Leah

Seeking Love

Leah’s despair and hope find expression as she gives birth to Jacob’s sons. Nahum Sarna makes the following observation:

The first motif that runs through the narrative is the unhappiness of Leah. Jacob’s greater love of Rachel is psychologically understandable in the context of his experience with Laban; but that makes the lesser-loved Leah the innocent victim of her father’s duplicity. For this reason she is the beneficiary of God’s compassion and is blessed with many children. In fact, she herself bears more than all three other women combined.

(p206)

Leah’s childbearing served as an avenue by which she not only hoped to gain the love of her husband. It was also the channel through which she experienced God and communicated with Him.  The character of Leah is generally given less attention than the character of Rachel. Rachel’s overpowering beauty caused Jacob to fall in love with her at first sight.  This deep romantic love was able to turn seven long years into a fleeting moment. Biblical readers feel Rachel’s pain and frustration at being forced to wait for the love of her life and to suffer painful years of barrenness. Leah plays a supporting role in Jacob’s family; unloved and unwanted.

However, in a fascinating book entitled  Women of Israel, written in 1845, Grace Aguilar (1816-47)  portrays Leah differently. Writing in Victorian England, Aguilar, a Sephardic woman was a prominent contributor to Anglo-Jewish Haskalah. She argued for Jewish emancipation in the Victorian world and women’s emancipation in the Jewish world. Grace was a descendant of those who had fled the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions and recorded the oral history of the crypto-Jews in her romances and histories. In  Women of Israel, she sketched biblical woman and Jewish women throughout history from a unique vantage point.  These early versions of modern feminist “midrashim” appealed to both Jewish and Christian women readers. Since most Jewish women were not taught Hebrew, and vernacular translations of the Bible were only beginning to appear, her work served as “Torah” for man Jewish women, Torah that was centered on women’s obligations, needs and aspirations. At her death at the age of thirty-one, she was described as “the moral governess of the Hebrew family”. Her death was called a “national calamity” for the Jewish people.[1]Michael Galshinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, Detroit  State University, 1996), Milton, Kerker, “Grace Aguilar, A Woman of Israel”, Midstream 47,2 (2001), pp. 35-37.

In her chapter on Leah, Aguilar begins by filling in the feelings of sadness and rejection that Leah carried in her heart, adding: “Her compelled agency in her father’s fraud must have been fraught with absolute horror to a heart that loved secretly and unreturned, as herself, and heightened the trial of unrequited affection in no ordinary degree.” (114) Aguilar proceeds to outline the astounding religious contribution that Leah made. The Bible records the following:

The Lord saw that Leah was unloved and he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren.” (29:31) Leah conceived and bore a son, and named him Reuben; for she declared, “It means: ‘The Lord has seen my affliction’; it also means: ‘Now my husband will love me.'” She conceived again and bore a son, and declared, “This is because the Lord heard that I was unloved and has given me this one also”, and so she named him Simeon. Again she conceived and bore a son and declared, “This time my husband will become attached to me, for I have borne him three sons.” Therefore he was named Levi. She conceived again and bore a son, and declared, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she named him Judah.[2]Women of Israel, Vol. I , (NY, 1951) pp.29;…35

Grace Aguilar interprets these verses as follows:

And when the Lord saw that Leah was hated (lit. less loved), He gave her children, but Rachel had none. And she called the name of her eldest son Reuben: for, she said, “Surely the Lord hath looked upon my affliction; now therefore my husband will love me.” What a volume of woman’s deepest feelings and the compassionating love of the Eternal do these brief lines reveal! He who had, in His inscrutable wisdom, ordained that Leah should be tried in the fiery ordeal of woman’s saddest loneliness, unrequited affection, yet deigned to grant a compensating blessing in all the sweet, pure feelings of a mother’s love. Who that reads but this one verse can uphold that woman is less an object of tender love and compassion to her God than man? Who can say that the Mosaic records are silent on this head? The words of man to point out the proper station and value of woman we need not, for the children of Israel have the WORD OF THEIR GOD. And do we not still recognize the God of Leah? His ear has not become heavy that it cannot hear, nor His arm shortened that it cannot save. And though He may not bestow on us a visible and audible manifestation of His tender compassion as on Leah, yet we may be certain that He will grant us some compensating blessing for every joy of which he may think fit to deprive us. And even for those bitter griefs, which from their nature, their seeming selfishness, woman shrinks in trembling from bringing before her God, and buries them in her own heart till it bleeds at every pore, — Leah’s history proves that He will grant peace and healing. It may be that a wiser and kinder will than her own has flung an insuperable barrier between woman’s heart and its dearest object; and impelled her by all that is refined and delicate in her character, to hide deep from every eye the anguish which is her burden. How blessed then that even for such a grief there is the fount of healing waters still in the word of God—that she may come there and read, not only the abundance, the fullness of his love but that He has especial tenderness for those by earth unloved! And as He gave Leah children because she was not loved, so will He grant such sufferers a peace,, and calm, and joy in the consciousness of His unfailing tenderness, far surpassing even the rich and glowing, but too transient happiness of sympathy on earth.

(ibid, p. 115)

Leah’s Spiritual Triumph

The biblical narrative itself describes Leah’s spiritual triumph not in terms of her being a sterling example of grace but of her ability to turn that gift into prayer. The Rabbis alighted upon this notion with regard to the name Judah. Leah exclaimed, ‘This time I will praise the Lord!’.

This time I will praise the Lord. Rabbi Johannan in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai said, from the day the Holy One Blessed Be He created His world no human ever praised Him until Leah came and praised Him as it says, “This time I will praise the Lord.”

(Berachot 7b)

Commentators grappled with the fact that others before Leah indeed did sing God’s praises. Why then would the Rabbis claim, “No human ever praised Him until Leah came and praised Him”?  Some suggest that it may well be that Leah was the first to personalize the thanksgiving and offer her prayer in first person. Others say that by giving her child a name which encapsulated her feelings of gratitude she immortalized God’s greatness. In that sense her words and her son’s name became an ongoing prayer for eternity.

Grace Aguilar embellishes this notion:

It was not only the gift of children then, His love bestowed. He had brought light from darkness, He had turned her mourning into praise, and returned with tenfold blessing her meek enduring confidence in Him. Shall we then, who may be in darkness of sorrow and heavy care, shrink from walking in her steps, and swell only on the affliction which is ours? Shall we not also look and strive for some blessing which can bid us too “praise the Lord,” and lead us to behold light where all was heaviness? There is no lot so desolate which, if we seek Him, the Lord will not bless: not, perhaps, by the removal of our present sorrow, but by some compensating mercy. We must not suppose that seeking Him and loving Him will exempt us from affliction. No, for if it did, where would be that heavenly exercise which alone can fit us for heaven?…How know we but those very sorrows, lasting but a time, are preparing us to be of those whom the Lord writeth in His book for eternity, who shall be His when He maketh up His jewels? Of this only are we certain, that the Lord loveth whom He correcteth. Then, while like Leah we feel affliction, let us hope on, pray on, with undoubting faith, that one day we too shall cry aloud, “Now will I praise the Lord.”

(ibid, pp.116-117)

In conclusion Aguilar says the lesson of Leah who welcomed the birth of every child with prayer and thanksgiving is:

There is not one who has addressed the Lord in prayer—the daily prayer for all things, who can say he has had no answer. And oh! Who would not realize the glowing of the heart—the daily events of life, and feel that that which we have asked for He has given? But to realize this, we must come to Him in all things. We must pray to Him in our hearts as well as with our lips; we must think individual prayer as well as those public petitions framed for us. We must be in the constant habit of tracing all things to His almighty hand, and believe that His love is as deep as pitying for us individually, as His bounty is shown throughout the world. We must so commune with Him, that the hours of prayer will feel but the continuation, not the commencement and end of devotion. Did we but do this—bring before Him every care, and thought and grief, and joy and doubt, and thankfulness—how many, many instances of answered prayer would the briefest life recall. Then oh! How can we keep Him far from us, by withholding from Him the wishes which He alone has power to grant, the sorrows which He alone has compassion sufficient to heal?

(ibid., p.126)