The Immortalities of Rachel

Jacob was prepared to risk everything to keep his birthright – his role in the covenantal chain that began with Abraham. What was his beloved first love and second wife, Rachel, willing to fight for? Even die for?

Rachel was a caring, if at times competitive, sister. According to the Tradition, Rachel, however, reluctantly cooperated in Leah’s scheme to trick Jacob into first marrying Leah.

Rachel was willing to take risks to protect her material possessions. Lean and Rachel were concerned that their father, Laban, would leave his inheritance to his other children. They urged Jacob to run away. Rachel took with her father’s idols – perhaps because they symbolized inheritance rights.

But we know what Rachel was willing, above all, to die for:  to bear children. She tells Jacob, “Give me children, or I will die.” Genesis suggests that part of Rachel’s motivation concerns her jealousy of her sister Leah, who had already delivered four sons. Leah’s commitment to delivering children was based on more than that. Even after she had two stepsons through her handmaid Billah, even after Rachel herself had borne Joseph,  Rachel took on the risks of bearing yet another child. She died in the childbirth of her second son, Benjamin. She was buried along the roadside, rather than in the tomb of Jacob’s family.

Rachel refers to Benjamin as “ben oni,” the child of her suffering. Jacob refers to the child as Benyamin. That might mean “child of the right” or “child of the South,” but it might also mean “child of many days,” as Jacob was old at the time. But the child was both a cause of suffering for Rachel and the source of “many days” –   for all the descendants of Benjamin, who included King Saul and Mordecai from the book of Esther.

Joseph himself tried to ensure the memory of Rachel through a material remembrance, a gravesite pillar. The Bible says that the monument exists “even to this day.”     The Bible account of Rachel’s pillar was written down many centuries after her death. Even unto these days in the 21^st century, many Jews visit the tomb of Rachel on the eleventh of Cheshvan. It is not certain that the modern-day tomb is precisely the same place as the original pillar, but in any case, there is a physical monument to her that is revered and revisited even now.

Rachel is immortalized in the Jewish liturgy. Her story is retold in Genesis, recalled in Jeremian, and remembered in the Siddur, including in a distinct prayer called “Tikkun Rachel.”

Rachel was immortalized in the Tradition by saving many of her people, even after Rachel left the physical world. Mordecai’s ancestry from Rachel is fitting in that, like Rachel, he helped to rescue many Jews imperiled by foreign tyrants. In her afterlife, says the Tradition, Rachel was a saviour of her people. After the First Temple was destroyed, the Babylonians marched Israelites along the road to exile, past the pillar of Rachel. According to the prophet Jeremiah,  Rachel “was weeping for her children because they were no more.” But says Jeremiah the prophet, God resolved that the people would not perish and instead would someday return. According to the Tradition, God eventually restored the people to Israel because of Rachel’s pleading. Abraham and Moses had also pleaded for them, but God, in the end, yielded to the beseeching of Rachel.

Rachel was immortalized in the sacred literature of Christianity. She is recalled in the book of Matthew, undoubtedly written by a Jewish author –and about a Jewish preacher from Gallilee who himself quoted again and again from the Jewish bible. When King Herod orders the massacre of the innocents,  the book of Mathew quotes from the words of Jeremiah;  “Rachel was weeping for her children because they were no more.”

Rachel is also venerated in the Islamic tradition, although not mentioned by name in the Koran.

Eventually, Rachael entered into the wider Western literary tradition. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare has his characters producing competing interpretations of the story of Jacob and speckled sheep. Rachel is not mentioned by name, but perhaps the character of Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, was in part inspired by Rachel’s running away with her father and taking with her some of her father’s treasured possessions.

Rachel was an inspiration for Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, whom some say is the great American novel. The political project of the  United States was, in many ways, inspired by ancient Judaism. The Exodus was a model for revolution against a tyrant cited by some of the American founding fathers. Many Americans were devout protestants who studied the bible assiduously and heard long sermons about it every Sunday. In Pen of Iron, Robert Alter – a brilliant expositor of the stylistics of  Jewish Bible’s literary style and a translator of its entire contents into English – in explores how great American authors, including Melville, drew upon the rhythms and diction of the King James bible.

In the last chapter of Moby Dick, the obsessed Captain Ahab encounters the captain of another ship, the Rachel. The latter, Gardiner, desperately pleads for Ahab to help him find some missing smaller boats launched from the Rachel; they include one of Gardiner’s own sons. Ahab asks for God’s forgiveness as he proceeds instead to hunt down his enemy, the great white whale.

The first line of Moby Dick is “Call me Ishmael.”   The Ishmael character is the sole survivor of the adventure. The last line of Moby Dick is:

It was the devious-cruising Rachel that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”

Rachel the immortal:  mother of a chain of descendants, saviour of many of her people,  a beloved character in the Jewish bible,  a hallowed figure in the New Testament, respected the  Islamic tradition, an inspiration for some of the greatest literature in the United States, “the new Israel.

Today, like any other day, there are babies born who will bear the name Rachel. It is a name they can treasure through remembrance and honour through their own journey.

If you  ask, “Why be Jewish?”  Rachel answers you. You remember the weeping, you remember the joy, all recalled in an ancient story that is your story, too, as part of an enduring people who yearn for the presence of an Eternal creator. And you are encouraged to look forward, with all of your people, with hope and with the prospect of ultimate redemption.