows the import of the burden she bears. Two nations. Two peoples. Thousands of years of bloody, ideological conflict – if, as the sages suggest, Esau (qua Edom) is identified with Rome and, eventually, Christianity while Jacob (Israel) is the progenitor of the Jewish people. This is almost unbearably weighty news and hardly reassuring. Yet she knows that this in utero conflict, this womb rumble, is greater than her, greater than mere sibling rivalry, greater than the race for the status of first-born.
Why, decades later, when Isaac calls on Esau to hunt and to prepare the game for him so that he can bestow the blessing upon him, does Rebecca not tell her husband? Why does she resort to deceit, dressing Jacob in a goatskin? Thomas Mann wrote: “It is possible to be in a plot and not know it.” Isaac seems to be one of those unwitting players in God’s plot. And Rebecca is in cahoots with God’s shenanigans.
Isaac Blessing Jacob
Flinck, 1639 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam [Oil on canvas, 117 x 141 cm]
I’d like to suggest that the discrepancy between Rebecca’s and Isaac’s understanding goes back to their first meeting. Coming from Beer La-Hai Roi, Isaac raises his eyes and sees camels in the distance while Rebecca raises her eyes and sees him and falls from her camel (Gen. 25: 63-64). What does she see that so stuns her? There, set against the light of the dying day, stands a man most holy, other-worldly, marked by the trauma of the near-sacrifice on Mount Moriah. After discovering that “that man over there” would be her future husband, she may feel unworthy. And so she veils herself.
The Netziv (R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda of Berlin) suggests that her “fear of Isaac” marks the relationship from that moment onward. The veiling establishes an asymmetry – wherein she knows and sees more than he does. Rebecca, however, may assume otherwise: “Surely my husband, the holy man, would have known the oracle!” (See Ramban on Gen. 27:4). Despite her modesty, she perceives more than her husband, who lacks both sight and insight, loving “Esau because he had a taste for game”, while Rebecca loved Jacob (Gen. 25:28).
The text doesn’t tell us why Rebecca favored Jacob. But we know that she knew God’s will was with the tent-dweller, with the smooth one, an ish tam, blameless, man of integrity. His life became enormously complicated from the moment that he first donned those hairy goatskins.
From Rebecca’s first veiling and dressing Jacob up in goatskins, the sequence of masks reverberates on. Leah is veiled when she poses as Rachel under the wedding canopy. Later Laban ironically quips: “it is not done in our country, to give away the younger before the first born” (Gen. 29:26), as if to say: “While you may pose as the older son and steal a blessing, we don’t displace the right of the first born.” Jacobs own sons dupe their father with Joseph’s cloak dipped in goat’s blood. Tamar, his daughter-in-law, also dons a veil and sits at the crossroads of Enaim in harlot’s garb in order to seduce Judah. She becomes the progenitor of kings, establishing the Davidic line towards the Messiah.
So my question remains: why do biblical women choose the circuitous path, the road “not taken”, and why does God ally with them? “It is possible to be in a plot and not know it.” Yet, the women seem to know, forging a path through the brambles of history, like a prince hacking his way through roses and thorns to Sleeping Beauty, towards the final Awakening.
