The Blessing of Insufficiency

Parshat Toldot:
Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler
Dean of Students and Mashgicha Ruchanit, Maharat
Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination Track Class of 2018

Last week's parsha, Chayei Sarah, ended with the lineage of Yishmael.

This week's parsha, Toldot, begins with the sharply contrasting lineage of Yitzchak:

Yishmael is blessed with children, but Yitzchak is not. His wife, Rivka, is barren. And so she, and they, are immediately drawn into the orbit of the patriarchs and matriarchs who both precede and follow them. Like Sarah and Avraham, and like Rachel and Yaacov, Rivka and Yitzchak begin their covenantal journey together without child. It seems that a struggle with infertility is a sine qua non for covenantal partnership. It is puzzling to imagine why.
The Babylonian Talmud in Yevamot 64a weighs in on this matter:

Why did our revered ancestors suffer in this way? Or, more pointedly, why must they have undergone this trial? Why must the pain of childlessness ground the covenantal blessing that "you will multiply like the stars of the sky" (Gen. 22:17)? The answer given is mysterious. God afflicts just to arouse the cries of those whose voices He yearns to hear. God breaks hearts so that people will give their hearts back to Him. How can we make sense of such cruel cravings?
This concept‑‑ שהקב”ה מתאוה לתפלתן של צדיקים, that God longs for the prayers of the righteous‑‑can be found in just one other place in the Talmud and it is instructive to look there to help make sense of it. BT Chullin 60b states:

Just as God withheld productivity from our matriarchs and patriarchs, so God withheld productivity from the ground itself during the early stages of creation, all in order to elicit human prayer. There must be something unique to these particular prayers, these desperate groans for something to grow, that make them worthy of setting both the creation of the world and the creation of the Jewish people in motion.
The key, I believe, is to be found in the experience of "ayin," of lack. Of Sarah, our very first matriarch to experience infertility, we are told:

Of Adam, on the precipice of agricultural creation, we are told:

The root of these foundational, liminal moments is "ayin," awareness of what is not there ‑ a child to fill a womb, a person to till the ground. Against the backdrop of unfolding generations and unfolding creation, they represent a pause in the natural order. In the narratives that precede each of these verses, we are swept up in stories of easy growth. A world is born. Babies are born. We are lulled into forgetting what exquisitely miraculous processes are underway. We forget the divine energy that powers creation, both human and cosmic. We forget how very reliant we are on blessings from above. So God, at these crucial junctures of creation, slows down the story, halts the momentum of productivity to highlight its preciousness, and in these gaps, where need‑awareness grows, suggests the Talmud, prayer is born. The palpable, painful experience of 'ayin,' of not having, may turn one inward and upward toward God‑‑not necessarily in praise, but in deep awareness of one's vulnerability and profound dependency.
That God craves the prayers of the righteous, שהקב”ה מתאוה לתפלתן של צדיקים, might thus be softened from its initial cruelty (though still not redeemed) by rethinking what tefillah itself might be. God does not withhold (re)productivity to prompt desperate human request, but to occasion awareness of human impotence. The prayers of the righteous, those that ground the covenant and birth the world, are not wild pleas for things (children or rain), but quiet, sustained meditations on their own ultimate powerlessness. By making the first person and the first Jews wrestle with fertility, our tradition has placed such tefillot at the very cornerstones of our covenant. The Torah thereby offers a subtle spiritual message: The recognition that we are not God, painful as it is, just might be what we need to generate a God‑filled world.
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The latter part of parshat Toldot casts this need‑awareness not only as a truth of human existence, but also as a blessing. On the bracha given by Yitzchak to Yaacov––

The Sfat Emet writes:

In the eyes of the Gerrer Rebbe, there is a blessing in insufficiency, for it breeds dependency, which then yields renewed experience of divine benevolence. The blessing to Yaacov, in contrast to Esav, was specifically not for plenty, not for abundance, but for just the right amount to repeatedly necessitate awareness of need met again and again and again by God's grace.
What are the blessings in that vulnerability? The centering gift of humility, the joyful gift of gratitude, and, most importantly, the soul‑enlivening gift of constant contact with the divine. Herein lies the mystery of God's difficult cravings. God is mitaveh le'tefillatan shel tzaddikim because it is relationship, above all, that God seeks, one in which He might "give and then repeatedly give" again. No gift, of course, aside from the growth of life itself, could quell the pain of infertility and insufficiently, but may it be a whisper of comfort to all those who struggle to know that there might be some blessing yet in the experience of Ayin.