After the death of Sarah, much of her namesake parsha is concerned with finding a successor matriarch.  The journey of Eliezer, Avraham's servant, to find a wife for Yitzchak (Isaac) is chronicled in detail, and at its center is Eliezer asking G-d for a sign. The sign is that the woman who would be right for Yitzchak and for the next generation of the dynasty begun by Avraham is one who would show kindness by bringing water to a stranger and his camels. And he finds that woman in the form of Rivka or Rebecca.  Kindness and hospitality were certainly key characteristics for Avraham, yet his ultimate crisis and test was having to sacrifice his own son. Rivka's own climactic test was a similar one. After years of being unable to have children, she suddenly had twins, only to be told that one of them was evil.  Like Avraham, his daughter-in-law would have to sacrifice a child.  And while Eliezer might not know what was to come, G-d certainly did. How would a test o...

Noach, as a figure, comes burdened with ambiguity from the very beginning. Instead of taking the Torah's declaration of his righteousness at face value, they dig into the qualifier of the verse. "Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya bedorotav", "Noach was a perfectly righteous man in his time" becomes the basis of an argument over whether he was really a righteous man, or only righteous by the standards of his age. Would he have been a better or a worse man in a nobler time, they inquire. If this seems unfair, Noach is the second father of mankind, and the man who plants a vineyard and gets drunk in front of his sons and grandson. He's a righteous man, but unlike Avraham, seems to have little impact on those around him. And even his grandson turns out to be wicked and ends up cursed by him. The duality and ambiguity of Noach is there at the beginning. His name, Noach, means rest. His father gave him the name hoping that with his birth, mankind would have rest from t...