The Right Order – Parshat Toledot

When you tell a story, you are expected to tell it chronologically correct. We would almost always start a story with the phrase 'once upon a time' and almost never with the words 'and they lived happily ever after'.

Yet there seems to be a bit of confusion here. In Parshat Toledot we read that Yitzchak planted and reaped a hundredfold of what was expected. So far, so good. But only then does it say that God blessed him.1 Hadn't  the blessing come before the planting?

A number of commentaries (though not as many as I expected) explained that the blessing at the end of the verse was, in fact, an additional beracha. In other words, the first half of the verse, that Yitzchak planted and successfully harvested one hundredfold was not specifically connected to any blessing. He did what needed to be done. He didn’t wait for a blessing or the promise of a blessing in order to act. He acted and the blessing, in fact, came only afterwards. The passuk, then, is definitely in the correct order.

We all want to be successful. No one likes to fail. We would all love guarantees that we will succeed in our efforts. But no one can give us that guarantee. And we are then left with a choice. Do we act? Do we wait for the right conditions? If we search for happiness, do we go down a path only when guaranteed happiness? Or do we try so hard to be happy that we never actually achieve that goal?3 Can anyone guarantee our happiness? Do we then wait, paralyzed, searching for the right conditions? If we do that we may never do anything while waiting.

Doing what we like, what we know is important or what must be done right now is always an option. Like Yitzchak, we don’t have to wait for the right conditions to do any of these three options. We can start by doing. That seems to be the right order. Will the blessing come? I will make no promises. But I do know that, at least this time, Yitzchak saw that they needed to plant in order to have food and didn’t wait and he succeeded. You need a direction and some goals. You need to be smart about what you're doing. But start doing.

Is there a right order? Sure we all want to be assured of a blessing first. But then we may just get bored waiting. Whether or not a beracha comes is usually not in our control. In the meanwhile, start doing. 

In memory of my mother Hentcha Leah bat Yitzhak Lipa, hk"m

Notes

  1. Bereishit 26:12
  2. Netziv, Malbim, Rabbi Hirsch, Seforno among others
  3. Viktor Frankl talks about being overly obsessed with happiness as a goal that it becomes counter-productive. I believe that if happiness is always a goal, then on some level the person is also saying 'I am not happy now.' And that would, indeed, be very sad. But more on that in another blog.

Have A Great Shabbat!laughing

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