Love Does Not Make a Family
"And Jacob came also to Rachel and he loved also Rachel more than Leah" - Genesis 29:30
And Jacob came also to Rachel and he loved also Rachel more than Leah. And he served [his father in law] another seven years. God saw that Leah was hated so he opened her womb and Rachel was barren. – Genesis 29:30-31
Jacob, third of the Biblical patriarchs, famously married two sisters: Leah, the older, and Rachel, the younger. He had first seen and fallen in love with Rachel and promised seven years of work in exchange for the right to marry her, only to be deceived on his wedding night (with, according to Rashi, Rachel’s help) into marrying and sleeping with Leah.
When his father in law justifies the ruse by saying that it is not his custom to marry the younger before the older, Jacob commits to another seven years so that he might have Rachel also.
Then, a strange phrase is used to describe Jacob’s relative affections for Leah and Rachel. The literal translation of the ungrammatical Hebrew is: “And he loved also Rachel more than Leah.” The meaning seems to be that though Jacob loved both women, Rachel, the one whom he first desired, was his primary love.
The next line deepens the pathos, saying that God saw that Leah was “hated.”
In the words of Bachya ben Asher, “This certainly does not mean that Jacob hated Leah. The word ‘hated’ is strictly relative and tells us that by comparison to Jacob’s feelings for Rachel, Leah appeared as if she was hated.” Jonathan Sacks in his own commentary concluded that the story means that “love is not enough,” for while Leah may have been loved, her inferior position to Rachel was unjust, and no family can be built on an injustice, no matter how much love there may be.
Another way to put this is that love without obligation is no love at all.
Though Jacob may love Leah, his willingness to add Rachel to their marriage and thereby deny both Leah and Rachel the duty they are each owed to be first in her husband’s eyes is a moral failure. In this case, it is one that leads directly to a hateful rivalry between the sisters, as Leah seeks to fill her pain by providing children that Rachel can not. The contest, inevitably, seeps into the relationships between the twelve sons1 Jacob ultimately fathers, as Leah’s sons match their mother’s feeling of hatred with their own hatred for Joseph, the oldest son of Rachel, whom they secretly sell into slavery, beginning the series of events that will lead all of Jacob’s descendants into slavery in Egypt.
Such consequences for love so misapplied that it is not love at all are woven deeply into our culture. Rooted in the disordered affection for Beatrice that Dante described in The Divine Comedy is Anakin Skywalker’s desperate desire for Padme in Star Wars. For we know2 that love that is not consumed by obligation, love that is not at a minimum a partner to obligation, descends into selfish longing, with terrible consequences.
For Dante, it was a realization that even what he thought was his purest love was falsified by not being properly ordered. For Skywalker, it means that his betrayal of the sacred Jedi order will not only fail to save his beloved but lead to her death, the fate of the universe hanging on his choices.
It is a story we hear often. Nemo’s father’s suffocating protection of his son is in service to the father’s selfish fear, not Nemo’s well being. His love for Nemo only becomes real – only finds at least part of its source in what Nemo’s father must do - when he allows Nemo to risk his life to save a school of tuna caught in a fisher’s net. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey only finds peace when he realizes that his frustrated longing for wealth and travel is beneath the love that is found in his obligations to his wife and children.
The root of this story is found in Jacob and his wives. In the sad story lies a message we can not now escape even if we try: true love is found in obligation willingly assumed.
Even the names of the sons, explicitly defined by Leah and Rachel as descriptions of their despair (Rueben, because God had seen Leah’s affliction, or Joseph, for God had, in finally giving Rachel a son, taken away her disgrace), are testaments to the feud of their mothers
Because we have learned and listened and taught it more times than we realize for we live so deeply embedded in a three thousand year old culture that expresses this truth