Beloved Friends,
There is a moment in this week's Torah portion that glows quietly, like a candle burning at dusk. It happens just before Isaac and Rebecca meet. The Torah tells us that Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening. He is alone, wrapped in the long shadows of late light. The Hebrew word used here, lasuach, suggests reflection, prayer, the kind of whispered conversation with the heart that sometimes happens when we do not even realize we are praying. Isaac has loved and lost. His mother, Sarah, has died. His father is aging. He is the child of promise, yet he appears gentle, inward, contemplative, one who carries his heart not on his sleeve but deep within.
Rebecca, on the other hand, arrives from afar. She is bold, kind, generous. We met her at the well, offering water to a stranger and to his thirsty camels with an open spirit and ready strength. She is not hesitant. She moves toward life.
So imagine the scene. Isaac in the field, eyes lifted. Rebecca approaching, riding on a camel. The servant points, That is my master. She looks up, sees Isaac's posture in prayer, his quiet presence, and something in her heart knows. So strong is the moment that she slips, even falls gracefully from her camel, love or awe or destiny overtaking her.
The Torah describes what follows in a simple, tender phrase: Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother.
But our sages notice something remarkable in the wording. The verse can be read not as the tent of Sarah his mother but the tent, Sarah his mother. As if the memory of Sarah, the matriarch who shaped the very soul of the household, still lived there.
A midrash in Bereshit Rabbah opens this image with gentle wonder.
When Sarah was alive, a cloud of divine presence hovered over her tent. Her doors were open wide to guests. Her dough was blessed with abundance. Her Shabbat lamp glowed from one week to the next. When she died, all of this ceased.
But when Rebecca entered the tent, the cloud returned. The doors opened again. The blessing returned to the bread. The Shabbat lamp once again glowed through the night.
Rebecca does not replace Sarah. Instead, she carries forward her spirit. Not in personality, but in holiness. Not in imitation, but in continuity. Rebecca comforts Isaac not only by loving him, but by restoring the world of kindness, welcome, holiness, and light that he feared had been lost forever.
This is not simply a love story. It is a story of healing.
Grief narrows our world. It closes doors. It dims the soft lamp that once flickered with warmth. Isaac's meditation in the field is the posture of a soul trying to remain open. And Rebecca's arrival is the reminder that love can return. That blessing can be restored. That what once seemed gone forever can live again in new form.
I think often of this when I reflect on my father, of blessed memory. My children called him Poppi, and his presence in their lives was steady, joyful, and deeply good. When he died, there was an empty space that I felt not only in my own heart but in the very atmosphere of our family. There was a quiet that felt unfamiliar. A lamp gone still.
And now, I am a grandfather to two beautiful twin girls who just turned two this past Shabbat. And they call me Poppi.
The first time I heard that name out of their tiny voices, something in me stirred. Not a replacing, not a forgetting. But a returning. A thread woven gently back into my life. The doorway that grief had closed opened just a little wider. The lamp began to warm the room again.
My father's love has not disappeared. It now lives within me and is offered forward, renewed, reshaped, and alive. And in this becoming Poppi again, I have found comfort, not because the loss is gone, but because love has found room to grow around it.
This is how love heals us. Not by erasing wounds, but by helping us find our way through them.
Shabbat Shalom,