Parshas Chayei Sarah - The Two Tests of Rivka

 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 of kindness prepare her for the great crisis of her life?

There are two types of kind people.

Some are kind by inclination. They are nice people, but lack any real sense of mission. When their values are challenged, they either keep going through the same motions or they fall apart. Kind people who have a sense of mission are not simply nice by nature, but out of conviction. When a challenge arises, they can make the difficult decisions and painful sacrifices that have to be made.

Rivka actually experiences two tests in this parsha.

One is obvious. It's the central moment of the parsha. But the other passes by so quickly that we hardly notice it.

G-d selects Avraham for kindness. But He begins the selection by telling Avraham that he must leave his family and his people to begin a new life. Rivka is asked by Eliezer and her family to make the same choice.

"Will you go with this man?" they ask her.

And she replies that she will.

This is the second test and it's the same one that Avraham passed. Like her future father-in-law, Rivka leaves behind her family and her people to begin a new life. This is also what prepares her for the painful choice that she will have to make between Esav and Yaakov.

Avraham's sense of mission drove him to follow G-d's command to head into a new land. That same sense of mission which allowed him to leave behind his family also, when it came time, enabled him to make the painful choice to banish Ishmael and to sacrifice Yitzchak. That's the sense of mission that allowed Rivka to leave her family, to keep Esav from his father's blessing, and have Yaakov go into exile so that she would never see him again.

Yitzchak, having been sacrificed himself, could not make the hard choice. It fell to Rivka to do it.

As Jews, kindness and hospitality is part of our mission, but so is doing what we need to do to protect our values. These two missions are not contradictory. They are the same mission. The G-d who told us to welcome strangers, also told us to serve Him. That is why we are not meant to fall into the unthinking heresy of Tikkun Olam in which we have no mission other than to be nice to other people.

If Rivka had been merely nice, she would have made a pleasant addition to the household before falling apart at the first real crisis. 

As Jews, we must not only be nice, but to be able to make the hard choices that separate a pleasant life from a meaningful one.

Rivka passed both tests and that is what made her fit to become the second matriarch of Israel.