Weekly Torah Portion

The opening verse of this Torah portion reads: “And these are the children of Isaac the son of Abraham; Abraham gave birth to Isaac” (Genesis 25:19). The commentators over the ages have pointed out the obvious redundancy of the second part of the verse: if Isaac is the son of Abraham don’t we automatically know that Abraham gave birth to Isaac? The general rule is that there are no extraneous words in the Torah, therefore if there is an apparent redundancy it exists in order to teach us something we would not have necessarily known or understood without it.

Rashi explains the redundancy in two ways. Firstly it is emphasizing that only after God adds the letter hei to Abram’s name, indicating a qualitative change in his essential being, is he, Abraham, able to give birth to a son like Isaac, worthy to carry on the tradition he began. Rashi’s second explanation comes from the midrash which states that the scoffers of the generation claimed that Isaac was the son of Avimelech who had taken Sarah into his house thinking she was the sister of Abraham. Since Abraham and Sarah had not conceived during their married years they argued that Isaac must come from Avimelech. Therefore the redundancy teaches that God made Isaac look exactly like Abraham in order to dispel the notion that Isaac was not only raised as the son of Abraham but was in fact his biological son.

In addition to these explanations there are deeper spiritual and mystical secrets contained in this opening verse of Toldot. Abraham was naturally an extrovert, the epitome, or in Kabbalistic terminology, the “chariot” of chesed, loving kindness, expansiveness and giving. Isaac on the other hand was just the opposite, he was the “chariot” of gevurah, strength, manifest in the aspects of introversion, contraction and setting specific borders.

At the akeda, the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham, that awesome event discussed above, an archetypal exchange of spiritual energies occurred. Abraham’s test was to transcend his most primal characteristic of chesed, while Isaac is called upon to go beyond his fundamental attribute of gevurah in order to fulfill what they felt God was commanding them. As a result of both of them passing their respective tests, each was able to integrate their exact opposite energy, reaching an entire new level of consciousness.

According to Chassidut this spiritual process is being alluded to in our verse: Isaac is the son of Abraham, in as much as he now too contained an aspect of chesed, while Abraham was now able to give birth from within himself the aspect of Isaac, gevurah. This holistic dynamic is called in Kabbalah and Chassidut “inter-inclusion,” representing a highly developed stage of spiritual growth.

Another understanding of this verse relates to the matter of giving birth to children. As discussed earlier, Abraham and Sarah according to nature were not destined to have children. Only Divine intervention and a new state of consciousness allowed them to physically give birth to Isaac. Isaac also had a similar problem of conceiving children but his challenge was not a physical one, rather of a spiritual nature. Although Isaac was able to have marital relations his deep inner essence of introversion was preventing him from having children. It was only after he integrated a portion of Abraham’s aspect of chesed that he was able to give in such a way that lead to his having children. “Abraham gave birth to Isaac” is understood in this light to mean Abraham imparted to Isaac the ability to give birth.

From these teachings each person can learn the importance of going beyond his or her basic inbred nature so as to make room and give validity to the very opposite characteristic traits. By doing so it allows us to give birth to new levels of self and the full actualization of potential. Some of life’s hardest tests are specifically in this area. Yet, similar to Abraham and Isaac who were able to pass their respective tests, so too, can we their descendents, overcome our obstacles in life.